SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.

  TWELVE CHAPTERS.

  BY

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

  [Illustration]

  BOSTON:
  FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
  1870.




  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

  in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
  Massachusetts.


  UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
  CAMBRIDGE.




CONTENTS.


                         PAGE

  SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE      1

  CIVILIZATION             15

  ART                      31

  ELOQUENCE                53

  DOMESTIC LIFE            91

  FARMING                 121

  WORKS AND DAYS          139

  BOOKS                   167

  CLUBS                   199

  COURAGE                 225

  SUCCESS                 251

  OLD AGE                 279




SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.




SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.


I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a
cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which
that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he
was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory,
the mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new
friend made some extraordinary confessions. “Do you not see,” he said,
“the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you
have met at S----, though he were to be the last man, would, like the
executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one?” He added many
lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and,
in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted. He had good
abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect,--he
could not speak in the tone of the people. There was some paralysis
on his will, such that, when he met men on common terms, he spoke
weakly, and from the point, like a flighty girl. His consciousness
of the fault made it worse. He envied every drover and lumberman in
the tavern their manly speech. He coveted Mirabeau’s _don terrible de
la familiarité_, believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the
man from whom kings have the most to fear. For himself, he declared
that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. He
left the city; he hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not
solitary enough; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house,
the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal
himself. Set a hedge here; set oaks there,--trees behind trees; above
all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round.
The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to imply that you
had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him.
Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with
the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he
was not. All he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean
of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. He
went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London. In all the variety of costumes,
a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never
discover a man in the street who wore anything like his own dress. He
would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges. His dismay at his
visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. “Do you think,” he
said, “I am in such great terror of being shot,--I, who am only waiting
to shuffle off my corporeal jacket, to slip away into the back stars,
and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me
and all souls,--there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory
itself, if it be possible?” He had a remorse running to despair, of his
social _gaucheries_, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings
out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders.
God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in
heaven or earth. He admired in Newton, not so much his theory of the
moon, as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert
his name with the solution of the problem in the “Philosophical
Transactions”: “It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing
which I chiefly study to decline.”

These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of
similar cases, and to the discovery that they are not of very
infrequent occurrence. Few substances are found pure in nature.
Those constitutions which can bear in open day the rough dealing of
the world must be of that mean and average structure,--such as iron
and salt, atmospheric air, and water. But there are metals, like
potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under
naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a
culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in
royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the
world, an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by
a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing,
port, and clubs, we should have had no “Theory of the Sphere,” and no
“Principia.” They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels.
Each must stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the universe is based on affection,
and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure intellect,
is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: “There are also
angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house;
these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of
angels.”

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

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall
not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company,
and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time
of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and
saloons. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself. Yet
each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary
was he? Why, yes; but his society was limited only by the amount of
brain Nature appropriated in that age to carry on the government of the
world. “If I stay,” said Dante, when there was question of going to
Rome, “who will go? and if I go, who will stay?”

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

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

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

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

’Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through
sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people
to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone. Here is
the use of society: it is so easy with the great to be great; so easy
to come up to an existing standard;--as easy as it is to the lover
to swim to his maiden through waves so grim before. The benefits of
affection are immense; and the one event which never loses its romance
is the encounter with superior persons on terms allowing the happiest
intercourse.

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

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

But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is
proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set
down to the individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we
rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their
sympathies, their native aims being high enough, but their relation
all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to
live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their
demerits,--by their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and animal
good-nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.

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

Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a
rapid self-distribution takes place, into sets and pairs. The best are
accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say, they separate
as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred
in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the
affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation
is a magnetic experiment. I know that my friend can talk eloquently;
you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in
different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and
Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them
all wretched. ’Tis an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor. Leave them
to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows.

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

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




CIVILIZATION.




CIVILIZATION.


A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is
found,--a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape,--a cannibal,
and eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,--a certain degree of
progress from this extreme is called Civilization. It is a vague,
complex name, of many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition.
Mr. Guizot, writing a book on the subject, does not. It implies the
evolution of a highly organized man, brought to supreme delicacy of
sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor,
and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, we usually suggest
it by negations. A nation that has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet,
no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous.
And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks
and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to call them
civilized.

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its
own. The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is
different from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term
imports a mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind
to-day the savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than
civilized. The Indians of this country have not learned the white man’s
work; and in Africa, the negro of to-day is the negro of Herodotus.
In other races the growth is not arrested; but the like progress that
is made by a boy “when he cuts his eye-teeth,” as we say,--childish
illusions passing daily away, and he seeing things really and
comprehensively,--is made by tribes. It is the learning the secret of
cumulative power, of advancing on one’s self. It implies a facility
of association, power to compare, the ceasing from fixed ideas. The
Indian is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart from his habits
and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the white, and his eye
sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is always some
novelty that astounds the mind, and provokes it to dare to change. Thus
there is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning of each
improvement,--some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful arts,
and teaching them. Of course, he must not know too much, but must have
the sympathy, language, and gods of those he would inform. But chiefly
the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to
commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the
most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him
very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of
much nonsense of his wigwam.

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

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

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

The skilful combinations of civil government, though they usually
follow natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and
territory, yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their
result delight the imagination. “We see insurmountable multitudes
obeying, in opposition to their strongest passions, the restraints
of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single
individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth.”[A]

Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and
industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and
love them: place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and
a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates
all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy
and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have
thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good
women.

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

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

  “The pulses of her iron heart
  Go beating through the storm.”

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

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

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

Climate has much to do with this melioration. The highest civility has
never loved the hot zones. Wherever snow falls, there is usually civil
freedom. Where the banana grows, the animal system is indolent and
pampered at the cost of higher qualities: the man is sensual and cruel.
But this scale is not invariable. High degrees of moral sentiment
control the unfavorable influences of climate; and some of our grandest
examples of men and of races come from the equatorial regions,--as the
genius of Egypt, of India, and of Arabia.

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

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

Civilization depends on morality. Everything good in man leans on what
is higher. This rule holds in small as in great. Thus, all our strength
and success in the work of our hands depend on our borrowing the aid of
the elements. You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe
chopping upward chips from a beam. How awkward! at what disadvantage he
works! But see him on the ground, dressing his timber under him. Now,
not his feeble muscles, but the force of gravity brings down the axe;
that is to say, the planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much
ill-temper, laziness, and shirking to endure from his hand-sawyers,
until one day he bethought him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a
waterfall; and the river never tires of turning his wheel: the river is
good-natured, and never hints an objection.

We had letters to send: couriers could not go fast enough, nor far
enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in
spring, snow-drifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the
horses out of a walk. But we found out that the air and earth were
full of Electricity; and always going our way,--just the way we wanted
to send. _Would he take a message?_ Just as lief as not; had nothing
else to do; would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred, one
staggering objection,--he had no carpet-bag, no visible pockets, no
hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry a letter. But, after much
thought and many experiments, we managed to meet the conditions, and
to fold up the letter in such invisible compact form as he could
carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by needle and
thread,--and it went like a charm.

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

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

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

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

And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and
political action leans on principles. To accomplish anything excellent,
the will must work for catholic and universal ends. A puny creature
walled in on every side, as Daniel wrote,--

          “Unless above himself he can
  Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!”

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

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

These are traits, and measures, and modes; and the true test of
civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the
crops,--no, but the kind of man the country turns out. I see the vast
advantages of this country, spanning the breadth of the temperate
zone. I see the immense material prosperity,--towns on towns, states
on states, and wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities;
California quartz-mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled
architecturally along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward
to California again. But it is not New York streets built by the
confluence of workmen and wealth of all nations, though stretching out
towards Philadelphia until they touch it, and northward until they
touch New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and Boston,--not
these that make the real estimation. But, when I look over this
constellation of cities which animate and illustrate the land, and
see how little the government has to do with their daily life, how
self-helped and self-directed all families are,--knots of men in purely
natural societies,--societies of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual
hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight of opinion,
of longer or better-directed industry, the refining influence of
women, the invitation which experience and permanent causes open to
youth and labor,--when I see how much each virtuous and gifted person,
whom all men consider, lives affectionately with scores of excellent
people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with great reason
reckons these people his superiors in virtue, and in the symmetry and
force of their qualities, I see what cubic values America has, and
in these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or
enormous wealth.

In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral and intellectual
steps. The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh,--in
Greece, of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates,
and of the Stoic Zeno,--in Judæa, the advent of Jesus,--and in modern
Christendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, are causal
facts which carry forward races to new convictions, and elevate the
rule of life. In the presence of these agencies, it is frivolous to
insist on the invention of printing or gunpowder, of steam-power or
gas-light, percussion-caps and rubber-shoes, which are toys thrown off
from that security, freedom, and exhilaration which a healthy morality
creates in society. These arts add a comfort and smoothness to house
and street life; but a purer morality, which kindles genius, civilizes
civilization, casts backward all that we held sacred into the profane,
as the flame of oil throws a shadow when shined upon by the flame of
the Bude-light. Not the less the popular measures of progress will ever
be the arts and the laws.

But if there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests,--a
country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law
and statute-law,--where speech is not free,--where the post-office is
violated, mail-bags opened, and letters tampered with,--where public
debts and private debts outside of the State are repudiated,--where
liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life,--where
the position of the white woman is injuriously affected by the
outlawry of the black woman,--where the arts, such as they have, are
all imported, having no indigenous life,--where the laborer is not
secured in the earnings of his own hands,--where suffrage is not free
or equal,--that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but
barbarous; and no advantages of soil, climate, or coast can resist
these suicidal mischiefs.

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




ART.




ART.


All departments of life at the present day,--Trade, Politics, Letters,
Science, or Religion,--seem to feel, and to labor to express, the
identity of their law. They are rays of one sun; they translate each
into a new language the sense of the other. They are sublime when seen
as emanations of a Necessity contradistinguished from the vulgar Fate,
by being instant and alive, and dissolving man, as well as his works,
in its flowing beneficence. This influence is conspicuously visible in
the principles and history of Art.

On one side in primary communication with absolute truth through
thought and instinct, the human mind on the other side tends, by an
equal necessity, to the publication and embodiment of its thought,
modified and dwarfed by the impurity and untruth which, in all our
experience, injure the individuality through which it passes. The
child not only suffers, but cries; not only hungers, but eats. The
man not only thinks, but speaks and acts. Every thought that arises
in the mind, in its rising aims to pass out of the mind into act;
just as every plant, in the moment of germination, struggles up to
light. Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second
form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that
it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more
burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it
knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
What is in, will out. It struggles to the birth. Speech is a great
pleasure, and action a great pleasure; they cannot be foreborne.

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

The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end,
is Art. From the first imitative babble of a child to the despotism of
eloquence, from his first pile of toys or chip bridge to the masonry
of Minot Rock Light-house or the Pacific Railroad, from the tattooing
of the Owhyhees to the Vatican Gallery, from the simplest expedient
of private prudence to the American Constitution, from its first to
its last works, Art is the spirit’s voluntary use and combination
of things to serve its end. The Will distinguishes it as spiritual
action. Relatively to themselves, the bee, the bird, the beaver, have
no art; for what they do, they do instinctively; but relatively to
the Supreme Being, they have. And the same is true of all unconscious
action: relatively to the doer, it is instinct; relatively to the First
Cause, it is Art. In this sense, recognizing the Spirit which informs
Nature, Plato rightly said, “Those things which are said to be done
by Nature are indeed done by Divine Art.” Art, universally, is the
spirit creative. It was defined by Aristotle, “The reason of the thing,
without the matter.”

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

The useful arts comprehend not only those that lie next to instinct,
as agriculture, building, weaving, &c., but also navigation, practical
chemistry, and the construction of all the grand and delicate tools and
instruments by which man serves himself: as language, the watch, the
ship, the decimal cipher; and also the sciences, so far as they are
made serviceable to political economy.

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

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

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

The first and last lesson of the useful arts is, that Nature tyrannizes
over our works. They must be conformed to her law, or they will be
ground to powder by her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, nothing
whimsical will endure. Nature is ever interfering with Art. You cannot
build your house or pagoda as you will, but as you must. There is a
quick bound set to your caprice. The leaning tower can only lean so
far. The verandah or pagoda roof can curve upward only to a certain
point. The slope of your roof is determined by the weight of snow. It
is only within narrow limits that the discretion of the architect may
range: gravity, wind, sun, rain, the size of men and animals, and such
like, have more to say than he. It is the law of fluids that prescribes
the shape of the boat,--keel, rudder, and bows,--and, in the finer
fluid above, the form and tackle of the sails. Man seems to have no
option about his tools, but merely the necessity to learn from Nature
what will fit best, as if he were fitting a screw or a door. Beneath
a necessity thus almighty, what is artificial in man’s life seems
insignificant. He seems to take his task so minutely from intimations
of Nature, that his works become as it were hers, and he is no longer
free.

But if we work within this limit, she yields us all her strength. All
powerful action is performed by bringing the forces of nature to bear
upon our objects. We do not grind corn or lift the loom by our own
strength, but we build a mill in such position as to set the north wind
to play upon our instrument, or the elastic force of steam, or the ebb
and flow of the sea. So in our handiwork, we do few things by muscular
force, but we place ourselves in such attitudes as to bring the force
of gravity, that is, the weight of the planet, to bear upon the spade
or the axe we wield. In short, in all our operations we seek not to use
our own, but to bring a quite infinite force to bear.

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

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

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

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

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

In painting, bright colors stimulate the eye, before yet they are
harmonized into a landscape. In sculpture and in architecture the
material, as marble or granite, and in architecture the mass, are
sources of great pleasure, quite independent of the artificial
arrangement. The art resides in the model, in the plan; for it is on
that the genius of the artist is expended, not on the statue or the
temple. Just as much better as is the polished statue of dazzling
marble than the clay model, or as much more impressive as is the
granite cathedral or pyramid than the ground-plan or profile of them
on paper, so much more beauty owe they to Nature than to Art.

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

A jumble of musical sounds on a viol or a flute, in which the rhythm of
the tune is played without one of the notes being right, gives pleasure
to the unskilful ear. A very coarse imitation of the human form on
canvas, or in wax-work,--a coarse sketch in colors of a landscape,
in which imitation is all that is attempted,--these things give to
unpractised eyes, to the uncultured, who do not ask a fine spiritual
delight, almost as much pleasure as a statue of Canova or a picture of
Titian.

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

Another deduction from the genius of the artist is what is conventional
in his art, of which there is much in every work of art. Thus how
much is there that is not original in every particular building, in
every statue, in every tune, painting, poem, or harangue!--whatever is
national or usual; as the usage of building all Roman churches in the
form of a cross, the prescribed distribution of parts of a theatre, the
custom of draping a statue in classical costume. Yet who will deny
that the merely conventional part of the performance contributes much
to its effect?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As, in useful art, so far as it is useful, the work must be strictly
subordinated to the laws of Nature, so as to become a sort of
continuation, and in nowise a contradiction of Nature; so, in art that
aims at beauty, must the parts be subordinated to Ideal Nature, and
everything individual abstracted, so that it shall be the production of
the universal soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It differs from the works of Nature in this, that they are organically
reproductive. This is not; but spiritually it is prolific by its
powerful action on the intellects of men.

Hence it follows that a study of admirable works of art sharpens our
perceptions of the beauty of Nature; that a certain analogy reigns
throughout the wonders of both; that the contemplation of a work of
great art draws us into a state of mind which may be called religious.
It conspires with all exalted sentiments.

Proceeding from absolute mind, whose nature is goodness as much as
truth, the great works are always attuned to moral nature. If the earth
and sea conspire with virtue more than vice,--so do the masterpieces
of art. The galleries of ancient sculpture in Naples and Rome strike
no deeper conviction into the mind than the contrast of the purity,
the severity, expressed in these fine old heads, with the frivolity
and grossness of the mob that exhibits and the mob that gazes at them.
These are the countenances of the first-born,--the face of man in the
morning of the world. No mark is on these lofty features, of sloth, or
luxury, or meanness, and they surprise you with a moral admonition,
as they speak of nothing around you, but remind you of the fragrant
thoughts and the purest resolutions of your youth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be easy to show of many fine things in the world,--in the
customs of nations, the etiquette of courts, the constitution of
governments,--the origin in quite simple local necessities. Heraldry,
for example, and the ceremonies of a coronation, are a dignified
repetition of the occurrences that might befall a dragoon and his
footboy. The College of Cardinals were originally the parish priests
of Rome. The leaning towers originated from the civil discords which
induced every lord to build a tower. Then it became a point of family
pride,--and for more pride the novelty of a leaning tower was built.

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

The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and
the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every
stone. The Madonnas of Raphael and Titian were made to be worshipped.
Tragedy was instituted for the like purpose, and the miracles of
music: all sprang out of some genuine enthusiasm, and never out of
dilettanteism and holidays. Now they languish, because their purpose
is merely exhibition. Who cares, who knows what works of art our
government have ordered to be made for the Capitol? They are a mere
flourish to please the eye of persons who have associations with
books and galleries. But in Greece, the Demos of Athens divided into
political factions upon the merits of Phidias.

In this country, at this time, other interests than religion and
patriotism are predominant, and the arts, the daughters of enthusiasm,
do not flourish. The genuine offspring of our ruling passions we
behold. Popular institutions, the school, the reading-room, the
telegraph, the post-office, the exchange, the insurance-company, and
the immense harvest of economical inventions, are the fruit of the
equality and the boundless liberty of lucrative callings. These are
superficial wants; and their fruits are these superficial institutions.
But as far as they accelerate the end of political freedom and
national education, they are preparing the soil of man for fairer
flowers and fruits in another age. For beauty, truth, and goodness
are not obsolete; they spring eternal in the breast of man; they are
as indigenous in Massachusetts as in Tuscany or the Isles of Greece.
And that Eternal Spirit, whose triple face they are, moulds from them
forever, for his mortal child, images to remind him of the Infinite and
Fair.




ELOQUENCE.




ELOQUENCE.


It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can
speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life.
Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at different
degrees. One man is brought to the boiling-point by the excitement of
conversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep.
He has a two-inch enthusiasm, a patty-pan ebullition. Another requires
the additional caloric of a multitude, and a public debate; a third
needs an antagonist, or a hot indignation; a fourth needs a revolution;
and a fifth, nothing less than the grandeur of absolute ideas, the
splendors and shades of Heaven and Hell.

But because every man is an orator, how long soever he may have been
a mute, an assembly of men is so much more susceptible. The eloquence
of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and
all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors,
and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased
loquacity on their return to the fireside.

The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better than that of those
who prematurely boil, and who impatiently break silence before their
time. Our county conventions often exhibit a small-pot-soon-hot style
of eloquence. We are too much reminded of a medical experiment where a
series of patients are taking nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient, in turn,
exhibits similar symptoms,--redness in the face, volubility, violent
gesticulation, delirious attitudes, occasional stamping, an alarming
loss of perception of the passage of time, a selfish enjoyment of his
sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferings of the audience.

Plato says, that the punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to
take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse
men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the
penalty of abstaining to speak,--that they shall hear worse orators
than themselves.

But this lust to speak marks the universal feeling of the energy of
the engine, and the curiosity men feel to touch the springs. Of all
the musical instruments on which men play, a popular assembly is
that which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which,
by genius and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn. An
audience is not a simple addition of the individuals that compose it.
Their sympathy gives them a certain social organism, which fills each
member, in his own degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a
battery is charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one
can survey the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised
of new opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being
agitated to agitate. How many orators sit mute there below! They come
to get justice done to that ear and intuition which no Chatham and no
Demosthenes has begun to satisfy.

The Welsh Triads say, “Many are the friends of the golden tongue.”
Who can wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress,
or the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of
society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience
at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his. He is the
true potentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they
who know how to govern. The definitions of eloquence describe its
attraction for young men. Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s
ten orators, advertised in Athens, “that he would cure distempers of
the mind with words.” No man has a prosperity so high or firm but two
or three words can dishearten it. There is no calamity which right
words will not begin to redress. Isocrates described his art as “the
power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great,”--an
acute but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art assumed a
Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon. Socrates says: “If
any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedæmonians, he
will at first find him despicable in conversation; but, when a proper
opportunity offers, this same person, like a skilful jaculator, will
hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short and contorted, so that he
who converses with him will appear to be in no respect superior to a
boy.” Plato’s definition of rhetoric is, “the art of ruling the minds
of men.” The Koran says, “A mountain may change its place, but a man
will not change his disposition” yet the end of eloquence is,--is it
not?--to alter in a pair of hours, perhaps in a half-hour’s discourse,
the convictions and habits of years. Young men, too, are eager to enjoy
this sense of added power and enlarged sympathetic existence. The
orator sees himself the organ of a multitude, and concentrating their
valors and powers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But eloquence must be attractive, or it is none. The virtue of books
is, to be readable, and of orators, to be interesting; and this is
a gift of Nature; as Demosthenes, the most laborious student in
that kind, signified his sense of this necessity when he wrote,
“Good Fortune,” as his motto on his shield. As we know, the power of
discourse of certain individuals amounts to fascination, though it may
have no lasting effect. Some portion of this sugar must intermingle.
The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no
constable to keep them. It draws the children from their play, the
old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his warm chamber: it holds
the hearer fast; steals away his feet, that he shall not depart,--his
memory, that he shall not remember the most pressing affairs,--his
belief, that he shall not admit any opposing considerations. The
pictures we have of it in semi-barbarous ages, when it has some
advantages in the simpler habit of the people, show what it aims at. It
is said that the Khans, or story-tellers, in Ispahan and other cities
of the East, attain a controlling power over their audience, keeping
them for many hours attentive to the most fanciful and extravagant
adventures. The whole world knows pretty well the style of these
improvisators, and how fascinating they are, in our translations of the
“Arabian Nights.” Scheherezade tells these stories to save her life,
and the delight of young Europe and young America in them proves that
she fairly earned it. And who does not remember in childhood some white
or black or yellow Scheherezade, who, by that talent of telling endless
feats of fairies and magicians, and kings and queens, was more dear and
wonderful to a circle of children than any orator in England or America
is now? The more indolent and imaginative complexion of the Eastern
nations makes them much more impressible by these appeals to the fancy.

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

      “harpit a fish out o’ saut-water,
    Or water out of a stone,
  Or milk out of a maiden’s breast
    Who bairn had never none.”

Homer specially delighted in drawing the same figure. For what is the
“Odyssey” but a history of the orator, in the largest style, carried
through a series of adventures furnishing brilliant opportunities to
his talent? See with what care and pleasure the poet brings him on the
stage. Helen is pointing out to Priam, from a tower, the different
Grecian chiefs. “The old man asked: ‘Tell me, dear child, who is
that man, shorter by a head than Agamemnon, yet he looks broader in
his shoulders and breast. His arms lie on the ground, but he, like a
leader, walks about the bands of the men. He seems to me like a stately
ram, who goes as a master of the flock.’ Him answered Helen, daughter
of Jove: ‘This is the wise Ulysses, son of Laertes, who was reared
in the state of craggy Ithaca, knowing all wiles and wise counsels.’
To her the prudent Antenor replied again: ‘O woman, you have spoken
truly. For once the wise Ulysses came hither on an embassy, with
Menelaus, beloved by Mars. I received them, and entertained them at my
house. I became acquainted with the genius and the prudent judgments
of both. When they mixed with the assembled Trojans, and stood, the
broad shoulders of Menelaus rose above the other; but, both sitting,
Ulysses was more majestic. When they conversed, and interweaved stories
and opinions with all, Menelaus spoke succinctly,--few but very sweet
words, since he was not talkative, nor superfluous in speech, and was
the younger. But when the wise Ulysses arose, and stood, and looked
down, fixing his eyes on the ground, and neither moved his sceptre
backward nor forward, but held it still, like an awkward person, you
would say it was some angry or foolish man; but when he sent his
great voice forth out of his breast, and his words fell like the
winter snows, not then would any mortal contend with Ulysses; and we,
beholding, wondered not afterwards so much at his aspect.’”[B] Thus he
does not fail to arm Ulysses at first with this power of overcoming
all opposition by the blandishments of speech. Plutarch tells us that
Thucydides, when Archidamus, king of Sparta, asked him which was the
best wrestler,--Pericles or he,--replied, “When I throw him, he says he
was never down, and he persuades the very spectators to believe him.”
Philip of Macedon said of Demosthenes, on hearing the report of one of
his orations, “Had I been there, he would have persuaded me to take up
arms against myself”; and Warren Hastings said of Burke’s speech on
his impeachment, “As I listened to the orator, I felt for more than
half an hour as if I were the most culpable being on earth.”

In these examples, higher qualities have already entered; but the power
of detaining the ear by pleasing speech, and addressing the fancy and
imagination, often exists without higher merits. Thus separated, as
this fascination of discourse aims only at amusement, though it be
decisive in its momentary effect, it is yet a juggle, and of no lasting
power. It is heard like a band of music passing through the streets,
which converts all the passengers into poets, but is forgotten as soon
as it has turned the next corner; and unless this oiled tongue could,
in Oriental phrase, lick the sun and moon away, it must take its place
with opium and brandy. I know no remedy against it but cotton-wool, or
the wax which Ulysses stuffed into the ears of his sailors to pass the
Sirens safely.

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

One of our statesmen said, “The curse of this country is eloquent men.”
And one cannot wonder at the uneasiness sometimes manifested by trained
statesmen, with large experience of public affairs, when they observe
the disproportionate advantage suddenly given to oratory over the most
solid and accumulated public service. In a Senate or other business
committee, the solid result depends on a few men with working-talent.
They know how to deal with the facts before them, to put things into a
practical shape, and they value men only as they can forward the work.
But a new man comes there, who has no capacity for helping them at all,
is insignificant, and nobody in the committee, but has a talent for
speaking. In the debate with open doors, this precious person makes a
speech, which is printed, and read all over the Union, and he at once
becomes famous, and takes the lead in the public mind over all these
executive men, who, of course, are full of indignation to find one who
has no tact or skill, and knows he has none, put over them by means of
this talking-power which they despise.

Leaving behind us these pretensions, better or worse, to come a little
nearer to the verity,--eloquence is attractive as an example of the
magic of personal ascendency,--a total and resultant power, rare,
because it requires a rich coincidence of powers, intellect, will,
sympathy, organs, and, over all, good fortune in the cause. We have
a half-belief that the person is possible who can counterpoise all
other persons. We believe that there may be a man who is a match for
events,--one who never found his match,--against whom other men being
dashed are broken,--one of inexhaustible personal resources, who can
give you any odds and beat you. What we really wish for is a mind
equal to any exigency. You are safe in your rural district, or in the
city, in broad daylight, amidst the police, and under the eyes of a
hundred thousand people. But how is it on the Atlantic, in a storm,--do
you understand how to infuse your reason into men disabled by terror,
and to bring yourself off safe then?--how among thieves, or among an
infuriated populace, or among cannibals? Face to face with a highwayman
who has every temptation and opportunity for violence and plunder, can
you bring yourself off safe by your wit, exercised through speech?--a
problem easy enough to Cæsar or Napoleon. Whenever a man of that
stamp arrives, the highwayman has found a master. What a difference
between men in power of face! A man succeeds because he has more power
of eye than another, and so coaxes or confounds him. The newspapers,
every week, report the adventures of some impudent swindler, who, by
steadiness of carriage, duped those who should have known better. Yet
any swindlers we have known are novices and bunglers, as is attested
by their ill name. A greater power of face would accomplish anything,
and, with the rest of their takings, take away the bad name. A greater
power of carrying the thing loftily, and with perfect assurance, would
confound merchant, banker, judge, men of influence and power,--poet
and president,--and might head any party, unseat any sovereign, and
abrogate any constitution in Europe and America. It was said that a
man has at one step attained vast power, who has renounced his moral
sentiment, and settled it with himself that he will no longer stick
at anything. It was said of Sir William Pepperel, one of the worthies
of New England, that, “put him where you might, he commanded, and saw
what he willed come to pass.” Julius Cæsar said to Metellus, when that
tribune interfered to hinder him from entering the Roman treasury,
“Young man, it is easier for me to put you to death than to say that I
will”; and the youth yielded. In earlier days, he was taken by pirates.
What then? He threw himself into their ship, established the most
extraordinary intimacies, told them stories, declaimed to them; if they
did not applaud his speeches, he threatened them with hanging,--which
he performed afterwards,--and, in a short time, was master of all on
board. A man this is who cannot be disconcerted, and so can never play
his last card, but has a reserve of power when he has hit his mark.
With a serene face, he subverts a kingdom. What is told of him is
miraculous; it affects men so. The confidence of men in him is lavish,
and he changes the face of the world, and histories, poems, and new
philosophies arise to account for him. A supreme commander over all
his passions and affections; but the secret of his ruling is higher
than that. It is the power of Nature running without impediment from
the brain and will into the hands. Men and women are his game. Where
they are, he cannot be without resource. “Whoso can speak well,” said
Luther, “is a man.” It was men of this stamp that the Grecian States
used to ask of Sparta for generals. They did not send to Lacedæmon
for troops, but they said, “Send us a commander”; and Pausanias, or
Gylippus, or Brasidas, or Agis, was despatched by the Ephors.

It is easy to illustrate this overpowering personality by these
examples of soldiers and kings; but there are men of the most peaceful
way of life, and peaceful principle, who are felt, wherever they go, as
sensibly as a July sun or a December frost,--men who, if they speak,
are heard, though they speak in a whisper,--who, when they act, act
effectually, and what they do is imitated; and these examples may be
found on very humble platforms, as well as on high ones.

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

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

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

Thus it is not powers of speech that we primarily consider under this
word _eloquence_, but the power that, being present, gives them their
perfection, and, being absent, leaves them a merely superficial value.
Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.
Personal ascendency may exist with or without adequate talent for its
expression. It is as surely felt as a mountain or a planet; but when
it is weaponed with a power of speech, it seems first to become truly
human, works actively in all directions, and supplies the imagination
with fine materials.

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

This balance between the orator and the audience is expressed in what
is called the pertinence of the speaker. There is always a rivalry
between the orator and the occasion, between the demands of the hour
and the prepossession of the individual. The emergency which has
convened the meeting is usually of more importance than anything the
debaters have in their minds, and therefore becomes imperative to them.
But if one of them have anything of commanding necessity in his heart,
how speedily he will find vent for it, and with the applause of the
assembly! This balance is observed in the privatest intercourse. Poor
Tom never knew the time when the present occurrence was so trivial that
he could tell what was passing in his mind without being checked for
unseasonable speech; but let Bacon speak, and wise men would rather
listen, though the revolution of kingdoms was on foot. I have heard
it reported of an eloquent preacher, whose voice is not yet forgotten
in this city, that, on occasions of death or tragic disaster, which
overspread the congregation with gloom, he ascended the pulpit with
more than his usual alacrity, and, turning to his favorite lessons of
devout and jubilant thankfulness,--“Let us praise the Lord,”--carried
audience, mourners, and mourning along with him, and swept away all the
impertinence of private sorrow with his hosannas and songs of praise.
Pepys says of Lord Clarendon (with whom “he is mad in love”), on his
return from a conference, “I did never observe how much easier a man do
speak when he knows all the company to be below him, than in him; for,
though he spoke indeed excellent well, yet his manner and freedom of
doing it, as if he played with it, and was informing only all the rest
of the company, was mighty pretty.”[C]

This rivalry between the orator and the occasion is inevitable, and
the occasion always yields to the eminence of the speaker; for a great
man is the greatest of occasions. Of course, the interest of the
audience and of the orator conspire. It is well with them only when his
influence is complete; then only they are well pleased. Especially, he
consults his power by making instead of taking his theme. If he should
attempt to instruct the people in that which they already know, he
would fail; but, by making them wise in that which he knows, he has
the advantage of the assembly every moment. Napoleon’s tactics of
marching on the angle of an army, and always presenting a superiority
of numbers, is the orator’s secret also.

The several talents which the orator employs, the splendid weapons
which went to the equipment of Demosthenes, of Æschines, of Demades
the natural orator, of Fox, of Pitt, of Patrick Henry, of Adams, of
Mirabeau, deserve a special enumeration. We must not quite omit to name
the principal pieces.

The orator, as we have seen, must be a substantial personality. Then,
first, he must have power of statement,--must have the fact, and
know how to tell it. In any knot of men conversing on any subject,
the person who knows most about it will have the ear of the company,
if he wishes it, and lead the conversation,--no matter what genius
or distinction other men there present may have; and in any public
assembly, him who has the facts, and can and will state them, people
will listen to, though he is otherwise ignorant, though he is hoarse
and ungraceful, though he stutters and screams.

In a court of justice, the audience are impartial; they really wish to
sift the statements and know what the truth is. And in the examination
of witnesses there usually leap out, quite unexpectedly, three or four
stubborn words or phrases which are the pith and fate of the business,
which sink into the ear of all parties, and stick there, and determine
the cause. All the rest is repetition and qualifying; and the court
and the county have really come together to arrive at these three or
four memorable expressions, which betrayed the mind and meaning of
somebody.

In every company, the man with the fact is like the guide you hire to
lead your party up a mountain, or through a difficult country. He may
not compare with any of the party in mind, or breeding, or courage, or
possessions, but he is much more important to the present need than
any of them. That is what we go to the court-house for,--the statement
of the fact, and the elimination of a general fact, the real relation
of all the parties; and it is the certainty with which, indifferently
in any affair that is well handled, the truth stares us in the face,
through all the disguises that are put upon it,--a piece of the
well-known human life,--that makes the interest of a court-room to the
intelligent spectator.

I remember, long ago, being attracted by the distinction of the
counsel, and the local importance of the cause, into the court-room.
The prisoner’s counsel were the strongest and cunningest lawyers in
the Commonwealth. They drove the attorney for the State from corner to
corner, taking his reasons from under him, and reducing him to silence,
but not to submission. When hard pressed, he revenged himself, in his
turn, on the judge, by requiring the court to define what salvage was.
The court, thus pushed, tried words, and said everything it could
think of to fill the time, supposing cases, and describing duties of
insurers, captains, pilots, and miscellaneous sea-officers that are or
might be,--like a schoolmaster puzzled by a hard sum, who reads the
context with emphasis. But all this flood not serving the cuttle-fish
to get away in, the horrible shark of the district-attorney being still
there, grimly awaiting with his “The court must define,”--the poor
court pleaded its inferiority. The superior court must establish the
law for this, and it read away piteously the decisions of the Supreme
Court, but read to those who had no pity. The judge was forced at last
to rule something, and the lawyers saved their rogue under the fog
of a definition. The parts were so well cast and discriminated, that
it was an interesting game to watch. The government was well enough
represented. It was stupid, but it had a strong will and possession,
and stood on that to the last. The judge had a task beyond his
preparation, yet his position remained real: he was there to represent
a great reality,--the justice of states, which we could well enough see
beetling over his head, and which his trifling talk nowise affected,
and did not impede, since he was entirely well-meaning.

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

Next to the knowledge of the fact and its law is method, which
constitutes the genius and efficiency of all remarkable men. A crowd
of men go up to Faneuil Hall; they are all pretty well acquainted with
the object of the meeting; they have all read the facts in the same
newspapers. The orator possesses no information which his hearers have
not; yet he teaches them to see the thing with his eyes. By the new
placing, the circumstances acquire new solidity and worth. Every fact
gains consequence by his naming it, and trifles become important. His
expressions fix themselves in men’s memories, and fly from mouth to
mouth. His mind has some new principle of order. Where he looks, all
things fly into their places. What will he say next? Let this man
speak, and this man only. By applying the habits of a higher style of
thought to the common affairs of this world, he introduces beauty and
magnificence wherever he goes. Such a power was Burke’s, and of this
genius we have had some brilliant examples in our own political and
legal men.

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

Statement, method, imagery, selection, tenacity of memory, power of
dealing with facts, of illuminating them, of sinking them by ridicule
or by diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, pathos,
are keys which the orator holds; and yet these fine gifts are not
eloquence, and do often hinder a man’s attainment of it. And if we
come to the heart of the mystery, perhaps we should say that the truly
eloquent man is a sane man with power to communicate his sanity. If
you arm the man with the extraordinary weapons of this art, give him
a grasp of facts, learning, quick fancy, sarcasm, splendid allusion,
interminable illustration,--all these talents, so potent and charming,
have an equal power to insnare and mislead the audience and the orator.
His talents are too much for him, his horses run away with him; and
people always perceive whether you drive, or whether the horses take
the bits in their teeth and run. But these talents are quite something
else when they are subordinated and serve him; and we go to Washington,
or to Westminster Hall, or might well go round the world, to see a
man who drives, and is not run away with,--a man who, in prosecuting
great designs, has an absolute command of the means of representing his
ideas, and uses them only to express these; placing facts, placing men;
amid the inconceivable levity of human beings, never for an instant
warped from his erectness. There is for every man a statement possible
of that truth which he is most unwilling to receive,--a statement
possible, so broad and so pungent that he cannot get away from it, but
must either bend to it or die of it. Else there would be no such word
as eloquence, which means this. The listener cannot hide from himself
that something has been shown him and the whole world, which he did
not wish to see; and, as he cannot dispose of it, it disposes of him.
The history of public men and affairs in America will readily furnish
tragic examples of this fatal force.

For the triumphs of the art somewhat more must still be required,
namely, a reinforcing of man from events, so as to give the double
force of reason and destiny. In transcendent eloquence, there was
ever some crisis in affairs, such as could deeply engage the man to
the cause he pleads, and draw all this wide power to a point. For
the explosions and eruptions, there must be accumulations of heat
somewhere, beds of ignited anthracite at the centre. And in cases where
profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no
beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It
agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power
of articulation. Then it rushes from him as in short, abrupt screams,
in torrents of meaning. The possession the subject has of his mind is
so entire, that it insures an order of expression which is the order
of Nature itself, and so the order of greatest force, and inimitable
by any art. And the main distinction between him and other well-graced
actors is the conviction, communicated by every word, that his mind is
contemplating a whole, and inflamed by the contemplation of the whole,
and that the words and sentences uttered by him, however admirable,
fall from him as unregarded parts of that terrible whole which he
sees, and which he means that you shall see. Add to this concentration
a certain regnant calmness, which, in all the tumult, never utters a
premature syllable, but keeps the secret of its means and method; and
the orator stands before the people as a demoniacal power to whose
miracles they have no key. This terrible earnestness makes good the
ancient superstition of the hunter, that the bullet will hit its mark,
which is first dipped in the marksman’s blood.

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

The power of Chatham, of Pericles, of Luther, rested on this strength
of character, which, because it did not and could not fear anybody,
made nothing of their antagonists, and became sometimes exquisitely
provoking and sometimes terrific to these.

We are slenderly furnished with anecdotes of these men, nor can we help
ourselves by those heavy books in which their discourses are reported.
Some of them were writers, like Burke; but most of them were not,
and no record at all adequate to their fame remains. Besides, what
is best is lost,--the fiery life of the moment. But the conditions
for eloquence always exist. It is always dying out of famous places,
and appearing in corners. Wherever the polarities meet, wherever the
fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, come in
direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the
spark will pass. The resistance to slavery in this country has been a
fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connection by which it drew
to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight yet sufficient
party organization it offered, reinforced the city with new blood from
the woods and mountains. Wild men, John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John
Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of Nature in the heart of commercial
capitals. They send us every year some piece of aboriginal strength,
some tough oak-stick of a man who is not to be silenced or insulted
or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they,--one who
mobs the mob,--some sturdy countryman, on whom neither money, nor
politeness, nor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats, make
any impression. He is fit to meet the bar-room wits and bullies; he is
a wit and a bully himself, and something more: he is a graduate of the
plough, and the stub-hoe, and the bushwhacker; knows all the secrets
of swamp and snow-bank, and has nothing to learn of labor or poverty
or the rough of farming. His hard head went through, in childhood, the
drill of Calvinism, with text and mortification, so that he stands
in the New England assembly a purer bit of New England than any, and
flings his sarcasms right and left. He has not only the documents in
his pocket to answer all cavils, and to prove all his positions, but
he has the eternal reason in his head. This man scornfully renounces
your civil organizations,--county, or city, or governor, or army,--is
his own navy and artillery, judge and jury, legislature and executive.
He has learned his lessons in a bitter school. Yet, if the pupil be of
a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recommended to a
man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must
lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character
and insight. Let him see that his speech is not differenced from
action; that, when he has spoken, he has not done nothing, nor done
wrong, but has cleared his own skirts, has engaged himself to wholesome
exertion. Let him look on opposition as opportunity. He cannot be
defeated or put down. There is a principle of resurrection in him, an
immortality of purpose. Men are averse and hostile, to give value to
their suffrages. It is not the people that are in fault for not being
convinced, but he that cannot convince them. He should mould them,
armed as he is with the reason and love which are also the core of
their nature. He is not to neutralize their opposition, but he is to
convert them into fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.

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

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

All the chief orators of the world have been grave men, relying on
this reality. One thought the philosophers of Demosthenes’s own time
found running through all his orations,--this namely, that “virtue
secures its own success.” “To stand on one’s own feet” Heeren finds the
key-note to the discourses of Demosthenes, as of Chatham.

Eloquence, like every other art, rests on laws the most exact and
determinate. It is the best speech of the best soul. It may well stand
as the exponent of all that is grand and immortal in the mind. If it do
not so become an instrument, but aspires to be somewhat of itself, and
to glitter for show, it is false and weak. In its right exercise, it
is an elastic, unexhausted power,--who has sounded, who has estimated
it?--expanding with the expansion of our interests and affections. Its
great masters, whilst they valued every help to its attainment, and
thought no pains too great which contributed in any manner to further
it;--resembling the Arabian warrior of fame, who wore seventeen weapons
in his belt, and in personal combat used them all occasionally;--yet
subordinated all means; never permitted any talent--neither voice,
rhythm, poetic power, anecdote, sarcasm--to appear for show; but were
grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed
that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their
country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech or of the
press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world, and themselves
also.




DOMESTIC LIFE.




DOMESTIC LIFE.


The perfection of the providence for childhood is easily acknowledged.
The care which covers the seed of the tree under tough husks and stony
cases provides for the human plant the mother’s breast and the father’s
house. The size of the nestler is comic, and its tiny beseeching
weakness is compensated perfectly by the happy patronizing look of the
mother, who is a sort of high reposing Providence toward it. Welcome to
the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms
more irresistible than the soldier’s, his lips touched with persuasion
which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected
lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,
the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow
his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and
clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason
and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than
all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue.
His flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive. “Infancy,” said Coleridge,
“presents body and spirit in unity: the body is all animated.” All
day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,
sputters, and spurs, and puts on his faces of importance; and when he
fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him.
By lamplight he delights in shadows on the wall; by daylight, in yellow
and scarlet. Carry him out of doors,--he is overpowered by the light
and by the extent of natural objects, and is silent. Then presently
begins his use of his fingers, and he studies power, the lesson of
his race. First it appears in no great harm, in architectural tastes.
Out of blocks, thread-spools, cards, and checkers, he will build his
pyramid with the gravity of Palladio. With an acoustic apparatus of
whistle and rattle he explores the laws of sound. But chiefly, like his
senior countrymen, the young American studies new and speedier modes of
transportation. Mistrusting the cunning of his small legs, he wishes
to ride on the necks and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter
nothing can withstand,--no seniority of age, no gravity of character;
uncles, aunts, grandsires, grandams, fall an easy prey: he conforms to
nobody, all conform to him; all caper and make mouths, and babble, and
chirrup to him. On the strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls the hair
of laurelled heads.

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

Fast--almost too fast for the wistful curiosity of the parents,
studious of the witchcraft of curls and dimples and broken words--the
little talker grows to a boy. He walks daily among wonders: fire,
light, darkness, the moon, the stars, the furniture of the house, the
red tin horse, the domestics, who like rude foster-mothers befriend and
feed him, the faces that claim his kisses, are all in turn absorbing;
yet warm, cheerful, and with good appetite the little sovereign subdues
them without knowing it; the new knowledge is taken up into the life of
to-day and becomes the means of more. The blowing rose is a new event;
the garden full of flowers is Eden over again to the small Adam; the
rain, the ice, the frost, make epochs in his life. What a holiday is
the first snow in which Twoshoes can be trusted abroad!

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

The household is the home of the man, as well as of the child. The
events that occur therein are more near and affecting to us than
those which are sought in senates and academies. Domestic events are
certainly our affair. What are called public events may or may not
be ours. If a man wishes to acquaint himself with the real history
of the world, with the spirit of the age, he must not go first to
the state-house or the court-room. The subtle spirit of life must be
sought in facts nearer. It is what is done and suffered in the house,
in the constitution, in the temperament, in the personal history, that
has the profoundest interest for us. Fact is better than fiction, if
only we could get pure fact. Do you think any rhetoric or any romance
would get your ear from the wise gypsy who could tell straight on the
real fortunes of the man; who could reconcile your moral character and
your natural history; who could explain your misfortunes, your fevers,
your debts, your temperament, your habits of thought, your tastes,
and, in every explanation, not sever you from the whole, but unite you
to it? Is it not plain that not in senates, or courts, or chambers
of commerce, but in the dwelling-house must the true character and
hope of the time be consulted? These facts are, to be sure, harder to
read. It is easier to count the census, or compute the square extent
of a territory, to criticise its polity, books, art, than to come to
the persons and dwellings of men, and read their character and hope
in their way of life. Yet we are always hovering round this better
divination. In one form or another, we are always returning to it. The
physiognomy and phrenology of to-day are rash and mechanical systems
enough, but they rest on everlasting foundations. We are sure that
the sacred form of man is not seen in these whimsical, pitiful, and
sinister masks (masks which we wear and which we meet), these bloated
and shrivelled bodies, bald heads, bead eyes, short winds, puny and
precarious healths, and early deaths. We live ruins amidst ruins. The
great facts are the near ones. The account of the body is to be sought
in the mind. The history of your fortunes is written first in your life.

Let us come, then, out of the public square, and enter the domestic
precinct. Let us go to the sitting-room, the table-talk, and the
expenditure of our contemporaries. An increased consciousness of the
soul, you say, characterizes the period. Let us see if it has not only
arranged the atoms at the circumference, but the atoms at the core.
Does the household obey an idea? Do you see the man,--his form, genius,
and aspiration,--in his economy? Is that translucent, thorough-lighted?
There should be nothing confounding and conventional in economy, but
the genius and love of the man so conspicuously marked in all his
estate, that the eye that knew him should read his character in his
property, in his grounds, in his ornaments, in every expense. A man’s
money should not follow the direction of his neighbor’s money, but
should represent to him the things he would willingliest do with it. I
am not one thing and my expenditure another. My expenditure is me. That
our expenditure and our character are twain, is the vice of society.

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

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

I am afraid that, so considered, our houses will not be found to have
unity, and to express the best thought. The household, the calling,
the friendships, of the citizen are not homogeneous. His house ought
to show us his honest opinion of what makes his well-being when he
rests among his kindred, and forgets all affectation, compliance,
and even exertion of will. He brings home whatever commodities and
ornaments have for years allured his pursuit, and his character must be
seen in them. But what idea predominates in our houses? Thrift first,
then convenience and pleasure. Take off all the roofs, from street to
street, and we shall seldom find the temple of any higher god than
Prudence. The progress of domestic living has been in cleanliness, in
ventilation, in health, in decorum, in countless means and arts of
comfort, in the concentration of all the utilities of every clime in
each house. They are arranged for low benefits. The houses of the rich
are confectioners’ shops, where we get sweetmeats and wine; the houses
of the poor are imitations of these to the extent of their ability.
With these ends housekeeping is not beautiful; it cheers and raises
neither the husband, the wife, nor the child; neither the host, nor
the guest; it oppresses women. A house kept to the end of prudence is
laborious without joy; a house kept to the end of display is impossible
to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

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

The difficulties to be overcome must be freely admitted; they are
many and great. Nor are they to be disposed of by any criticism
or amendment of particulars taken one at a time, but only by the
arrangement of the household to a higher end than those to which our
dwellings are usually built and furnished. And is there any calamity
more grave, or that more invokes the best good-will to remove it,
than this?--to go from chamber to chamber, and see no beauty; to find
in the housemates no aim; to hear an endless chatter and blast; to be
compelled to criticise; to hear only to dissent and to be disgusted;
to find no invitation to what is good in us, and no receptacle for
what is wise;--this is a great price to pay for sweet bread and warm
lodging,--being defrauded of affinity, of repose, of genial culture,
and the inmost presence of beauty.

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

_Give us wealth, and the home shall exist._ But that is a very
imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no
solution. “_Give us wealth._” You ask too much. Few have wealth; but
all must have a home. Men are not born rich; and in getting wealth, the
man is generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring
wealth at last. Besides, that cannot be the right answer;--there are
objections to wealth. Wealth is a shift. The wise man angles with
himself only, and with no meaner bait. Our whole use of wealth needs
revision and reform. Generosity does not consist in giving money or
money’s worth. These so-called _goods_ are only the shadow of good. To
give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement
of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence,--a credit-system
in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of
liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to
man man. If he is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is
because there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden
from him. He should be visited in this his prison with rebuke to the
evil demons, with manly encouragement, with no mean-spirited offer of
condolence because you have not money, or mean offer of money as the
utmost benefit, but by your heroism, your purity, and your faith.
You are to bring with you that spirit which is understanding, health
and self-help. To offer him money in lieu of these is to do him the
same wrong as when the bridegroom offers his betrothed virgin a sum
of money to release him from his engagements. The great depend on
their heart, not on their purse. Genius and virtue, like diamonds,
are best plain-set,--set in lead, set in poverty. The greatest man in
history was the poorest. How was it with the captains and sages of
Greece and Rome, with Socrates, with Epaminondas? Aristides was made
general receiver of Greece, to collect the tribute which each state
was to furnish against the barbarian. “Poor,” says Plutarch, “when he
set about it, poorer when he had finished it.” How was it with Æmilius
and Cato? What kind of house was kept by Paul and John,--by Milton and
Marvell,--by Samuel Johnson,--by Samuel Adams in Boston, and Jean Paul
Richter at Baireuth?

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

Nor is this redress so hopeless as it seems. Certainly, if we begin by
reforming particulars of our present system, correcting a few evils
and letting the rest stand, we shall soon give up in despair. For our
social forms are very far from truth and equity. But the way to set the
axe at the root of the tree is, to raise our aim. Let us understand,
then, that a house should bear witness in all its economy that human
culture is the end to which it is built and garnished. It stands there
under the sun and moon to ends analogous, and not less noble than
theirs. It is not for festivity, it is not for sleep: but the pine and
the oak shall gladly descend from the mountains to uphold the roof of
men as faithful and necessary as themselves; to be the shelter always
open to good and true persons;--a hall which shines with sincerity,
brows ever tranquil, and a demeanor impossible to disconcert; whose
inmates know what they want; who do not ask your house how theirs
should be kept. They have aims: they cannot pause for trifles. The
diet of the house does not create its order, but knowledge, character,
action, absorb so much life and yield so much entertainment that the
refectory has ceased to be so curiously studied. With a change of aim
has followed a change of the whole scale by which men and things were
wont to be measured. Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are.
It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and
poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and
among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent
and ragged. The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of
circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and
subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions
find their objects everywhere: only the low habits need palaces and
banquets.

Let a man, then, say, My house is here in the county, for the culture
of the county;--an eating-house and sleeping-house for travellers it
shall be, but it shall be much more. I pray you, O excellent wife, not
to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this
woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bedchamber made ready at too
great a cost. These things, if they are curious in, they can get for
a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your
looks, in your accent and behavior, read your heart and earnestness,
your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price, in any village
or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine sparely
and sleep hard, in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread
and let the bed be dressed for the traveller; but let not the emphasis
of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are
simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake
and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love,
honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.

There was never a country in the world which could so easily exhibit
this heroism as ours; never anywhere the State has made such efficient
provision for popular education, where intellectual entertainment is
so within reach of youthful ambition. The poor man’s son is educated.
There is many a humble house in every city, in every town, where talent
and taste, and sometimes genius, dwell with poverty and labor. Who
has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low roof, the eager,
blushing boys discharging as they can their household chores, and
hastening into the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow’s merciless
lesson, yet stealing time to read one chapter more of the novel hardly
smuggled into the tolerance of father and mother,--atoning for the
same by some pages of Plutarch or Goldsmith; the warm sympathy with
which they kindle each other in school-yard, or in barn or wood-shed,
with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the last oration, or
mimicry of the orator; the youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the
sermons; the school declamation faithfully rehearsed at home, sometimes
to the fatigue, sometimes to the admiration of sisters; the first
solitary joys of literary vanity, when the translation or the theme has
been completed, sitting alone near the top of the house; the cautious
comparison of the attractive advertisement of the arrival of Macready,
Booth, or Kemble, or of the discourse of a well-known speaker, with
the expense of the entertainment; the affectionate delight with which
they greet the return of each one after the early separations which
school or business require; the foresight with which, during such
absences, they hive the honey which opportunity offers, for the ear and
imagination of the others; and the unrestrained glee with which they
disburden themselves of their early mental treasures when the holidays
bring them again together? What is the hoop that holds them stanch?
It is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which,
excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which make other boys too
early old, has directed their activity in safe and right channels, and
made them, despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful,
and the good. Ah! short-sighted students of books, of Nature, and of
man! too happy, could they know their advantages. They pine for freedom
from that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, for rides,
for the theatre, and premature freedom and dissipation, which others
possess. Woe to them, if their wishes were crowned! The angels that
dwell with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful
brows, are Toil, and Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith.

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

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

In the old fables, we used to read of a cloak brought from fairy-land
as a gift for the fairest and purest in Prince Arthur’s court. It was
to be her prize whom it would fit. Every one was eager to try it on,
but it would fit nobody: for one it was a world too wide, for the next
it dragged on the ground, and for the third it shrunk to a scarf. They,
of course, said that the devil was in the mantle, for really the truth
was in the mantle, and was exposing the ugliness which each would fain
conceal. All drew back with terror from the garment. The innocent
Genelas alone could wear it. In like manner, every man is provided in
his thought with a measure of man which he applies to every passenger.
Unhappily, not one in many thousands comes up to the stature and
proportions of the model. Neither does the measurer himself; neither
do the people in the street; neither do the select individuals whom he
admires,--the heroes of the race. When he inspects them critically, he
discovers that their aims are low, that they are too quickly satisfied.
He observes the swiftness with which life culminates, and the humility
of the expectations of the greatest part of men. To each occurs, soon
after the age of puberty, some event, or society, or way of living,
which becomes the crisis of life, and the chief fact in their history.
In woman, it is love and marriage (which is more reasonable); and
yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel of an
unfolding life from such a youthful, and generally inconsiderate,
period as the age of courtship and marriage. In men, it is their place
of education, choice of an employment, settlement in a town, or removal
to the East or to the West, or some other magnified trifle, which makes
the meridian moment, and all the after years and actions only derive
interest from their relation to that. Hence it comes that we soon catch
the trick of each man’s conversation, and, knowing his two or three
main facts, anticipate what he thinks of each new topic that rises. It
is scarcely less perceivable in educated men, so called, than in the
uneducated. I have seen finely endowed men at college festivals, ten,
twenty years after they had left the halls, returning, as it seemed,
the same boys who went away. The same jokes pleased, the same straws
tickled; the manhood and offices they brought thither at this return
seemed mere ornamental masks: underneath they were boys yet. We never
come to be citizens of the world, but are still villagers, who think
that everything in their petty town is a little superior to the same
thing anywhere else. In each the circumstance signalized differs, but
in each it is made the coals of an ever-burning egotism. In one, it was
his going to sea; in a second, the difficulties he combated in going to
college; in a third, his journey to the West, or his voyage to Canton;
in a fourth, his coming out of the Quaker Society; in a fifth, his
new diet and regimen; in a sixth, his coming forth from the abolition
organizations; and in a seventh, his going into them. It is a life of
toys and trinkets. We are too easily pleased.

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

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every
company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears
so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners,
which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of
face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a
divine building, if the soul will build thereon. There is no face, no
form, which one cannot in fancy associate with great power of intellect
or with generosity of soul. In our experience, to be sure, beauty is
not, as it ought to be, the dower of man and of woman as invariably as
sensation. Beauty is, even in the beautiful, occasional,--or, as one
has said, culminating and perfect only a single moment, before which
it is unripe, and after which it is on the wane. But beauty is never
quite absent from our eyes. Every face, every figure, suggests its own
right and sound estate. Our friends are not their own highest form.
But let the hearts they have agitated witness what power has lurked in
the traits of these structures of clay that pass and repass us! The
secret power of form over the imagination and affections transcends all
our philosophy. The first glance we meet may satisfy us that matter is
the vehicle of higher powers than its own, and that no laws of line
or surface can ever account for the inexhaustible expressiveness of
form. We see heads that turn on the pivot of the spine,--no more; and
we see heads that seem to turn on a pivot as deep as the axle of the
world,--so slow, and lazily, and great, they move. We see on the lip of
our companion the presence or absence of the great masters of thought
and poetry to his mind. We read in his brow, on meeting him after many
years, that he is where we left him, or that he has made great strides.

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

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

  “Not on the store of sprightly wine,
    Nor plenty of delicious meats,
  Though generous Nature did design
    To court us with perpetual treats,--
  ’Tis not on these we for content depend,
  So much as on the shadow of a Friend.”

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

2. Certainly, not aloof from this homage to beauty, but in strict
connection therewith, the house will come to be esteemed a Sanctuary.
The language of a ruder age has given to common law the maxim that
every man’s house is his castle: the progress of truth will make every
house a shrine. Will not man one day open his eyes and see how dear
he is to the soul of Nature,--how near it is to him? Will he not see,
through all he miscalls accident, that Law prevails for ever and ever;
that his private being is a part of it; that its home is in his own
unsounded heart; that his economy, his labor, his good and bad fortune,
his health and manners, are all a curious and exact demonstration in
miniature of the Genius of the Eternal Providence? When he perceives
the Law, he ceases to despond. Whilst he sees it, every thought and
act is raised, and becomes an act of religion. Does the consecration
of Sunday confess the desecration of the entire week? Does the
consecration of the church confess the profanation of the house? Let
us read the incantation backward. Let the man stand on his feet. Let
religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to
the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the
Household.

These are the consolations,--these are the ends to which the household
is instituted and the rooftree stands. If these are sought, and in any
good degree attained, can the State, can commerce, can climate, can
the labor of many for one, yield anything better, or half as good?
Beside these aims, Society is weak and the State an intrusion. I think
that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression
of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He
who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and
Fashion, and show-men how to lead a clean, handsome, and heroic life
amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall
teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose, and deal with men,
without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor,
and make his own name dear to all history.




FARMING.




FARMING.


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

Then the beauty of nature, the tranquillity and innocence of the
countryman, his independence, and his pleasing arts,--the care of bees,
of poultry, of sheep, of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruits,
of orchards and forests, and the reaction of these on the workman, in
giving him a strength and plain dignity, like the face and manners
of nature, all men acknowledge. All men keep the farm in reserve as
an asylum where, in case of mischance, to hide their poverty,--or a
solitude, if they do not succeed in society. And who knows how many
glances of remorse are turned this way from the bankrupts of trade,
from mortified pleaders in courts and senates, or from the victims
of idleness and pleasure? Poisoned by town life and town vices, the
sufferer resolves: ‘Well, my children, whom I have injured, shall go
back to the land, to be recruited and cured by that which should have
been my nursery, and now shall be their hospital.’

The farmer’s office is precise and important, but you must not try to
paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and
gravitation, whose minister he is. He represents the necessities. It is
the beauty of the great economy of the world that makes his comeliness.
He bends to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops,
as the sails of a ship bend to the wind. He represents continuous hard
labor, year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed
to nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons,
plants, and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little
by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns in fishing,
yachting, hunting, or planting, is the manners of Nature; patience
with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather,
excess or lack of water,--patience with the slowness of our feet, with
the parsimony of our strength, with the largeness of sea and land we
must traverse, etc. The farmer times himself to Nature, and acquires
that livelong patience which belongs to her. Slow, narrow man, his rule
is, that the earth shall feed and clothe him; and he must wait for his
crop to grow. His entertainments, his liberties, and his spending must
be on a farmer’s scale, and not on a merchant’s. It were as false for
farmers to use a wholesale and massy expense, as for states to use a
minute economy. But if thus pinched on one side, he has compensatory
advantages. He is permanent, clings to his land as the rocks do. In
the town where I live, farms remain in the same families for seven and
eight generations; and most of the first settlers (in 1635), should
they reappear on the farms to-day, would find their own blood and names
still in possession. And the like fact holds in the surrounding towns.

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

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

He is the continuous benefactor. He who digs a well, constructs a stone
fountain, plants a grove of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard,
builds a durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as puts a stone
seat by the wayside, makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes
a fortune which he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to
his country long afterwards. The man that works at home helps society
at large with somewhat more of certainty than he who devotes himself to
charities. If it be true that, not by votes of political parties, but
by the eternal laws of political economy, slaves are driven out of a
slave State as fast as it is surrounded by free States, then the true
abolitionist is the farmer, who, heedless of laws and constitutions,
stands all day in the field, investing his labor in the land, and
making a product with which no forced labor can compete.

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

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

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

Science has shown the great circles in which nature works; the manner
in which marine plants balance the marine animals, as the land plants
supply the oxygen which the animals consume, and the animals the carbon
which the plants absorb. These activities are incessant. Nature works
on a method of _all for each and each for all_. The strain that is made
on one point bears on every arch and foundation of the structure. There
is a perfect solidarity. You cannot detach an atom from its holdings,
or strip off from it the electricity, gravitation, chemic affinity, or
the relation to light and heat, and leave the atom bare. No, it brings
with it its universal ties.

Nature, like a cautious testator, ties up her estate so as not to
bestow it all on one generation, but has a forelooking tenderness and
equal regard to the next and the next, and the fourth, and the fortieth
age.

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

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

The air works for him. The atmosphere, a sharp solvent, drinks the
essence and spirit of every solid on the globe,--a menstruum which
melts the mountains into it. Air is matter subdued by heat. As the sea
is the grand receptacle of all rivers, so the air is the receptacle
from which all things spring, and into which they all return. The
invisible and creeping air takes form and solid mass. Our senses are
sceptics, and believe only the impression of the moment, and do not
believe the chemical fact that these huge mountain-chains are made up
of gases and rolling wind. But Nature is as subtle as she is strong.
She turns her capital day by day; deals never with dead, but ever
with quick subjects. All things are flowing, even those that seem
immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe
the materials which they want from the air and the ground. They burn,
that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth
again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption.
The earth burns,--the mountains burn and decompose,--slower, but
incessantly. It is almost inevitable to push the generalization up into
higher parts of nature, rank over rank into sentient beings. Nations
burn with internal fire of thought and affection, which wastes while
it works. We shall find finer combustion and finer fuel. Intellect is
a fire: rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is
called man. Genius even, as it is the greatest good, is the greatest
harm. Whilst all thus burns,--the universe in a blaze kindled from
the torch of the sun,--it needs a perpetual tempering, a phlegm, a
sleep, atmospheres of azote, deluges of water, to check the fury of the
conflagration; a hoarding to check the spending; a centripetence equal
to the centrifugence: and this is invariably supplied.

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

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

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

  “Enclosing in the garden square
  A dead and standing pool of air,”

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

The chemist comes to his aid every year by following out some new hint
drawn from nature, and now affirms that this dreary space occupied by
the farmer is needless: he will concentrate his kitchen-garden into a
box of one or two rods square, will take the roots into his laboratory;
the vines and stalks and stems may go sprawling about in the fields
outside, he will attend to the roots in his tub, gorge them with food
that is good for them. The smaller his garden, the better he can feed
it, and the larger the crop. As he nursed his Thanksgiving turkeys on
bread and milk, so he will pamper his peaches and grapes on the viands
they like best. If they have an appetite for potash, or salt, or iron,
or ground bones, or even now and then for a dead hog, he will indulge
them. They keep the secret well, and never tell on your table whence
they drew their sunset complexion or their delicate flavors.

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

There has been a nightmare bred in England of indigestion and spleen
among landlords and loomlords, namely, the dogma that men breed too
fast for the powers of the soil; that men multiply in a geometrical
ratio, whilst corn only in an arithmetical; and hence that, the more
prosperous we are, the faster we approach these frightful limits: nay,
the plight of every new generation is worse than of the foregoing,
because the first comers take up the best lands; the next, the second
best; and each succeeding wave of population is driven to poorer, so
that the land is ever yielding less returns to enlarging hosts of
eaters. Henry Carey of Philadelphia replied: ‘Not so, Mr. Malthus, but
just the opposite of so is the fact.’

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

Meantime we cannot enumerate the incidents and agents of the farm
without reverting to their influence on the farmer. He carries out
this cumulative preparation of means to their last effect. This crust
of soil which ages have refined he refines again for the feeding
of a civil and instructed people. The great elements with which he
deals cannot leave him unaffected, or unconscious of his ministry;
but their influence somewhat resembles that which the same Nature has
on the child,--of subduing and silencing him. We see the farmer with
pleasure and respect, when we think what powers and utilities are
so meekly worn. He knows every secret of labor: he changes the face
of the landscape. Put him on a new planet, and he would know where
to begin; yet there is no arrogance in his bearing, but a perfect
gentleness. The farmer stands well on the world. Plain in manners as
in dress, he would not shine in palaces; he is absolutely unknown and
inadmissible therein; living or dying, he never shall be heard of in
them; yet the drawing-room heroes put down beside him would shrivel in
his presence,--he solid and unexpressive, they expressed to gold-leaf.
But he stands well on the world,--as Adam did, as an Indian does, as
Homer’s heroes, Agamemnon or Achilles, do. He is a person whom a poet
of any clime--Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes--would appreciate as being
really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow
and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representative of
Nature as much as these.

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




WORKS AND DAYS.




WORKS AND DAYS.


Our nineteenth century is the age of tools. They grow out of our
structure. “Man is the metre of all things,” said Aristotle; “the hand
is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.”
The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office,
where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools
and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. One
definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.” Machines can
only second, not supply, his unaided senses. The body is a metre. The
eye appreciates finer differences than art can expose. The apprentice
clings to his foot-rule, a practised mechanic will measure by his thumb
and his arm with equal precision; and a good surveyor will pace sixteen
rods more accurately than another man can measure them by tape. The
sympathy of eye and hand by which an Indian or a practised slinger hits
his mark with a stone, or a wood-chopper or a carpenter swings his axe
to a hair-line on his log, are examples; and there is no sense or organ
which is not capable of exquisite performance.

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

Our century, to be sure, had inherited a tolerable apparatus. We had
the compass, the printing-press, watches, the spiral spring, the
barometer, the telescope. Yet so many inventions have been added,
that life seems almost made over new; and as Leibnitz said of Newton,
“that if he reckoned all that had been done by mathematicians from the
beginning of the world down to Newton, and what had been done by him,
his would be the better half,” so one might say that the inventions
of the last fifty years counterpoise those of the fifty centuries
before them. For the vast production and manifold application of iron
is new; and our common and indispensable utensils of house and farm
are new; the sewing-machine, the power-loom, the McCormick reaper,
the mowing-machines, gas-light, lucifer-matches, and the immense
productions of the laboratory, are new in this century, and one franc’s
worth of coal does the work of a laborer for twenty days.

Why need I speak of steam, the enemy of space and time, with its
enormous strength and delicate applicability, which is made in
hospitals to bring a bowl of gruel to a sick man’s bed, and can twist
beams of iron like candy-braids, and vies with the forces which
upheaved and doubled over the geologic strata? Steam is an apt scholar
and a strong-shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its work.
It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything
required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It
must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr. Babbage,
it must calculate interest and logarithms. Lord Chancellor Thurlow
thought it might be made to draw bills and answers in chancery. If
that were satire, it is yet coming to render many higher services of
a mechanico-intellectual kind, and will leave the satire short of the
fact.

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

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

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

There does not seem any limit to these new informations of the same
Spirit that made the elements at first, and now, through man, works
them. Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out
of night, time out of space, and space out of time.

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

Another result of our arts is the new intercourse which is surprising
us with new solutions of the embarrassing political problems. The
intercourse is not new, but the scale is new. Our selfishness would
have held slaves, or would have excluded from a quarter of the planet
all that are not born on the soil of that quarter. Our politics are
disgusting; but what can they help or hinder when from time to time
the primal instincts are impressed on masses of mankind, when the
nations are in exodus and flux? Nature loves to cross her stocks,--and
German, Chinese, Turk, Russ, and Kanaka were putting out to sea, and
intermarrying race with race; and commerce took the hint, and ships
were built capacious enough to carry the people of a county.

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

Yes, we have a pretty artillery of tools now in our social
arrangements: we ride four times as fast as our fathers did; travel,
grind, weave, forge, plant, till, and excavate better. We have new
shoes, gloves, glasses, and gimlets; we have the calculus; we have the
newspaper, which does its best to make every square acre of land and
sea give an account of itself at your breakfast-table; we have money,
and paper money; we have language,--the finest tool of all, and nearest
to the mind. Much will have more. Man flatters himself that his command
over nature must increase. Things begin to obey him. We are to have the
balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the air. We may yet
find a rose-water that will wash the negro white. He sees the skull of
the English race changing from its Saxon type under the exigencies of
American life.

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

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

Then the political economist thinks “’tis doubtful if all the
mechanical inventions that ever existed have lightened the day’s toil
of one human being.” The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine
is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the
engine restricts one more act of the engineer,--unteaches him. Once it
took Archimedes; now it only needs a fireman, and a boy to know the
coppers, to pull up the handles or mind the water-tank. But when the
engine breaks, they can do nothing.

What sickening details in the daily journals! I believe they have
ceased to publish the “Newgate Calendar” and the “Pirate’s Own Book”
since the family newspapers, namely, the New York Tribune and the
London Times, have quite superseded them in the freshness, as well
as the horror, of their records of crime. Politics were never more
corrupt and brutal; and Trade, that pride and darling of our ocean,
that educator of nations, that benefactor in spite of itself, ends in
shameful defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy, all over the world.

Of course, we resort to the enumeration of his arts and inventions as a
measure of the worth of man. But if, with all his arts, he is a felon,
we cannot assume the mechanical skill or chemical resources as the
measure of worth. Let us try another gauge.

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

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

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

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

How the day fits itself to the mind, winds itself round it like a fine
drapery, clothing all its fancies! Any holiday communicates to us its
color. We wear its cockade and favors in our humor. Remember what
boys think in the morning of “Election day,” of the Fourth of July,
of Thanksgiving or Christmas. The very stars in their courses wink
to them of nuts and cakes, bonbons, presents, and fireworks. Cannot
memory still descry the old school-house and its porch, somewhat hacked
by jack-knives, where you spun tops and snapped marbles; and do you
not recall that life was then calendared by moments, threw itself
into nervous knots or glittering hours, even as now, and not spread
itself abroad an equable felicity? In college terms, and in years
that followed, the young graduate, when the Commencement anniversary
returned, though he were in a swamp, would see a festive light, and
find the air faintly echoing with plausive academic thunders. In
solitude and in the country, what dignity distinguishes the holy time!
The old Sabbath, or Seventh Day, white with the religions of unknown
thousands of years, when this hallowed hour dawns out of the deep,--a
clean page, which the wise may inscribe with truth, whilst the savage
scrawls it with fetishes,--the cathedral music of history breathes
through it a psalm to our solitude.

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

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

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and
future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought
a thread to the skyey web. ’Tis pitiful the things by which we are
rich or poor,--a matter of coins, coats, and carpets, a little more
or less stone, or wood, or paint, the fashion of a cloak or hat; like
the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud in the possession of
a glass bead or a red feather, and the rest miserable in the want
of it. But the treasures which Nature spent itself to amass,--the
secular, refined, composite anatomy of man,--which all strata go to
form, which the prior races, from infusory and saurian, existed to
ripen; the surrounding plastic natures; the earth with its foods; the
intellectual, temperamenting air; the sea with its invitations; the
heaven deep with worlds; and the answering brain and nervous structure
replying to these; the eye that looketh into the deeps, which again
look back to the eye,--abyss to abyss;--these, not like a glass bead,
or the coins or carpets, are given immeasurably to all.

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

’Tis singular that our rich English language should have no word to
denote the face of the world. _Kinde_ was the old English term, which,
however, filled only half the range of our fine Latin word, with its
delicate future tense,--_natura_, _about to be born_, or what German
philosophy denotes as a _becoming_. But nothing expresses that power
which seems to work for beauty alone. The Greek _Kosmos_ did; and
therefore, with great propriety, Humboldt entitles his book, which
recounts the last results of science, _Cosmos_.

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

This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of
present time. Who is he that does not always find himself doing
something less than his best task? “What are you doing?” “O, nothing;
I have been doing thus, or I shall do so or so, but now I am only--”
Ah! poor dupe, will you never slip out of the web of the master
juggler,--never learn that, as soon as the irrecoverable years have
woven their blue glory between to-day and us, these passing hours shall
glitter and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and
poetry? How difficult to deal erect with them! The events they bring,
their trade, entertainments, and gossip, their urgent work, all throw
dust in the eyes and distract attention. He is a strong man who can
look them in the eye, see through this juggle, feel their identity, and
keep his own; who can know surely that one will be like another to the
end of the world, nor permit love, or death, or politics, or money,
war, or pleasure, to draw him from his task.

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

History of ancient art, excavated cities, recovery of books and
inscriptions,--yes, the works were beautiful, and the history worth
knowing; and academies convene to settle the claims of the old schools.
What journeys and measurements,--Niebuhr and Müller and Layard,--to
identify the plain of Troy and Nimroud town! And your homage to Dante
costs you so much sailing; and to ascertain the discoverers of America
needs as much voyaging as the discovery cost. Poor child! that flexile
clay of which these old brothers moulded their admirable symbols was
not Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was
common lime and silex and water, and sunlight, the heat of the blood,
and the heaving of the lungs; it was that clay which thou heldest but
now in thy foolish hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain in
sepulchres, mummy-pits, and old book-shops of Asia Minor, Egypt, and
England. It was the deep to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty,
which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit
for the tattle of towns. HE lurks, _he_ hides,--_he_ who is success,
reality, joy, and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour
is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every
day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly,
until he knows that every day is Doomsday. ’Tis the old secret of the
gods that they come in low disguises. ’Tis the vulgar great who come
dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in
their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. In the Norse
legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher’s hut, and patches
a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant among peasants.
In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus; and
Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. So, in our history,
Jesus is born in a barn, and his twelve peers are fishermen. ’Tis the
very principle of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts;
’twas the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, in modern times, of
Swedenborg and of Hahnemann. The order of changes in the egg determines
the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule of our poets, in the
legends of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were the least
in size. In the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all, in
the form of the Madonna; and in life, this is the secret of the wise.
We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the
common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the
seeming gang of gypsies and pedlers. In daily life, what distinguishes
the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking
about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well. “A
general,” said Bonaparte, “always has troops enough, if he only knows
how to employ those he has, and bivouacs with them.” Do not refuse
the employment which the hour brings you, for one more ambitious. The
highest heaven of wisdom is alike near from every point, and thou must
find it, if at all, by methods native to thyself alone.

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

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

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

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

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade,
a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works
in moments,”--“_En peu d’heure Dieu labeure_.” We ask for long life,
but ’tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of
time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments
of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample
borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and
Homer said, “The gods ever give to mortals their apportioned share of
reason only on one day.”

I am of the opinion of the poet Wordsworth, “that there is no real
happiness in this life, but in intellect and virtue.” I am of the
opinion of Pliny, “that, whilst we are musing on these things, we are
adding to the length of our lives.” I am of the opinion of Glauco, who
said, “The measure of life, O Socrates, is, with the wise, the speaking
and hearing such discourses as yours.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same rule holds in science. The savant is often an amateur. His
performance is a memoir to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or
spiders’ legs; he observes as other academicians observe; he is
on stilts at a microscope, and,--his memoir finished and read and
printed,--he retreats into his routinary existence, which is quite
separate from his scientific. But in Newton, science was as easy as
breathing; he used the same wit to weigh the moon that he used to
buckle his shoes; and all his life was simple, wise, and majestic. So
was it in Archimedes,--always self-same, like the sky. In Linnæus, in
Franklin, the like sweetness and equality,--no stilts, no tiptoe;--and
their results are wholesome and memorable to all men.

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

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

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

’Tis a fine fable for the advantage of character over talent, the Greek
legend of the strife of Jove and Phœbus. Phœbus challenged the gods,
and said, “Who will outshoot the far-darting Apollo?” Zeus said, “I
will.” Mars shook the lots in his helmet, and that of Apollo leaped out
first. Apollo stretched his bow and shot his arrow into the extreme
west. Then Zeus arose, and with one stride cleared the whole distance,
and said, “Where shall I shoot? there is no space left.” So the
bowman’s prize was adjudged to him who drew no bow.

And this is the progress of every earnest mind; from the works of man
and the activity of the hands to a delight in the faculties which rule
them; from a respect to the works to a wise wonder at this mystic
element of time in which he is conditioned; from local skills and the
economy which reckons the amount of production _per_ hour to the finer
economy which respects the quality of what is done, and the right we
have to the work, or the fidelity with which it flows from ourselves;
then to the depth of thought it betrays, looking to its universality,
or, that its roots are in eternity, not in time. Then it flows from
character, that sublime health which values one moment as another, and
makes us great in all conditions, and is the only definition we have of
freedom and power.




BOOKS.




BOOKS.


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

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

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of
the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil
countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results
of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and
inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette;
but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is
here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another
age.

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

Meantime the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish
no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much wanted. In a
library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they
are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes;
and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty
centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to give us a sign, and
unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not
speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like
battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand
and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be
computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,--not
a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets all
alike. But it happens in our experience, that in this lottery there
are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then,
as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among
the false books, and alighting upon a few true ones which made him
happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been
bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren
oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples.
This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time
to time appear,--the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers,
Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of
learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book,
would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.

There are books; and it is practicable to read them, because they are
so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of
the Vatican, and the British Museum. In 1858, the number of printed
books in the Imperial Library at Paris was estimated at eight hundred
thousand volumes, with an annual increase of twelve thousand volumes;
so that the number of printed books extant to-day may easily exceed
a million. It is easy to count the number of pages which a diligent
man can read in a day, and the number of years which human life in
favorable circumstances allows to reading; and to demonstrate, that,
though he should read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, he must
die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be more deceptive than this
arithmetic, where none but a natural method is really pertinent. I
visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there
without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already
within the four walls of my study at home. The inspection of the
catalogue brings me continually back to the few standard writers who
are on every private shelf; and to these it can afford only the most
slight and casual additions. The crowds and centuries of books are only
commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of these few great
voices of Time.

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

Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always clarifying
her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect. She does the
same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There is always a
selection in writers, and then a selection from the selection. In the
first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world
were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing
class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.
There has already been a scrutiny and choice from many hundreds of
young pens, before the pamphlet or political chapter which you read in
a fugitive journal comes to your eye. All these are young adventurers,
who produce their performance to the wise ear of Time, who sits and
weighs, and, ten years hence, out of a million of pages reprints
one. Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion,
and what terrific selection has not passed on it before it can be
reprinted after twenty years,--and reprinted after a century!--it is as
if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed the writing. ’Tis therefore an
economy of time to read old and famed books. Nothing can be preserved
which is not good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence,
Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the
average intellect. In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish
betwixt notoriety and fame.

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

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,--1. Never
read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed
books. 3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakspeare’s phrase

  “No profit goes where is no pleasure ta’en:
  In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”

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

Of the old Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare:
1. Homer, who in spite of Pope and all the learned uproar of centuries,
has really the true fire, and is good for simple minds, is the true
and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as history,
which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature, that our
best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanskrit, and
in Greek. English history is best known through Shakspeare; how much
through Merlin, Robin Hood, and the Scottish ballads!--the German,
through the Nibelungenlied;--the Spanish, through the Cid. Of Homer,
George Chapman’s is the heroic translation, though the most literal
prose version is the best of all. 2. Herodotus, whose history contains
inestimable anecdotes, which brought it with the learned into a sort
of disesteem; but in these days, when it is found that what is most
memorable of history is a few anecdotes, and that we need not be
alarmed though we should find it not dull, it is regaining credit.
3. Æschylus, the grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us
under a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The “Prometheus”
is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the
Norse Edda. 4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no
end. You find in him that which you have already found in Homer, now
ripened to thought,--the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier
strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached; as if Homer were the
youth, and Plato the finished man; yet with no less security of bold
and perfect song, when he cares to use it, and with some harp-strings
fetched from a higher heaven. He contains the future, as he came out
of the past. In Plato, you explore modern Europe in its causes and
seed,--all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or
has yet to embody. The well-informed man finds himself anticipated.
Plato is up with him too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop
in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh suggestion of modern
humanity, is there. If the student wish to see both sides, and justice
done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants, and the
supremacy of truth and the religious sentiment, he shall be contented
also. Why should not young men be educated on this book? It would
suffice for the tuition of the race,--to test their understanding,
and to express their reason. Here is that which is so attractive to
all men,--the literature of aristocracy shall I call it?--the picture
of the best persons, sentiments, and manners, by the first master, in
the best times,--portraits of Pericles, Alcibiades, Crito, Prodicus,
Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the lovely background of
the Athenian and suburban landscape. Or who can overestimate the
images with which Plato has enriched the minds of men, and which pass
like bullion in the currency of all nations? Read the “Phædo,” the
“Protagoras,” the “Phædrus,” the “Timæus,” the “Republic,” and the
“Apology of Socrates.” 5. Plutarch cannot be spared from the smallest
library; first, because he is so readable, which is much; then, that he
is medicinal and invigorating. The lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander,
Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus, and the rest, are what history has of
best. But this book has taken care of itself, and the opinion of the
world is expressed in the innumerable cheap editions, which make it
as accessible as a newspaper. But Plutarch’s “Morals” is less known,
and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill
spare it as the “Lives.” He will read in it the essays “On the Dæmon
of Socrates,” “On Isis and Osiris,” “On Progress in Virtue,” “On
Garrulity,” “On Love,” and thank anew the art of printing, and the
cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility
of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open
his book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is
like the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was
assembled, and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by
philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the
worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and laurel
wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, and utensils of sacrifice. An
inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the three “Banquets”
respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. Plutarch’s has the least
approach to historical accuracy; but the meeting of the Seven Wise
Masters is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and discourse, and
is as clear as the voice of a fife, and entertaining as a French novel.
Xenophon’s delineation of Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato,
and supplies traits of Socrates; whilst Plato’s has merits of every
kind,--being a repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject
of love,--a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than
Aristophanes,--and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates
which is the source from which all the portraits of that philosopher
current in Europe have been drawn.

Of course a certain outline should be obtained of Greek history, in
which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but
the shortest is the best, and if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote’s
voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith or
of Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles and the
next generation. And here we must read the “Clouds” of Aristophanes,
and what more of that master we gain appetite for, to learn our way
in the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny of Aristophanes,
requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty than belonged to
the official commanders. Aristophanes is now very accessible, with much
valuable commentary, through the labors of Mitchell and Cartwright. An
excellent popular book is J. A. St. John’s “Ancient Greece”; the “Life
and Letters” of Niebuhr, even more than his Lectures, furnish leading
views; and Winckelmann, a Greek born out of due time, has become
essential to an intimate knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret of
the recent histories in German and in English is the discovery, owed
first to Wolff, and later to Boeckh, that the sincere Greek history
of that period must be drawn from Demosthenes, especially from the
business orations, and from the comic poets.

If we come down a little by natural steps from the master to the
disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,--who
also cannot be skipped,--Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius,
Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, “that he was
posterior to Plato in time, not in genius.” Of Plotinus, we
have eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the
Emperor Gallienus,--indicating the respect he inspired among his
contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the “Isis and
Osiris” of Plutarch should then read a chapter called “Providence,” by
Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find it one
of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking in the
noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his fellow-men, and
a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative scholar will find
few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the
Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and dæmons
and dæmoniacal men, of the “azonic” and the “aquatic gods,” dæmons
with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted
a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. The acolyte has
mounted the tripod over the cave at Delphi; his heart dances, his
sight is quickened. These guides speak of the gods with such depth and
with such pictorial details, as if they had been bodily present at the
Olympian feasts. The reader of these books makes new acquaintance with
his own mind; new regions of thought are opened. Jamblichus’s “Life
of Pythagoras” works more directly on the will than the others; since
Pythagoras was eminently a practical person, the founder of a school
of ascetics and socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of
abstract studies alone.

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

For history there is great choice of ways to bring the student through
early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one of the
short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be used,
that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The
poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of
historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners,--and some very
bad ones,--in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read,
if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon, who
will take him in charge, and convey him with abundant entertainment
down--with notice of all remarkable objects on the way--through
fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with his vast
reading,--with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though never
profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization, like
the new railroad from ocean to ocean,--and, I think, will be sure to
send the reader to his “Memoirs of Himself,” and the “Extracts from my
Journal,” and “Abstracts of my Readings,” which will spur the laziest
scholar to emulation of his prodigious performance.

Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople in
1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands waiting for
him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon learned. There
is Dante’s poem, to open the Italian Republics of the Middle Age;
Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” to explain Dante and Beatrice; and Boccaccio’s
“Life of Dante,”--a great man to describe a greater. To help us,
perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi’s “Italian Republics” will be
as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo, his
Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our
day, by Herman Grimm. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution, Mr.
Hallam’s “Middle Ages” will furnish, if superficial, yet readable and
conceivable outlines.

The “Life of the Emperor Charles V.,” by the useful Robertson, is
still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther,
Erasmus, Melanchthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry
IV. of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and
expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit.

If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to
British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history
takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and mythology
to the “Younger Edda” and the “Heimskringla” of Snorro Sturleson, to
Mallet’s “Northern Antiquities,” to Ellis’s “Metrical Romances,” to
Asser’s “Life of Alfred” and Venerable Bede, and to the researches of
Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent
guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the
English mind, with the chief men of action and of thought which that
nation has produced, and with a pregnant future before him. Here he has
Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick; and Milton, Marvell,
and Dryden, not long after.

In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He will
not repent the time he gives to Bacon,--not if he read the “Advancement
of Learning,” the “Essays,” the “Novum Organum,” the “History of
Henry VII.,” and then all the “Letters” (especially those to the
Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business), and all but his
“Apophthegms.”

The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed
on each other. Thus, the works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to
bind all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they
belong. He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries;
and what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in
his “Discoveries,” and the gossiping record of his opinions in his
conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, he has really illustrated
the England of his time, if not to the same extent, yet much in the
same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of
Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also to
the times.

Among the best books are certain _Autobiographies_: as, St. Augustine’s
Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini’s Life; Montaigne’s Essays; Lord
Herbert of Cherbury’s Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz;
Rousseau’s Confessions; Linnæus’s Diary; Gibbon’s, Hume’s, Franklin’s,
Burns’s, Alfieri’s, Goethe’s, and Haydon’s Autobiographies.

Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest,
are those which may be called _Table-Talks_: of which the best are
Saadi’s Gulistan; Luther’s Table-Talk; Aubrey’s Lives; Spence’s
Anecdotes; Selden’s Table-Talk; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge’s Table-Talk; and Hazlitt’s Life
of Northcote.

There is a class whose value I should designate as _Favorites_: such
as Froissart’s Chronicles; Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes;
Sully’s Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas
Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson;
Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De
Quincey;--a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent
on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers
in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man’s library is a sort
of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in
showing their books to a stranger.

The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious
extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in a
book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This mania
reached its height about the beginning of the present century. For an
autograph of Shakspeare one hundred and fifty-five guineas were given.
In May, 1812, the library of the Duke of Roxburgh was sold. The sale
lasted forty-two days,--we abridge the story from Dibdin,--and among
the many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio published by Valdarfer,
at Venice, in 1471; the only perfect copy of this edition. Among
the distinguished company which attended the sale were the Duke of
Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of Marlborough, then Marquis
of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred guineas. “A thousand
guineas,” said Earl Spencer: “And ten,” added the Marquis. You might
hear a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the bidders. Now they talked
apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet, but without the least thought
of yielding one to the other. But to pass over some details,--the
contest proceeded until the Marquis said, “Two thousand pounds.” The
Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed
and waste of powder, and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord
Althorp with long steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a
fresh lance to renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and
Earl Spencer exclaimed, “Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!”
An electric shock went through the assembly. “And ten,” quietly added
the Marquis. There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer fall, he
paused; the ivory instrument swept the air; the spectators stood dumb,
when the hammer fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest
shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries of
Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five hundred
years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain among the royal alcoves in
Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.

Another class I distinguish by the term _Vocabularies_. Burton’s
“Anatomy of Melancholy” is a book of great learning. To read it is
like reading in a dictionary. ’Tis an inventory to remind us how
many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into
what strange and multiplex by-ways learning has strayed, to infer
our opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is
no cant in Germans, it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of
suggestion,--the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing
is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage.
Out of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa “On the Vanity of Arts
and Sciences” is a specimen of that scribatiousness which grew to be
the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern they
read a literature while other mortals read a few books. They read
voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they take any general
topic, as, Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or Praise of Folly,
and write and quote without method or end. Now and then out of that
affluence of their learning comes a fine sentence from Theophrastus,
or Seneca, or Boëthius, but no high method, no inspiring efflux. But
one cannot afford to read for a few sentences; they are good only as
strings of suggestive words.

There is another class, more needful to the present age, because
the currents of custom run now in another direction, and leave us
dry on this side;--I mean the _Imaginative_. A right metaphysics
should do justice to the co-ordinate powers of Imagination, Insight,
Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and
Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are
ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything that is not
ciphering, that is, which does not serve the tyrannical animal, is
hustled out of sight. Our orators and writers are of the same poverty,
and, in this rag-fair, neither the Imagination, the great awakening
power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed.
But though orator and poet be of this hunger party, the capacities
remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is
thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with
meaning. The man asks for a novel,--that is, asks leave for a few
hours to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be. The youth
asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre. What
private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the suggestion of
rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies,--some swing and verge
for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here, driving ardent
natures to insanity and crime if it do not find vent. Without the great
arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor,
naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm
and adorn him. Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society
starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she
may. The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds.
Everything else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott,
Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their
education is neglected; but the circulating-library and the theatre, as
well as the trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondack country,
the tour to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, and the Ghauts, make such
amends as they can.

The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has a
flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets; and,
once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never
quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the imagination?
Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of
the reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world,
our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a
certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America
and Europe, but after the laws of right reason, and with as daring a
freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again, enable us to
form an original judgment of our duties, and suggest new thoughts for
to-morrow.

“Lucrezia Floriani,” “Le Péché de M. Antoine,” “Jeanne,” and
“Consuelo,” of George Sand, are great steps from the novel of one
termination, which we all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from
life and manners and motives the novel still is! Life lies about us
dumb; the day, as we know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories
are to the plots of real life what the figures in “La Belle Assemblée,”
which represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits. But the
novel will find the way to our interiors one day, and will not always
be the novel of costume merely. I do not think it inoperative now. So
much novel-reading cannot leave the young men and maidens untouched;
and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity to the day. The young study
noble behavior; and as the player in “Consuelo” insists that he and his
colleagues on the boards have taught princes the fine etiquette and
strokes of grace and dignity which they practise with so much effect
in their villas and among their dependents, so I often see traces
of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy and brilliancy of
young midshipmen, collegians, and clerks. Indeed, when one observes
how ill and ugly people make their loves and quarrels, ’tis pity they
should not read novels a little more, to import the fine generosities,
and the clear, firm conduct, which are as becoming in the unions and
separations which love effects under shingle roofs as in palaces and
among illustrious personages.

In novels the most serious questions are beginning to be discussed.
What made the popularity of “Jane Eyre,” but that a central question
was answered in some sort? The question there answered in regard to a
vicious marriage will always be treated according to the habit of the
party. A person of commanding individualism will answer it as Rochester
does,--as Cleopatra, as Milton, as George Sand do,--magnifying the
exception into a rule, dwarfing the world into an exception. A person
of less courage, that is, of less constitution, will answer as the
heroine does,--giving way to fate, to conventionalism, to the actual
state and doings of men and women.

For the most part, our novel-reading is a passion for results. We
admire parks, and high-born beauties, and the homage of drawing-rooms,
and parliaments. They make us sceptical, by giving prominence to
wealth and social position.

I remember when some peering eyes of boys discovered that the oranges
hanging on the boughs of an orange-tree in a gay piazza were tied to
the twigs by thread. I fear ’tis so with the novelist’s prosperities.
Nature has a magic by which she fits the man to his fortunes, by
making them the fruit of his character. But the novelist plucks this
event here, and that fortune there, and ties them rashly to his
figures, to tickle the fancy of his readers with a cloying success,
or scare them with shocks of tragedy. And so, on the whole, ’tis a
juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which only
oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element, no
power, no furtherance. ’Tis only confectionery, not the raising of new
corn. Great is the poverty of their inventions. _She was beautiful,
and he fell in love._ Money, and killing, and the Wandering Jew, and
persuading the lover that his mistress is betrothed to another,--these
are the main-springs: new names, but no new qualities in the men and
women. Hence the vain endeavor to keep any bit of this fairy gold,
which has rolled like a brook through our hands. A thousand thoughts
awoke; great rainbows seemed to span the sky,--a morning among the
mountains;--but we close the book, and not a ray remains in the memory
of evening. But this passion for romance, and this disappointment,
show how much we need real elevations and pure poetry: that which shall
show us, in morning and night, in stars and mountains, and in all the
plight and circumstance of men, the analogons of our own thoughts, and
a like impression made by a just book and by the face of Nature.

If our times are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of
rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them.
Every good fable, every mythology, every biography from a religious
age, every passage of love, and even philosophy and science, when
they proceed from an intellectual integrity, and are not detached
and critical, have the imaginative element. The Greek fables, the
Persian history (Firdusi), the “Younger Edda” of the Scandinavians,
the “Chronicle of the Cid,” the poem of Dante, the Sonnets of Michel
Angelo, the English drama of Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and
Ford, and even the prose of Bacon and Milton,--in our time, the Ode
of Wordsworth, and the poems and the prose of Goethe, have this
enlargement, and inspire hope and generous attempts.

There is no room left,--and yet I might as well not have begun as
to leave out a class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles
of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for
each the supreme result of their experience. After the Hebrew and
Greek Scriptures, which constitute the sacred books of Christendom,
these are, the Desatir of the Persians, and the Zoroastrian Oracles;
the Vedas and Laws of Menu; the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the
Bhagvat Geeta, of the Hindoos; the books of the Buddhists; the
“Chinese Classic,” of four books, containing the wisdom of Confucius
and Mencius. Also such other books as have acquired a semi-canonical
authority in the world, as expressing the highest sentiment and hope of
nations. Such are the “Hermes Trismegistus,” pretending to be Egyptian
remains; the “Sentences” of Epictetus; of Marcus Antoninus; the “Vishnu
Sarma” of the Hindoos; the “Gulistan” of Saadi; the “Imitation of
Christ,” of Thomas à Kempis; and the “Thoughts” of Pascal.

All these books are the majestic expressions of the universal
conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s almanac
or this day’s newspaper. But they are for the closet, and to be read
on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or
taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow
of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give
and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and enact
them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but are
living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life.
I read them on lichens and bark; I watch them on waves on the beach;
they fly in birds, they creep in worms; I detect them in laughter and
blushes and eye-sparkles of men and women. These are Scriptures which
the missionary might well carry over prairie, desert, and ocean, to
Siberia, Japan, Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which is in
them journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival,--was there
already long before him. The missionary must be carried by it, and find
it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography in these things?
We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only
optical; for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good
eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations
of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and
it takes millenniums to make a Bible.

These are a few of the books which the old and the later times have
yielded us, which will reward the time spent on them. In comparing the
number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well be
read by proxy, if we had good proxies; and it would be well for sincere
young men to borrow a hint from the French Institute and the British
Association, and, as they divide the whole body into sections, each of
which sits upon and reports of certain matters confided to it, so let
each scholar associate himself to such persons as he can rely on, in
a literary club, in which each shall undertake a single work or series
for which he is qualified. For example, how attractive is the whole
literature of the “Roman de la Rose,” the “Fabliaux,” and the _gaie
science_ of the French Troubadours! Yet who in Boston has time for
that? But one of our company shall undertake it, shall study and master
it, and shall report on it, as under oath; shall give us the sincere
result, as it lies in his mind, adding nothing, keeping nothing back.
Another member, meantime, shall as honestly search, sift, and as truly
report, on British mythology, the Round Table, the histories of Brut,
Merlin, and Welsh poetry; a third on the Saxon Chronicles, Robert of
Gloucester, and William of Malmesbury; a fourth, on Mysteries, Early
Drama, “Gesta Romanorum,” Collier, and Dyce, and the Camden Society.
Each shall give us his grains of gold, after the washing; and every
other shall then decide whether this is a book indispensable to him
also.




CLUBS.




CLUBS.


We are delicate machines, and require nice treatment to get from us
the maximum of power and pleasure. We need tonics, but must have those
that cost little or no reaction. The flame of life burns too fast in
pure oxygen, and nature has tempered the air with nitrogen. So thought
is the native air of the mind, yet pure it is a poison to our mixed
constitution, and soon burns up the bone-house of man, unless tempered
with affection and coarse practice in the material world. Varied
foods, climates, beautiful objects,--and especially the alternation of
a large variety of objects--are the necessity of this exigent system
of ours. But our tonics, our luxuries, are force-pumps which exhaust
the strength they pretend to supply; and of all the cordials known to
us, the best, safest, and most exhilarating, with the least harm, is
society; and every healthy and efficient mind passes a large part of
life in the company most easy to him.

We seek society with very different aims, and the staple of
conversation is widely unlike in its circles. Sometimes it is
facts,--running from those of daily necessity to the last results of
science,--and has all degrees of importance; sometimes it is love, and
makes the balm of our early and of our latest days; sometimes it is
thought, as from a person who is a mind only; sometimes a singing, as
if the heart poured out all like a bird; sometimes experience. With
some men it is a debate; at the approach of a dispute they neigh like
horses. Unless there be an argument, they think nothing is doing.
Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their
thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember; others lay
criticism asleep by a charm. Especially women use words that are not
words,--as steps in a dance are not steps,--but reproduce the genius
of that they speak of; as the sound of some bells makes us think of
the bell merely, whilst the church-chimes in the distance bring the
church and its serious memories before us. Opinions are accidental in
people,--have a poverty-stricken air. A man valuing himself as the
organ of this or that dogma is a dull companion enough; but opinion
native to the speaker is sweet and refreshing, and inseparable from his
image. Neither do we by any means always go to people for conversation.
How often to say nothing,--and yet must go; as a child will long for
his companions, but among them plays by himself. ’Tis only presence
which we want. But one thing is certain,--at some rate, intercourse we
must have. The experience of retired men is positive,--that we lose our
days and are barren of thought for want of some person to talk with.
The understanding can no more empty itself by its own action than can a
deal box.

The clergyman walks from house to house all day all the year to give
people the comfort of good talk. The physician helps them mainly in the
same way, by healthy talk giving a right tone to the patient’s mind.
The dinner, the walk, the fireside, all have that for their main end.

See how Nature has secured the communication of knowledge. ’Tis certain
that money does not more burn in a boy’s pocket than a piece of news
burns in our memory until we can tell it. And, in higher activity of
mind, every new perception is attended with a thrill of pleasure, and
the imparting of it to others is also attended with pleasure. Thought
is the child of the intellect, and this child is conceived with joy and
born with joy.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student. The
affection or sympathy helps. The wish to speak to the want of another
mind assists to clear your own. A certain truth possesses us, which we
in all ways strive to utter. Every time we say a thing in conversation,
we get a mechanical advantage in detaching it well and delivery. I
prize the mechanics of conversation. ’Tis pulley and lever and screw.
To fairly disengage the mass, and send it jingling down, a good
boulder,--a block of quartz and gold, to be worked up at leisure in the
useful arts of life,--is a wonderful relief.

What are the best days in memory? Those in which we met a companion who
was truly such. How sweet those hours when the day was not long enough
to communicate and compare our intellectual jewels,--the favorite
passages of each book, the proud anecdotes of our heroes, the delicious
verses we had hoarded! What a motive had then our solitary days! How
the countenance of our friend still left some light after he had gone!
We remember the time when the best gift we could ask of fortune was
to fall in with a valuable companion in a ship’s cabin, or on a long
journey in the old stage-coach, where, each passenger being forced
to know every other, and other employments being out of question,
conversation naturally flowed, people became rapidly acquainted, and,
if well adapted, more intimate in a day than if they had been neighbors
for years.

In youth, in the fury of curiosity and acquisition, the day is too
short for books and the crowd of thoughts, and we are impatient of
interruption. Later, when books tire, thought has a more languid flow;
and the days come when we are alarmed, and say there are no thoughts.
‘What a barren-witted pate is mine!’ the student says; ‘I will go and
learn whether I have lost my reason.’ He seeks intelligent persons,
whether more wise or less wise than he, who give him provocation,
and at once and easily the old motion begins in his brain: thoughts,
fancies, humors flow; the cloud lifts; the horizon broadens; and
the infinite opulence of things is again shown him. But the right
conditions must be observed. Mainly he must have leave to be himself.
Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep. So I prize the good
invention whereby everybody is provided with somebody who is glad to
see him.

If men are less when together than they are alone, they are also in
some respects enlarged. They kindle each other; and such is the power
of suggestion, that each sprightly story calls out more; and sometimes
a fact that had long slept in the recesses of memory hears the voice,
is welcomed to daylight, and proves of rare value. Every metaphysician
must have observed, not only that no thought is alone, but that
thoughts commonly go in pairs; though the related thoughts first
appeared in his mind at long distances of time. Things are in pairs:
a natural fact has only half its value, until a fact in moral nature,
its counterpart, is stated. Then they confirm and adorn each other; a
story is matched by another story. And that may be the reason why, when
a gentleman has told a good thing, he immediately tells it again.

Nothing seems so cheap as the benefit of conversation: nothing is more
rare. ’Tis wonderful how you are balked and baffled. There is plenty
of intelligence, reading, curiosity; but serious, happy discourse,
avoiding personalities, dealing with results, is rare: and I seldom
meet with a reading and thoughtful person but he tells me, as if it
were his exceptional mishap, that he has no companion.

Suppose such a one to go out exploring different circles in search
of this wise and genial counterpart,--he might inquire far and
wide. Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low
as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet. Amidst all the gay
banter, sentiment cannot profane itself and venture out. The reply
of old Isocrates comes so often to mind,--“The things which are now
seasonable I cannot say; and for the things which I can say it is not
now the time.” Besides, who can resist the charm of talent? The lover
of letters loves power too. Among the men of wit and learning, he
could not withhold his homage from the gayety, grasp of memory, luck,
splendor, and speed; such exploits of discourse, such feats of society!
What new powers, what mines of wealth! But when he came home, his brave
sequins were dry leaves. He found either that the fact they had thus
dizened and adorned was of no value, or that he already knew all and
more than all they had told him. He could not find that he was helped
by so much as one thought or principle, one solid fact, one commanding
impulse: great was the dazzle, but the gain was small. He uses his
occasions; he seeks the company of those who have convivial talent. But
the moment they meet, to be sure they begin to be something else than
they were; they play pranks, dance jigs, run on each other, pun, tell
stories, try many fantastic tricks, under some superstition that there
must be excitement and elevation;--and they kill conversation at once.
I know well the rusticity of the shy hermit. No doubt he does not make
allowance enough for men of more active blood and habit. But it is only
on natural ground that conversation can be rich. It must not begin with
uproar and violence. Let it keep the ground, let it feel the connection
with the battery. Men must not be off their centres.

Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to
school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people
gladly lend an ear to any one. On these terms they give information,
and please themselves by sallies and chat which are admired by the
idlers; and the talker is at his ease and jolly, for he can walk out
without ceremony when he pleases. They go rarely to their equals, and
then as for their own convenience simply, making too much haste to
introduce and impart their new whim or discovery; listen badly, or
do not listen to the comment or to the thought by which the company
strive to repay them; rather, as soon as their own speech is done,
they take their hats. Then there are the gladiators, to whom it is
always a battle; ’tis no matter on which side, they fight for victory;
then the heady men, the egotists, the monotones, the steriles, and the
impracticables.

It does not help that you find as good or a better man than yourself,
if he is not timed and fitted to you. The greatest sufferers are
often those who have the most to say,--men of a delicate sympathy,
who are dumb in mixed company. Able people, if they do not know how
to make allowance for them, paralyze them. One of those conceited
prigs who value nature only as it feeds and exhibits them is equally
a pest with the roysterers. There must be large reception as well
as giving. How delightful after these disturbers is the radiant,
playful wit of--one whom I need not name,--for in every society there
is his representative. Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks. His
conversation is all pictures: he can reproduce whatever he has seen;
he tells the best story in the county, and is of such genial temper
that he disposes all others irresistibly to good-humor and discourse.
Diderot said of the Abbé Galiani: “He was a treasure in rainy days; and
if the cabinet-makers made such things, everybody would have one in the
country.”

One lesson we learn early,--that, in spite of seeming difference, men
are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are
disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their
watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never
forgive in each other is difference of opinion. We know beforehand that
yonder man must think as we do. Has he not two hands,--two feet,--hair
and nails? Does he not eat,--bleed,--laugh,--cry? His dissent from
me is the veriest affectation. This conclusion is at once the logic
of persecution and of love. And the ground of our indignation is our
conviction that his dissent is some wilfulness he practises on himself.
He checks the flow of his opinion, as the cross cow holds up her milk.
Yes, and we look into his eye, and see that he knows it and hides his
eye from ours.

But to come a little nearer to my mark, I am to say that there may
easily be obstacles in the way of finding the pure article we are in
search of; but when we find it, it is worth the pursuit, for beside
its comfort as medicine and cordial, once in the right company, new
and vast values do not fail to appear. All that man can do for man is
to be found in that market. There are great prizes in this game. Our
fortunes in the world are as our mental equipment for this competition
is. Yonder is a man who can answer the questions which I cannot. Is
it so? Hence comes to me boundless curiosity to know his experiences
and his wit. Hence competition for the stakes dearest to man. What is
a match at whist, or draughts, or billiards, or chess, to a match of
mother-wit, of knowledge, and of resources? However courteously we
conceal it, it is social rank and spiritual power that are compared;
whether in the parlor, the courts, the caucus, the senate, or the
chamber of science,--which are only less or larger theatres for this
competition.

He that can define, he that can answer a question so as to admit of no
further answer, is the best man. This was the meaning of the story of
the Sphinx. In the old time conundrums were sent from king to king by
ambassadors. The seven wise masters at Periander’s banquet spent their
time in answering them. The life of Socrates is a propounding and a
solution of these. So, in the hagiology of each nation, the lawgiver
was in each case some man of eloquent tongue, whose sympathy brought
him face to face with the extremes of society. Jesus, Menu, the first
Buddhist, Mahomet, Zertusht, Pythagoras, are examples.

Jesus spent his life in discoursing with humble people on life and
duty, in giving wise answers, showing that he saw at a larger angle
of vision, and at least silencing those who were not generous enough
to accept his thoughts. Luther spent his life so; and it is not his
theologic works,--his “Commentary on the Galatians,” and the rest,
but his “Table-Talk” which is still read by men. Dr. Johnson was
a man of no profound mind,--full of English limitations, English
politics, English Church, Oxford philosophy; yet having a large heart,
mother-wit, and good sense, which impatiently overleaped his customary
bounds, his conversation as reported by Boswell has a lasting charm.
Conversation is the vent of character as well as of thought; and Dr.
Johnson impresses his company, not only by the point of the remark, but
also, when the point fails, because _he_ makes it. His obvious religion
or superstition, his deep wish that they should think so or so, weighs
with them,--so rare is depth of feeling, or a constitutional value for
a thought or opinion, among the light-minded men and women who make up
society; and though they know that there is in the speaker a degree
of shortcoming, of insincerity, and of talking for victory, yet the
existence of character, and habitual reverence for principles over
talent or learning, is felt by the frivolous.

One of the best records of the great German master, who towered over
all his contemporaries in the first thirty years of this century, is
his conversations as recorded by Eckermann; and the “Table-Talk” of
Coleridge is one of the best remains of his genius.

In the Norse legends, the gods of Valhalla, when they meet the Jotuns,
converse on the perilous terms that he who cannot answer the other’s
questions forfeits his own life. Odin comes to the threshold of the
Jotun Waftrhudnir in disguise, calling himself Gangrader; is invited
into the hall, and told that he cannot go out thence unless he can
answer every question Waftrhudnir shall put. Waftrhudnir asks him the
name of the god of the sun, and of the god who brings the night; what
river separates the dwellings of the sons of the giants from those of
the gods; what plain lies between the gods and Surtur, their adversary,
etc.; all which the disguised Odin answers satisfactorily. Then it is
his turn to interrogate, and he is answered well for a time by the
Jotun. At last he puts a question which none but himself could answer:
“What did Odin whisper in the ear of his son Balder, when Balder
mounted the funeral pile?” The startled giant replies: “None of the
gods knows what in the old time THOU saidst in the ear of thy son: with
death on my mouth have I spoken the fate-words of the generation of the
Æsir; with Odin contended I in wise words. Thou must ever the wisest
be.”

And still the gods and giants are so known, and still they play the
same game in all the million mansions of heaven and of earth; at all
tables, clubs, and _tête-à-têtes_, the lawyers in the court-house,
the senators in the capitol, the doctors in the academy, the wits in
the hotel. Best is he who gives an answer that cannot be answered
again. _Omnis definitio periculosa est_, and only wit has the secret.
The same thing took place when Leibnitz came to visit Newton; when
Schiller came to Goethe; when France, in the person of Madame de Staël,
visited Goethe and Schiller; when Hegel was the guest of Victor Cousin
in Paris; when Linnæus was the guest of Jussieu. It happened many
years ago, that an American chemist carried a letter of introduction
to Dr. Dalton of Manchester, England, the author of the theory of
atomic proportions, and was coolly enough received by the Doctor in the
laboratory where he was engaged. Only Dr. Dalton scratched a formula
on a scrap of paper and pushed it towards the guest,--“Had he seen
that?” The visitor scratched on another paper a formula describing
some results of his own with sulphuric acid, and pushed it across the
table,--“Had he seen that?” The attention of the English chemist was
instantly arrested, and they became rapidly acquainted. To answer a
question so as to admit of no reply, is the test of a man,--to touch
bottom every time. Hyde, Earl of Rochester, asked Lord-Keeper Guilford,
“Do you not think I could understand any business in England in a
month?” “Yes, my Lord,” replied the other, “but I think you would
understand it better in two months.” When Edward I. claimed to be
acknowledged by the Scotch (1292) as lord paramount, the nobles of
Scotland replied, “No answer can be made while the throne is vacant.”
When Henry III. (1217) plead duress against his people demanding
confirmation and execution of the Charter, the reply was: “If this were
admitted, civil wars could never close but by the extirpation of one of
the contending parties.”

What can you do with one of these sharp respondents? What can you do
with an eloquent man? No rules of debate, no contempt of court, no
exclusions, no gag-laws can be contrived, that his first syllable will
not set aside or overstep and annul. You can shut out the light, it may
be; but can you shut out gravitation? You may condemn his book; but
can you fight against his thought? That is always too nimble for you,
anticipates you, and breaks out victorious in some other quarter. Can
you stop the motions of good sense? What can you do with Beaumarchais,
who converts the censor whom the court has appointed to stifle his
play into an ardent advocate? The court appoints another censor, who
shall crush it this time. Beaumarchais persuades him to defend it. The
court successively appoints three more severe inquisitors; Beaumarchais
converts them all into triumphant vindicators of the play which is
to bring in the Revolution. Who can stop the mouth of Luther,--of
Newton?--of Franklin,--of Mirabeau,--of Talleyrand?

These masters can make good their own place, and need no patron. Every
variety of gift--science, religion, politics, letters, art, prudence,
war, or love--has its vent and exchange in conversation. Conversation
is the Olympic games whither every superior gift resorts to assert
and approve itself,--and, of course, the inspirations of powerful
and public men, with the rest. But it is not this class,--whom the
splendor of their accomplishment almost inevitably guides into the
vortex of ambition, makes them chancellors and commanders of council
and of action, and makes them at last fatalists,--not these whom we
now consider. We consider those who are interested in thoughts, their
own and other men’s, and who delight in comparing them, who think it
the highest compliment they can pay a man, to deal with him as an
intellect, to expose to him the grand and cheerful secrets perhaps
never opened to their daily companions, to share with him the sphere of
freedom and the simplicity of truth.

But the best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to
treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple
lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds,--as a religious or
intellectual seeker,--finds himself a stranger and alien.

It is possible that the best conversation is between two persons who
can talk only to each other. Even Montesquieu confessed that, in
conversation, if he perceived he was listened to by a third person,
it seemed to him from that moment the whole question vanished from
his mind. I have known persons of rare ability who were heavy company
to good, social men who knew well enough how to draw out others of
retiring habit; and, moreover, were heavy to intellectual men who ought
to have known them. And does it never occur that we, perhaps, live with
people too superior to be seen,--as there are musical notes too high
for the scale of most ears? There are men who are great only to one or
two companions of more opportunity, or more adapted.

It was to meet these wants that in all civil nations attempts have been
made to organize conversation by bringing together cultivated people
under the most favorable conditions. ’Tis certain there was liberal
and refined conversation in the Greek, in the Roman, and in the Middle
Age. There was a time when in France a revolution occurred in domestic
architecture; when the houses of the nobility, which, up to that time,
had been constructed on feudal necessities, in a hollow square,--the
ground-floor being resigned to offices and stables, and the floors
above to rooms of state and to lodging-rooms,--were rebuilt with new
purpose. It was the Marchioness of Rambouillet who first got the horses
out of and the scholars into the palaces, having constructed her
_hôtel_ with a view to society, with superb suites of drawing-rooms
on the same floor, and broke through the _morgue_ of etiquette by
inviting to her house men of wit and learning as well as men of rank,
and piqued the emulation of Cardinal Richelieu to rival assemblies,
and so to the founding of the French Academy. The history of the Hôtel
Rambouillet and its brilliant circles makes an important date in French
civilization. And a history of clubs from early antiquity, tracing the
efforts to secure liberal and refined conversation, through the Greek
and Roman to the Middle Age, and thence down through French, English,
and German memoirs, tracing the clubs and coteries in each country,
would be an important chapter in history. We know well the Mermaid
Club, in London, of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Herrick, Selden,
Beaumont and Fletcher; its “Rules” are preserved, and many allusions
to their suppers are found in Jonson, Herrick, and in Aubrey. Anthony
Wood has many details of Harrington’s Club. Dr. Bentley’s Club held
Newton, Wren, Evelyn, and Locke; and we owe to Boswell our knowledge of
the club of Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Gibbon, Reynolds, Garrick,
Beauclerk, and Percy. And we have records of the brilliant society that
Edinburgh boasted in the first decade of this century. Such societies
are possible only in great cities, and are the compensation which these
can make to their dwellers for depriving them of the free intercourse
with Nature. Every scholar is surrounded by wiser men than he--if they
cannot write as well. Cannot they meet and exchange results to their
mutual benefit and delight? It was a pathetic experience when a genial
and accomplished person said to me, looking from his country home to
the capital of New England, “There is a town of two hundred thousand
people, and not a chair in it for me.” If he were sure to find at No.
2000 Tremont Street what scholars were abroad after the morning studies
were ended, Boston would shine as the New Jerusalem to his eyes.

Now this want of adapted society is mutual. The man of thought, the man
of letters, the man of science, the administrator skilful in affairs,
the man of manners and culture, whom you so much wish to find,--each
of these is wishing to be found. Each wishes to open his thought,
his knowledge, his social skill to the daylight in your company and
affection, and to exchange his gifts for yours; and the first hint of a
select and intelligent company is welcome.

But the club must be self-protecting, and obstacles arise at the
outset. There are people who cannot well be cultivated, whom you must
keep down and quiet if you can. There are those who have the instinct
of a bat to fly against any lighted candle and put it out,--marplots
and contradictors. There are those who go only to talk, and those
who go only to hear: both are bad. A right rule for a club would
be,--Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires
people who are not surprised and shocked, who do and let do, and let
be, who sink trifles, and know solid values, and who take a great deal
for granted.

It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws
of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance.
Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character. The
poet Marvell was wont to say “that he would not drink wine with any
one with whom he could not trust his life.” But neither can we afford
to be superfine. A man of irreproachable behavior and excellent sense
preferred on his travels taking his chance at a hotel for company, to
the charging himself with too many select letters of introduction. He
confessed he liked low company. He said the fact was incontestable,
that the society of gypsies was more attractive than that of bishops.
The girl deserts the parlor for the kitchen; the boy, for the wharf.
Tutors and parents cannot interest him like the uproarious conversation
he finds in the market or the dock. I knew a scholar, of some
experience in camps, who said that he liked, in a bar-room, to tell a
few coon stories, and put himself on a good footing with the company;
then he could be as silent as he chose. A scholar does not wish to be
always pumping his brains: he wants gossips. The black-coats are good
company only for black-coats; but when the manufacturers, merchants,
and ship-masters meet, see how much they have to say, and how long the
conversation lasts! They have come from many zones; they have traversed
wide countries; they know each his own arts, and the cunning artisans
of his craft; they have seen the best and the worst of men. Their
knowledge contradicts the popular opinion and your own on many points.
Things which you fancy wrong they know to be right and profitable;
things which you reckon superstitious they know to be true. They have
found virtue in the strangest homes; and in the rich store of their
adventures are instances and examples which you have been seeking in
vain for years, and which they suddenly and unwittingly offer you.

I remember a social experiment in this direction, wherein it appeared
that each of the members fancied he was in need of society, but himself
unpresentable. On trial they all found that they could be tolerated
by, and could tolerate, each other. Nay, the tendency to extreme
self-respect which hesitated to join in a club was running rapidly down
to abject admiration of each other, when the club was broken up by new
combinations.

The use of the hospitality of the club hardly needs explanation. Men
are unbent and social at table; and I remember it was explained to me,
in a Southern city, that it was impossible to set any public charity
on foot unless through a tavern dinner. I do not think our metropolitan
charities would plead the same necessity; but to a club met for
conversation a supper is a good basis, as it disarms all parties, and
puts pedantry and business to the door. All are in good-humor and at
leisure, which are the first conditions of discourse; the ordinary
reserves are thrown off, experienced men meet with the freedom of boys,
and, sooner or later, impart all that is singular in their experience.

The hospitalities of clubs are easily exaggerated. No doubt the suppers
of wits and philosophers acquire much lustre by time and renown.
Plutarch, Xenophon, and Plato, who have celebrated each a banquet of
their set, have given us next to no data of the viands; and it is to
be believed that an indifferent tavern dinner in such society was more
relished by the _convives_ than a much better one in worse company.
Herrick’s verses to Ben Jonson no doubt paint the fact:--

  “When we such clusters had
  As made us nobly wild, not mad;
  And yet, each verse of thine
  Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”

Such friends make the feast satisfying; and I notice that it was when
things went prosperously, and the company was full of honor, at the
banquet of the Cid, that “the guests all were joyful, and agreed in one
thing,--that they had not eaten better for three years.”

I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in
their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to an
understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion shall
have its just influence on public questions of education and politics.
’Tis agreed that in the sections of the British Association more
information is mutually and effectually communicated, in a few hours,
than in many months of ordinary correspondence, and the printing and
transmission of ponderous reports. We know that _l’homme de lettres_
is a little wary, and not fond of giving away his seed-corn; but there
is an infallible way to draw him out, namely, by having as good as
he. If you have Tuscaroora and he Canada, he may exchange kernel for
kernel. If his discretion is incurable, and he dare not speak of fairy
gold, he will yet tell what new books he has found, what old ones
recovered, what men write and read abroad. A principal purpose also is
the hospitality of the club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner
with mutual advantage.

Every man brings into society some partial thought and local culture.
We need range and alternation of topics, and variety of minds. One
likes in a companion a phlegm which it is a triumph to disturb, and,
not less, to make in an old acquaintance unexpected discoveries of
scope and power through the advantage of an inspiring subject. Wisdom
is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable
of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable
conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire
electric power for a while. But, while we look complacently at these
obvious pleasures and values of good companions, I do not forget that
Nature is always very much in earnest, and that her great gifts have
something serious and stern. When we look for the highest benefits
of conversation, the Spartan rule of one to one is usually enforced.
Discourse, when it rises highest and searches deepest, when it lifts us
into that mood out of which thoughts come that remain as stars in our
firmament, is between two.




COURAGE.




COURAGE.


I observe that there are three qualities which conspicuously attract
the wonder and reverence of mankind:--

1. Disinterestedness, as shown in indifference to the ordinary bribes
and influences of conduct,--a purpose so sincere and generous that it
cannot be tempted aside by any prospects of wealth or other private
advantage. Self-love is, in almost all men, such an overweight, that
they are incredulous of a man’s habitual preference of the general good
to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth,
rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration. This
has made the power of the saints of the East and West, who have led
the religion of great nations. Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out
of which all the reported miracles grew. This makes the renown of the
heroes of Greece and Rome,--of Socrates, Aristides, and Phocion; of
Quintus Curtius, Cato, and Regulus; of Hatem Tai’s hospitality; of
Chatham, whose scornful magnanimity gave him immense popularity; of
Washington, giving his service to the public without salary or reward.

2. Practical power. Men admire the man who can organize their wishes
and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass,--the man who can
build the boat, who has the impiety to make the rivers run the way
he wants them, who can lead his telegraph through the ocean from
shore to shore; who, sitting in his closet, can lay out the plans of
a campaign,--sea-war and land-war; such that the best generals and
admirals, when all is done, see that they must thank him for success;
the power of better combination and foresight, however exhibited,
which, whether it only plays a game of chess, or whether, more loftily,
a cunning mathematician, penetrating the cubic weights of stars,
predicts the planet which eyes had never seen; or whether, exploring
the chemical elements whereof we and the world are made, and seeing
their secret, Franklin draws off the lightning in his hand, suggesting
that one day a wiser geology shall make the earthquake harmless and
the volcano an agricultural resource. Or here is one who, seeing the
wishes of men, knows how to come at their end; whispers to this friend,
argues down that adversary, moulds society to his purpose, and looks at
all men as wax for his hands,--takes command of them as the wind does
of clouds, as the mother does of the child, or the man that knows more
does of the man that knows less; and leads them in glad surprise to the
very point where they would be: this man is followed with acclamation.

3. The third excellence is courage, the perfect will, which no terrors
can shake, which is attracted by frowns or threats or hostile armies,
nay, needs these to awake and fan its reserved energies into a pure
flame, and is never quite itself until the hazard is extreme; then
it is serene and fertile, and all its powers play well. There is a
Hercules, an Achilles, a Rustem, an Arthur, or a Cid in the mythology
of every nation; and in authentic history, a Leonidas, a Scipio, a
Cæsar, a Richard Cœur de Lion, a Cromwell, a Nelson, a Great Condé, a
Bertrand du Guesclin, a Doge Dandolo, a Napoleon, a Massena, and Ney.
’Tis said courage is common, but the immense esteem in which it is
held proves it to be rare. Animal resistance, the instinct of the male
animal when cornered, is no doubt common; but the pure article, courage
with eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the cannon’s mouth,
cheerfulness in lonely adherence to the right, is the endowment of
elevated characters. I need not show how much it is esteemed, for the
people give it the first rank. They forgive everything to it. What an
ado we make through two thousand years about Thermopylæ and Salamis!
What a memory of Poitiers and Crecy, and Bunker Hill, and Washington’s
endurance! And any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which
is esteemed becomes the darling of all men. The very nursery-books,
the ballads which delight boys, the romances which delight men, the
favorite topics of eloquence, the thunderous emphasis which orators
give to every martial defiance and passage of arms, and which the
people greet, may testify. How short a time since this whole nation
rose every morning to read or to hear the traits of courage of its sons
and brothers in the field, and was never weary of the theme! We have
had examples of men who, for showing effective courage on a single
occasion, have become a favorite spectacle to nations, and must be
brought in chariots to every mass meeting.

Men are so charmed with valor, that they have pleased themselves with
being called lions, leopards, eagles, and dragons, from the animals
contemporary with us in the geologic formations. But the animals have
great advantage of us in precocity. Touch the snapping-turtle with a
stick, and he seizes it with his teeth. Cut off his head, and the teeth
will not let go the stick. Break the egg of the young, and the little
embryo, before yet the eyes are open, bites fiercely; these vivacious
creatures contriving,--shall we say?--not only to bite after they are
dead, but also to bite before they are born.

But man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the
moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power
of self-protection, that mothers say the salvation of the life and
health of a young child is a perpetual miracle. The terrors of the
child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter
ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small
basis of capital, compel every by-stander to take his part. Every
moment, as long as he is awake, he studies the use of his eyes, ears,
hands, and feet, learning how to meet and avoid his dangers, and thus
every hour loses one terror more. But this education stops too soon.
A large majority of men being bred in families, and beginning early
to be occupied day by day with some routine of safe industry, never
come to the rough experiences that make the Indian, the soldier, or
the frontiersman self-subsistent and fearless. Hence the high price
of courage indicates the general timidity. “Mankind,” said Franklin,
“are dastardly when they meet with opposition.” In war even, generals
are seldom found eager to give battle. Lord Wellington said, “Uniforms
were often masks”; and again, “When my journal appears, many statues
must come down.” The Norse Sagas relate that when Bishop Magne reproved
King Sigurd for his wicked divorce, the priest who attended the bishop,
expecting every moment when the savage king would burst with rage
and slay his superior, said “that he saw the sky no bigger than a
calf-skin.” And I remember when a pair of Irish girls, who had been run
away with in a wagon by a skittish horse, said that, when he began to
rear, they were so frightened that they could not see the horse.

Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin;
shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away
with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart. Fear
is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns
of madness and malignity,--a total perversion of opinion; society is
upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live. Then the
protection which a house, a family, neighborhood and property, even
the first accumulation of savings, gives go in all times to generate
this taint of the respectable classes. Voltaire said, “One of the
chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.” Those
political parties which gather-in the well-disposed portion of the
community,--how infirm and ignoble! what white lips they have! always
on the defensive, as if the lead were intrusted to the journals, often
written in great part by women and boys, who, without strength, wish
to keep up the appearance of strength. They can do the hurras, the
placarding, the flags,--and the voting, if it is a fair day; but the
aggressive attitude of men who will have right done, will no longer be
bothered with burglars and ruffians in the streets, counterfeiters in
public offices, and thieves on the bench; that part, the part of the
leader and soul of the vigilance committee, must be taken by stout and
sincere men who are really angry and determined. In ordinary, we have
a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the opposite party.
We want the will which advances and dictates. When we get an advantage,
as in Congress the other day, it is because our adversary has committed
a fault, not that we have taken the initiative and given the law.
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be
defended. Complaining never so loud, and with never so much reason, is
of no use. One heard much cant of peace-parties long ago in Kansas and
elsewhere, that their strength lay in the greatness of their wrongs,
and dissuading all resistance, as if to make this strength greater. But
were their wrongs greater than the negro’s? and what kind of strength
did they ever give him? It was always invitation to the tyrant, and
bred disgust in those who would protect the victim. What cannot stand
must fall; and the measure of our sincerity, and therefore of the
respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in
the defence of our right. An old farmer, my neighbor across the fence,
when I ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says: “No; ’tis no
use balloting, for it will not stay; but what you do with the gun will
stay so.” Nature has charged every one with his own defence as with
his own support, and the only title I can have to your help is when I
have manfully put forth all the means I possess to keep me, and, being
overborne by odds, the by-standers have a natural wish to interfere
and see fair play.

But with this pacific education, we have no readiness for bad times.
I am much mistaken if every man who went to the army in the late war
had not a lively curiosity to know how he should behave in action.
Tender, amiable boys, who had never encountered any rougher play than
a base-ball match or a fishing excursion, were suddenly drawn up to
face a bayonet charge or capture a battery. Of course, they must each
go into that action with a certain despair. Each whispers to himself:
“My exertions must be of small account to the result; only will the
benignant Heaven save me from disgracing myself and my friends and my
State. Die! O yes, I can well die; but I cannot afford to misbehave;
and I do not know how I shall feel.” So great a soldier as the old
French Marshal Montluc acknowledges that he has often trembled with
fear, and recovered courage when he had said a prayer for the occasion.
I knew a young soldier who died in the early campaign, who confided to
his sister that he had made up his mind to volunteer for the war. “I
have not,” he said, “any proper courage, but I shall never let any one
find it out.” And he had accustomed himself always to go into whatever
place of danger, and do whatever he was afraid to do, setting a dogged
resolution to resist this natural infirmity. Coleridge has preserved
an anecdote of an officer in the British Navy, who told him that when
he, in his first boat expedition, a midshipman in his fourteenth year,
accompanied Sir Alexander Ball, “as we were rowing up to the vessel we
were to attack, amid a discharge of musketry, I was overpowered with
fear, my knees shook, and I was ready to faint away. Lieutenant Ball
seeing me, placed himself close beside me, took hold of my hand and
whispered, ‘Courage, my dear boy! you will recover in a minute or so; I
was just the same when I first went out in this way.’ It was as if an
angel spoke to me. From that moment I was as fearless and as forward
as the oldest of the boat’s crew. But I dare not think what would have
become of me, if, at that moment, he had scoffed and exposed me.”

Knowledge is the antidote to fear,--Knowledge, Use, and Reason, with
its higher aids. The child is as much in danger from a staircase,
or the fire-grate, or a bath-tub, or a cat, as the soldier from a
cannon or an ambush. Each surmounts the fear as fast as he precisely
understands the peril, and learns the means of resistance. Each is
liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered
to the imagination. Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes
fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in
practice. They can conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done
the deed once who does not shrink from attempting it again. It is the
groom who knows the jumping horse well who can safely ride him. It is
the veteran soldier, who, seeing the flash of the cannon, can step
aside from the path of the ball. Use makes a better soldier than the
most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling
him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not
afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe’s rule, that
every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.

The sailor loses fear as fast as he acquires command of sails and
spars and steam; the frontiersman, when he has a perfect rifle and has
acquired a sure aim. To the sailor’s experience every new circumstance
suggests what he must do. The terrific chances which make the hours
and the minutes long to the passenger, he whiles away by incessant
application of expedients and repairs. To him a leak, a hurricane, or
a water-spout is so much work--no more. The hunter is not alarmed by
bears, catamounts, or wolves, nor the grazier by his bull, nor the
dog-breeder by his bloodhound, nor an Arab by the simoom, nor a farmer
by a fire in the woods. The forest on fire looks discouraging enough
to a citizen: the farmer is skilful to fight it. The neighbors run
together; with pine boughs they can mop out the flame, and, by raking
with the hoe a long but little trench, confine to a patch the fire
which would easily spread over a hundred acres.

In short, courage consists in equality to the problem before us. The
school-boy is daunted before his tutor by a question of arithmetic,
because he does not yet command the simple steps of the solution which
the boy beside him has mastered. These once seen, he is as cool as
Archimedes, and cheerily proceeds a step farther. Courage is equality
to the problem, in affairs, in science, in trade, in council, or in
action; consists in the conviction that the agents with whom you
contend are not superior in strength or resources or spirit to you.
The general must stimulate the mind of his soldiers to the perception
that they are men, and the enemy is no more. Knowledge, yes; for the
danger of dangers is illusion. The eye is easily daunted; and the
drums, flags, shining helmets, beard, and mustache of the soldier have
conquered you long before his sword or bayonet reaches you.

But we do not exhaust the subject in the slight analysis; we must not
forget the variety of temperaments, each of which qualifies this power
of resistance. It is observed that men with little imagination are
less fearful; they wait till they feel pain, whilst others of more
sensibility anticipate it, and suffer in the fear of the pang more
acutely than in the pang. ’Tis certain that the threat is sometimes
more formidable than the stroke, and ’tis possible that the beholders
suffer more keenly than the victims. Bodily pain is superficial, seated
usually in the skin and the extremities, for the sake of giving us
warning to put us on our guard; not in the vitals, where the rupture
that produces death is perhaps not felt, and the victim never knew what
hurt him. Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments
of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers. The
torments are illusory. The first suffering is the last suffering, the
later hurts being lost on insensibility. Our affections and wishes for
the external welfare of the hero tumultuously rush to expression in
tears and outcries; but we, like him, subside into indifferency and
defiance, when we perceive how short is the longest arm of malice, how
serene is the sufferer.

It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup
or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms
that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of
every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to
do. It is directness,--the instant performing of that which he ought.
The thoughtful man says, you differ from me in opinion and methods; but
do you not see that I cannot think or act otherwise than I do? that my
way of living is organic? And to be really strong we must adhere to
our own means. On organic action all strength depends. Hear what women
say of doing a task by sheer force of will: it costs them a fit of
sickness. Plutarch relates that the Pythoness who tried to prophesy
without command in the Temple at Delphi, though she performed the
usual rites, and inhaled the air of the cavern standing on the tripod,
fell into convulsions, and died. Undoubtedly there is a temperamental
courage, a warlike blood, which loves a fight, does not feel itself
except in a quarrel, as one sees in wasps, or ants, or cocks, or cats.
The like vein appears in certain races of men and in individuals of
every race. In every school there are certain fighting boys; in every
society, the contradicting men; in every town, bravoes and bullies,
better or worse dressed, fancy-men, patrons of the cock-pit and the
ring. Courage is temperamental, scientific, ideal. Swedenborg has left
this record of his king: “Charles XII., of Sweden, did not know what
that was which others called fear, nor what that spurious valor and
daring that is excited by inebriating draughts, for he never tasted
any liquid but pure water. Of him we may say, that he led a life more
remote from death, and in fact lived more, than any other man.” It was
told of the Prince of Condé, “that there not being a more furious man
in the world, danger in fight never disturbs him more than just to make
him civil, and to command in words of great obligation to his officers
and men, and without any the least disturbance to his judgment or
spirit.” Each has his own courage, as his own talent; but the courage
of the tiger is one, and of the horse another. The dog that scorns to
fight, will fight for his master. The llama that will carry a load if
you caress him, will refuse food and die if he is scourged. The fury
of onset is one, and of calm endurance another. There is a courage of
the cabinet as well as a courage of the field; a courage of manners in
private assemblies, and another in public assemblies; a courage which
enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company, whilst another
man who can easily face a cannon’s mouth dares not open his own.

There is a courage of a merchant in dealing with his trade, by which
dangerous turns of affairs are met and prevailed over. Merchants
recognize as much gallantry, well judged too, in the conduct of a wise
and upright man of business, in difficult times, as soldiers in a
soldier.

There is a courage in the treatment of every art by a master in
architecture, in sculpture, in painting, or in poetry, each cheering
the mind of the spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius,
which yet nowise implies the presence of physical valor in the artist.
This is the courage of genius, in every kind. A certain quantity of
power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. The beautiful voice at
church goes sounding on, and covers up in its volume, as in a cloak,
all the defects of the choir. The singers, I observe, all yield to it,
and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, and dares, and dares,
because she knows she can.

It gives the cutting edge to every profession. The judge puts his
mind to the tangle of contradictions in the case, squarely accosts
the question, and, by not being afraid of it, by dealing with it as
business which must be disposed of, he sees presently that common
arithmetic and common methods apply to this affair. Perseverance
strips it of all peculiarity, and ranges it on the same ground as
other business. Morphy played a daring game in chess: the daring was
only an illusion of the spectator, for the player sees his move to be
well fortified and safe. You may see the same dealing in criticism;
a new book astonishes for a few days, takes itself out of common
jurisdiction, and nobody knows what to say of it: but the scholar is
not deceived. The old principles which books exist to express are more
beautiful than any book; and out of love of the reality he is an expert
judge how far the book has approached it and where it has come short.
In all applications ’tis the same power,--the habit of reference to
one’s own mind, as the home of all truth and counsel, and which can
easily dispose of any book because it can very well do without all
books. When a confident man comes into a company magnifying this or
that author he has freshly read, the company grow silent and ashamed of
their ignorance. But I remember the old professor, whose searching mind
engraved every word he spoke on the memory of the class, when we asked
if he had read this or that shining novelty, “No, I have never read
that book”; instantly the book lost credit, and was not to be heard of
again.

Every creature has a courage of his constitution fit for his
duties:--Archimedes, the courage of a geometer to stick to his diagram,
heedless of the siege and sack of the city; and the Roman soldier his
faculty to strike at Archimedes. Each is strong, relying on his own,
and each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others.

Captain John Brown, the hero of Kansas, said to me in conversation,
that “for a settler in a new country, one good, believing,
strong-minded man is worth a hundred, nay, a thousand men without
character; and that the right men will give a permanent direction to
the fortunes of a state. As for the bullying drunkards, of which armies
are usually made up, he thought cholera, small-pox, and consumption as
valuable recruits.” He held the belief that courage and chastity are
silent concerning themselves. He said, “As soon as I hear one of my men
say, ‘Ah, let me only get my eye on such a man, I’ll bring him down,’
I don’t expect much aid in the fight from that talker. ’Tis the quiet,
peaceable men, the men of principle, that make the best soldiers.”

  “’Tis still observed those men most valiant are
  Who are most modest ere they came to war.”

True courage is not ostentatious; men who wish to inspire terror seem
thereby to confess themselves cowards. Why do they rely on it, but
because they know how potent it is with themselves?

The true temper has genial influences. It makes a bond of union
between enemies. Governor Wise of Virginia, in the record of his
first interviews with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If
Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as he is a superior man,
he distinguishes John Brown. As they confer, they understand each other
swiftly; each respects the other. If opportunity allowed, they would
prefer each other’s society and desert their former companions. Enemies
would become affectionate. Hector and Achilles, Richard and Saladin,
Wellington and Soult, General Daumas and Abdel Kader, become aware that
they are nearer and more alike than any other two, and, if their nation
and circumstance did not keep them apart, would run into each other’s
arms.

See too what good contagion belongs to it. Everywhere it finds its
own with magnetic affinity. Courage of the soldier awakes the courage
of woman. Florence Nightingale brings lint and the blessing of her
shadow. Heroic women offer themselves as nurses of the brave veteran.
The troop of Virginian infantry that had marched to guard the prison
of John Brown ask leave to pay their respects to the prisoner. Poetry
and eloquence catch the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown before.
Everything feels the new breath, except the old doting, nigh-dead
politicians, whose heart the trumpet of resurrection could not wake.

The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions,
inspirations, flashes of genius. The hero could not have done the
feat at another hour, in a lower mood. The best act of the marvellous
genius of Greece was its first act; not in the statue or the Parthenon,
but in the instinct which, at Thermopylæ, held Asia at bay, kept Asia
out of Europe,--Asia with its antiquities and organic slavery,--from
corrupting the hope and new morning of the West. The statue, the
architecture, were the later and inferior creation of the same
genius. In view of this moment of history, we recognize a certain
prophetic instinct better than wisdom. Napoleon said well, “My hand
is immediately connected with my head”; but the _sacred_ courage is
connected with the heart. The head is a half, a fraction, until it is
enlarged and inspired by the moral sentiment. For it is not the means
on which we draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous
talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but the aims only. The
aim reacts back on the means. A great aim aggrandizes the means. The
meal and water that are the commissariat of the _forlorn hope_ that
stake their lives to defend the pass are sacred as the Holy Grail, or
as if one had eyes to see in chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed
the sun.

There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause,
that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for
which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists
that could combine against him. The pious Mrs. Hutchinson says of some
passages in the defence of Nottingham against the Cavaliers, “It was a
great instruction that the best and highest courages are beams of the
Almighty.” And whenever the religious sentiment is adequately affirmed,
it must be with dazzling courage. As long as it is cowardly insinuated,
as with the wish to succor some partial and temporary interest, or to
make it affirm some pragmatical tenet which our parish church receives
to-day, it is not imparted, and cannot inspire or create. For it is
always new, leads and surprises, and practice never comes up with it.
There are ever appearing in the world men who, almost as soon as they
are born, take a bee-line to the rack of the inquisitor, the axe of the
tyrant, like Jordano Bruno, Vanini, Huss, Paul, Jesus, and Socrates.
Look at Fox’s Lives of the Martyrs, Sewel’s History of the Quakers,
Southey’s Book of the Church, at the folios of the Brothers Bollandi,
who collected the lives of twenty-five thousand martyrs, confessors,
ascetics, and self-tormentors. There is much of fable, but a broad
basis of fact. The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid
woman is not scared by fagots; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope
ignominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw
on his head, when the fire approached him, and said, “This is God’s
hat.” Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all
things in the world; that he is aiming neither at pelf or comfort, but
will venture all to put in act the invisible thought in his mind. He
is everywhere a liberator, but of a freedom that is ideal; not seeking
to have land or money or conveniences, but to have no other limitation
than that which his own constitution imposes. He is free to speak
truth; he is not free to lie. He wishes to break every yoke all over
the world which hinders his brother from acting after his thought.

There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted
with a higher virtue. Let us say then frankly that the education of
the will is the object of our existence. Poverty, the prison, the
rack, the fire, the hatred and execrations of our fellow-men, appear
trials beyond the endurance of common humanity; but to the hero whose
intellect is aggrandized by the soul, and so measures these penalties
against the good which his thought surveys, these terrors vanish as
darkness at sunrise.

We have little right in piping times of peace to pronounce on these
rare heights of character; but there is no assurance of security. In
the most private life, difficult duty is never far off. Therefore
we must think with courage. Scholars and thinkers are prone to an
effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the
street, or a brutal act is recorded in the journals. The Medical
College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy,
and there are melancholy sceptics with a taste for carrion who batten
on the hideous facts in history,--persecutions, inquisitions, St.
Bartholomew massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Cæsar, Borgia, Marat,
Lopez,--men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, parricides,
matricides, and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts,
but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience
as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration
of final causes. Wolf, snake, and crocodile are not inharmonious in
nature, but are made useful as checks, scavengers, and pioneers; and
we must have a scope as large as Nature’s to deal with beast-like men,
detect what scullion function is assigned them, and foresee in the
secular melioration of the planet how these will become unnecessary,
and will die out.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount
a fear. I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical
position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade. Have the
courage not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope and cause and
resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. And
there is no creed of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk, or Gentoo,
which does not equally preach it. If you have no faith in beneficent
power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds
about nature and man, then reflect that the best use of fate is to
teach us courage, if only because baseness cannot change the appointed
event. If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme
Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because
they come only so long as they are used; or, if your scepticism reaches
to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then
be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of
consequence to you, namely, your own.

       *       *       *       *       *

I am permitted to enrich my chapter by adding an anecdote of pure
courage from real life, as narrated in a ballad by a lady to whom all
the particulars of the fact are exactly known.


GEORGE NIDIVER.

  Men have done brave deeds,
    And bards have sung them well:
  I of good George Nidiver
    Now the tale will tell.

  In Californian mountains
    A hunter bold was he:
  Keen his eye and sure his aim
    As any you should see.

  A little Indian boy
    Followed him everywhere,
  Eager to share the hunter’s joy,
    The hunter’s meal to share.

  And when the bird or deer
    Fell by the hunter’s skill,
  The boy was always near
    To help with right good-will.

  One day as through the cleft
    Between two mountains steep,
  Shut in both right and left,
    Their questing way they keep,

  They see two grizzly bears
    With hunger fierce and fell
  Rush at them unawares
    Right down the narrow dell.

  The boy turned round with screams,
    And ran with terror wild;
  One of the pair of savage beasts
    Pursued the shrieking child.

  The hunter raised his gun,--
    He knew _one_ charge was all,--
  And through the boy’s pursuing foe
    He sent his only ball.

  The other on George Nidiver
    Came on with dreadful pace:
  The hunter stood unarmed,
    And met him face to face.

  I say _unarmed_ he stood.
    Against those frightful paws
  The rifle but, or club of wood,
    Could stand no more than straws.

  George Nidiver stood still
    And looked him in the face;
  The wild beast stopped amazed,
    Then came with slackening pace.

  Still firm the hunter stood,
    Although his heart beat high;
  Again the creature stopped,
    And gazed with wondering eye.

  The hunter met his gaze,
    Nor yet an inch gave way;
  The bear turned slowly round,
    And slowly moved away.

  What thoughts were in his mind
    It would be hard to spell:
  What thoughts were in George Nidiver
    I rather guess than tell.

  But sure that rifle’s aim,
    Swift choice of generous part,
  Showed in its passing gleam
    The depths of a brave heart.




SUCCESS.




SUCCESS.


Our American people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or
in praising their performance. The earth is shaken by our engineries.
We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. We have the power of
territory and of sea-coast, and know the use of these. We count our
census, we read our growing valuations, we survey our map, which
becomes old in a year or two. Our eyes run approvingly along the
lengthened lines of railroad and telegraph. We have gone nearest to
the Pole. We have discovered the Antarctic continent. We interfere in
Central and South America, at Canton, and in Japan; we are adding to an
already enormous territory. Our political constitution is the hope of
the world, and we value ourselves on all these feats.

’Tis the way of the world; ’tis the law of youth, and of unfolding
strength. Men are made each with some triumphant superiority, which,
through some adaptation of fingers, or ear, or eye, or ciphering, or
pugilistic or musical or literary craft, enriches the community with a
new art; and not only we, but all men of European stock value these
certificates. Giotto could draw a perfect circle; Erwin of Steinbach
could build a minster; Olaf, king of Norway, could run round his
galley on the blades of the oars of the rowers, when the ship was in
motion; Ojeda could run out swiftly on a plank projected from the top
of a tower, turn round swiftly, and come back; Evelyn writes from
Rome: “Bernini, the Florentine sculptor, architect, painter, and poet,
a little before my coming to Rome, gave a public opera, wherein he
painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the
music, writ the comedy, and built the theatre.”

“There is nothing in war,” said Napoleon, “which I cannot do by my
own hands. If there is nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture
it. The gun-carriages I know how to construct. If it is necessary to
make cannons at the forge, I can make them. The details of working
them in battle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. In
administration, it is I alone who have arranged the finances, as you
know.”

It is recorded of Linnæus, among many proofs of his beneficent skill,
that when the timber in the shipyards of Sweden was ruined by rot,
Linnæus was desired by the government to find a remedy. He studied the
insects that infested the timber, and found that they laid their eggs
in the logs within certain days in April, and he directed that during
ten days at that season the logs should be immersed under water in the
docks; which being done the timber was found to be uninjured.

Columbus at Veragua found plenty of gold; but leaving the coast, the
ship full of one hundred and fifty skilful seamen,--some of them old
pilots, and with too much experience of their craft and treachery to
him,--the wise admiral kept his private record of his homeward path.
And when he reached Spain, he told the King and Queen, “that they may
ask all the pilots who came with him, where is Veragua. Let them answer
and say, if they know where Veragua lies. I assert that they can give
no other account than that they went to lands where there was abundance
of gold, but they do not know the way to return thither, but would be
obliged to go on a voyage of discovery as much as if they had never
been there before. There is a mode of reckoning,” he proudly adds,
“derived from astronomy, which is sure and safe to any who understands
it.”

Hippocrates in Greece knew how to stay the devouring plague which
ravaged Athens in his time, and his skill died with him. Dr. Benjamin
Rush, in Philadelphia, carried that city heroically through the yellow
fever of the year 1793. Leverrier carries the Copernican system in
his head, and knew where to look for the new planet. We have seen an
American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold in
all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal
heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely,
in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house. We
have seen women who could institute hospitals and schools in armies.
We have seen a woman who by pure song could melt the souls of whole
populations. And there is no limit to these varieties of talent.

These are arts to be thankful for,--each one as it is a new direction
of human power. We cannot choose but respect them. Our civilization
is made up of a million contributions of this kind. For success, to
be sure, we esteem it a test in other people, since we do first in
ourselves. We respect ourselves more if we have succeeded. Neither do
we grudge to each of these benefactors the praise or the profit which
accrues from his industry.

Here are already quite different degrees of moral merit in these
examples. I don’t know but we and our race elsewhere set a higher value
on wealth, victory, and coarse superiority of all kinds, than other
men,--have less tranquillity of mind, are less easily contented. The
Saxon is taught from his infancy to wish to be first. The Norseman
was a restless rider, fighter, freebooter. The ancient Norse ballads
describe him as afflicted with this inextinguishable thirst of victory.
The mother says to her son:--

  “Success shall be in thy courser tall,
  Success in thyself, which is best of all,
  Success in thy hand, success in thy foot,
  In struggle with man, in battle with brute:--
  The holy God and Saint Drothin dear
  Shall never shut eyes on thy career;
        Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”

These feats that we extol do not signify so much as we say. These
boasted arts are of very recent origin. They are local conveniences,
but do not really add to our stature. The greatest men of the world
have managed not to want them. Newton was a great man, without
telegraph, or gas, or steam-coach, or rubber-shoes, or lucifer-matches,
or ether for his pain; so was Shakspeare, and Alfred, and Scipio, and
Socrates. These are local conveniences, but how easy to go now to parts
of the world where not only all these arts are wanting, but where they
are despised. The Arabian sheiks, the most dignified people in the
planet, do not want them; yet have as much self-respect as the English,
and are easily able to impress the Frenchman or the American who visits
them with the respect due to a brave and sufficient man.

These feats have, to be sure, great difference of merit and some of
them involve power of a high kind. But the public values the invention
more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and
better where this came from. The public sees in it a lucrative secret.
Men see the reward which the inventor enjoys, and they think, ‘How
shall we win that?’ Cause and effect are a little tedious; how to
leap to the result by short or by false means? We are not scrupulous.
What we ask is victory, without regard to the cause; after the Rob
Roy rule, after the Napoleon rule, to be the strongest to-day,--the
way of the Talleyrands,--prudent people, whose watches go faster than
their neighbors’, and who detect the first moment of decline, and
throw themselves on the instant on the winning side. I have heard that
Nelson used to say, “Never mind the justice or the impudence, only let
me succeed.” Lord Brougham’s single duty of counsel is, “to get the
prisoner clear.” Fuller says ’tis a maxim of lawyers, “that a crown
once worn cleareth all defects of the wearer thereof.” _Rien ne réussit
mieux que le succès._ And we Americans are tainted with this insanity,
as our bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. We are great by
exclusion, grasping, and egotism. Our success takes from all what it
gives to one. ’Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for luck.

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and
concentration to men, and seems to be much used in nature for fabrics
in which local and spasmodic energy is required. I could point to men
in this country of indispensable importance to the carrying on of
American life, of this humor, whom we could ill spare; any one of them
would be a national loss. But it spoils conversation. They will not
try conclusions with you. They are ever thrusting this pampered self
between you and them. It is plain they have a long education to undergo
to reach simplicity and plain-dealing, which are what a wise man mainly
cares for in his companion. Nature knows how to convert evil to good;
Nature utilizes misers, fanatics, show-men, egotists, to accomplish her
ends; but we must not think better of the foible for that. The passion
for sudden success is rude and puerile, just as war, cannons, and
executions are used to clear the ground of bad, lumpish, irreclaimable
savages, but always to the damage of the conquerors.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit,
to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of
the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without
apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through pretending that they sell,
or power through making believe you are powerful, or through a packed
jury or caucus, bribery and “repeating” votes, or wealth by fraud.
They think they have got it, but they have got something else,--a
crime which calls for another crime, and another devil behind that;
these are steps to suicide, infamy, and the harming of mankind. We
countenance each other in this life of show, puffing, advertisement,
and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in
the hunger for sudden performance and praise.

There was a wise man, an Italian artist, Michel Angelo, who writes thus
of himself: “Meanwhile the Cardinal Ippolito, in whom all my best hopes
were placed, being dead, I began to understand that the promises of
this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms, and that to confide
in one’s self, and become something of worth and value, is the best and
safest course.” Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will
assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first
rule for success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement,
and take Michel Angelo’s course, “to confide in one’s self, and be
something of worth and value.”

Each man has an aptitude born with him to do easily some feat
impossible to any other. Do your work. I have to say this often, but
nature says it oftener. ’Tis clownish to insist on doing all with
one’s own hands, as if every man should build his own clumsy house,
forge his hammer, and bake his dough; but he is to dare to do what
he can do best; not help others as they would direct him, but as he
knows his helpful power to be. To do otherwise is to neutralize all
those extraordinary special talents distributed among men. Yet, whilst
this self-truth is essential to the exhibition of the world and to the
growth and glory of each mind, it is rare to find a man who believes
his own thought or who speaks that which he was created to say. As
nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain-dealing, so
nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own. Any work looks
wonderful to him, except that which he can do. We do not believe our
own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote
on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import
the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their
laws. The gravest and learnedest courts in this country shudder to face
a new question, and will wait months and years for a case to occur that
can be tortured into a precedent, and thus throw on a bolder party the
_onus_ of an initiative. Thus we do not carry a counsel in our breasts,
or do not know it; and because we cannot shake off from our shoes this
dust of Europe and Asia, the world seems to be born old, society is
under a spell, every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical,
and literature a quotation; and hence that depression of spirits, that
furrow of care, said to mark every American brow.

Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that, if you are
here, the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or
with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so
long as you work at that you are well and successful. It by no means
consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the
eye and satisfy spectators. It is enough if you work in the right
direction. So far from the performance being the real success, it is
clear that the success was much earlier than that, namely, when all the
feats that make our civility were the thoughts of good heads. The fame
of each discovery rightly attaches to the mind that made the formula
which contains all the details, and not to the manufacturers who now
make their gain by it; although the mob uniformly cheers the publisher,
and not the inventor. It is the dulness of the multitude that they
cannot see the house, in the ground-plan; the working, in the model of
the projector. Whilst it is a thought, though it were a new fuel, or
a new food, or the creation of agriculture, it is cried down; it is a
chimera: but when it is a fact, and comes in the shape of eight per
cent, ten per cent, a hundred per cent, they cry, ‘It is the voice of
God.’ Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, said to me of Robert Fulton’s
visit to Paris: “Fulton knocked at the door of Napoleon with steam,
and was rejected; and Napoleon lived long enough to know that he had
excluded a greater power than his own.”

Is there no loving of knowledge, and of art, and of our design, for
itself alone? Cannot we please ourselves with performing our work, or
gaining truth and power, without being praised for it? I gain my point,
I gain all points, if I can reach my companion with any statement
which teaches him his own worth. The sum of wisdom is, that the time
is never lost that is devoted to work. The good workman never says,
‘There, that will do’; but, ‘There, that is it: try it, and come again,
it will last always.’ If the artist, in whatever art, is well at work
on his own design, it signifies little that he does not yet find orders
or customers. I pronounce that young man happy who is content with
having acquired the skill which he had aimed at, and waits willingly
when the occasion of making it appreciated shall arrive, knowing well
that it will not loiter. The time your rival spends in dressing up his
work for effect, hastily, and for the market, you spend in study and
experiments towards real knowledge and efficiency. He has thereby sold
his picture or machine, or won the prize, or got the appointment; but
you have raised yourself into a higher school of art, and a few years
will show the advantage of the real master over the short popularity of
the showman. I know it is a nice point to discriminate this self-trust,
which is the pledge of all mental vigor and performance, from the
disease to which it is allied,--the exaggeration of the part which we
can play;--yet they are two things. But it is sanity to know, that,
over my talent or knack, and a million times better than any talent,
is the central intelligence which subordinates and uses all talents;
and it is only as a door into this, that any talent or the knowledge it
gives is of value. He only who comes into this central intelligence,
in which no egotism or exaggeration can be, comes into self-possession.

My next point is that, in the scale of powers, it is not talent, but
sensibility, which is best: talent confines, but the central life
puts us in relation to all. How often it seems the chief good to be
born with a cheerful temper, and well adjusted to the tone of the
human race. Such a man feels himself in harmony, and conscious by
his receptivity of an infinite strength. Like Alfred, “good fortune
accompanies him like a gift of God.” Feel yourself, and be not daunted
by things. ’Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and
makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great. The joyful reader
borrows of his own ideas to fill their faulty outline, and knows not
that he borrows and gives.

There is something of poverty in our criticism. We assume that there
are few great men, all the rest are little; that there is but one
Homer, but one Shakspeare, one Newton, one Socrates. But the soul in
her beaming hour does not acknowledge these usurpations. We should know
how to praise Socrates, or Plato, or Saint John, without impoverishing
us. In good hours we do not find Shakspeare or Homer over-great,--only
to have been translators of the happy present,--and every man and woman
divine possibilities. ’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a
good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem
confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for
his ear.

The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of
the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces
and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are
miraculous and illimitable. Therein are the rules and formulas by which
the whole empire of matter is worked. There is no prosperity, trade,
art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it
home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Is all life a surface affair? ’Tis curious, but our difference of wit
appears to be only a difference of impressionability, or power to
appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions.
When the scholar or the writer has pumped his brain for thoughts and
verses, and then comes abroad into Nature, has he never found that
there is a better poetry hinted in a boy’s whistle of a tune, or in
the piping of a sparrow, than in all his literary results? We call
it health. What is so admirable as the health of youth?--with his
long days because his eyes are good, and brisk circulations keep him
warm in cold rooms, and he loves books that speak to the imagination;
and he can read Plato, covered to his chin with a cloak in a cold
upper chamber, though he should associate the Dialogues ever after
with a woollen smell. ’Tis the bane of life that natural effects are
continually crowded out, and artificial arrangements substituted.
We remember when, in early youth, the earth spoke and the heavens
glowed; when an evening, any evening, grim and wintry, sleet and snow,
was enough for us; the houses were in the air. Now it costs a rare
combination of clouds and lights to overcome the common and mean. What
is it we look for in the landscape, in sunsets and sunrises, in the sea
and the firmament? what but a compensation for the cramp and pettiness
of human performances? We bask in the day, and the mind finds somewhat
as great as itself. In Nature, all is large, massive repose. Remember
what befalls a city boy who goes for the first time into the October
woods. He is suddenly initiated into a pomp and glory that brings to
pass for him the dreams of romance. He is the king he dreamed he was;
he walks through tents of gold, through bowers of crimson, porphyry,
and topaz, pavilion on pavilion, garlanded with vines, flowers, and
sunbeams, with incense and music, with so many hints to his astonished
senses; the leaves twinkle and pique and flatter him, and his eye and
step are tempted on by what hazy distances to happier solitudes. All
this happiness he owes only to his finer perception. The owner of the
wood-lot finds only a number of discolored trees, and says, ‘They
ought to come down; they aren’t growing any better; they should be cut
and corded before spring.’

Wordsworth writes of the delights of the boy in Nature:--

  “For never will come back the hour
  Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

But I have just seen a man, well knowing what he spoke of, who told me
that the verse was not true for him; that his eyes opened as he grew
older, and that every spring was more beautiful to him than the last.

We live among gods of our own creation. Does that deep-toned bell,
which has shortened many a night of ill nerves, render to you nothing
but acoustic vibrations? Is the old church, which gave you the first
lessons of religious life, or the village school, or the college where
you first knew the dreams of fancy and joys of thought, only boards or
brick and mortar? Is the house in which you were born, or the house
in which your dearest friend lived, only a piece of real estate whose
value is covered by the Hartford insurance? You walk on the beach and
enjoy the animation of the picture. Scoop up a little water in the
hollow of your palm, take up a handful of shore sand; well, these are
the elements. What is the beach but acres of sand? What is the ocean
but cubic miles of water? a little more or less signifies nothing.
No, it is that this brute matter is part of somewhat not brute. It is
that the sand floor is held by spheral gravity, and bent to be a part
of the round globe, under the optical sky,--part of the astonishing
astronomy, and existing, at last, to moral ends and from moral causes.

The world is not made up to the eye of figures, that is, only half; it
is also made of color. How that element washes the universe with its
enchanting waves! The sculptor had ended his work, and behold a new
world of dream-like glory. ’Tis the last stroke of Nature; beyond color
she cannot go. In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only,
but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes
the skeleton world with space, variety, and glow. The hues of sunset
make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and
fireside populous, important, and filling the main space in our history.

The fundamental fact in our metaphysic constitution is the
correspondence of man to the world, so that every change in that
writes a record in the mind. The mind yields sympathetically to the
tendencies or law which stream through things, and make the order of
nature; and in the perfection of this correspondence or expressiveness,
the health and force of man consist. If we follow this hint into our
intellectual education, we shall find that it is not propositions, not
new dogmas and a logical exposition of the world, that are our first
need; but to watch and tenderly cherish the intellectual and moral
sensibilities, those fountains of right thought, and woo them to stay
and make their home with us. Whilst they abide with us, we shall not
think amiss. Our perception far outruns our talent. We bring a welcome
to the highest lessons of religion and of poetry out of all proportion
beyond our skill to teach. And, further, the great hearing and sympathy
of men is more true and wise than their speaking is wont to be. A deep
sympathy is what we require for any student of the mind; for the chief
difference between man and man is a difference of impressionability.
Aristotle, or Bacon, or Kant propound some maxim which is the key-note
of philosophy thenceforward. But I am more interested to know, that,
when at last they have hurled out their grand word, it is only some
familiar experience of every man in the street. If it be not, it will
never be heard of again.

Ah! if one could keep this sensibility, and live in the happy sufficing
present, and find the day and its cheap means contenting, which
only ask receptivity in you, and no strained exertion and cankering
ambition, overstimulating to be at the head of your class and the head
of society, and to have distinction and laurels and consumption! We are
not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness. The world
is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding more affinities
and potencies in those we have.

This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty which exalts the
faculties of youth, in the power which form and color exert upon
the soul; when we see eyes that are a compliment to the human race,
features that explain the Phidian sculpture. Fontenelle said: “There
are three things about which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of
them,--music, poetry, and love.” The great doctors of this science are
the greatest men,--Dante, Petrarch, Michel Angelo, and Shakspeare. The
wise Socrates treats this matter with a certain archness, yet with very
marked expressions. “I am always,” he says, “asserting that I happen to
know, I may say, nothing but a mere trifle relating to matters of love;
yet in that kind of learning I lay claim to being more skilled than
any one man of the past or present time.” They may well speak in this
uncertain manner of their knowledge, and in this confident manner of
their will, for the secret of it is hard to detect, so deep it is; and
yet genius is measured by its skill in this science.

Who is he in youth, or in maturity, or even in old age, who does not
like to hear of those sensibilities which turn curled heads round at
church, and send wonderful eye-beams across assemblies, from one to
one, never missing in the thickest crowd. The keen statist reckons by
tens and hundreds; the genial man is interested in every slipper that
comes into the assembly. The passion, alike everywhere, creeps under
the snows of Scandinavia, under the fires of the equator, and swims in
the seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puissant a divinity in the Norse Edda
as Camadeva in the red vault of India, Eros in the Greek, or Cupid in
the Latin heaven. And what is specially true of love is, that it is a
state of extreme impressionability; the lover has more senses and finer
senses than others; his eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads omens on
the flower, and cloud, and face, and form, and gesture, and reads them
aright. In his surprise at the sudden and entire understanding that is
between him and the beloved person, it occurs to him that they might
somehow meet independently of time and place. How delicious the belief
that he could elude all guards, precautions, ceremonies, means, and
delays, and hold instant and sempiternal communication! In solitude, in
banishment, the hope returned, and the experiment was eagerly tried.
The supernal powers seem to take his part. What was on his lips to say
is uttered by his friend. When he went abroad, he met, by wonderful
casualties, the one person he sought. If in his walk he chanced to look
back, his friend was walking behind him. And it has happened that the
artist has often drawn in his pictures the face of the future wife whom
he had not yet seen.

But also in complacences, nowise so strict as this of the passion, the
man of sensibility counts it a delight only to hear a child’s voice
fully addressed to him, or to see the beautiful manners of the youth
of either sex. When the event is past and remote, how insignificant
the greatest compared with the piquancy of the present! To-day at the
school examination the professor interrogates Sylvina in the history
class about Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can’t remember, but suggests
that Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies, “No, he
defeated the Romans.” But ’tis plain to the visitor, that ’tis of no
importance at all about Odoacer, and ’tis a great deal of importance
about Sylvina; and if she says he was defeated, why he had better,
a great deal, have been defeated, than give her a moment’s annoy.
Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have
said, Let me be defeated a thousand times.

And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just
importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility
gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in
corners. An Englishman of marked character and talent, who had brought
with him hither one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured me
that nobody and nothing of possible interest was left in England,--he
had brought all that was alive away. I was forced to reply: “No, next
door to you, probably, on the other side of the partition in the same
house, was a greater man than any you had seen.” Every man has a
history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from
him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into
any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto
to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life,--to add to our
high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you
that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads.
Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. ’Tis a secret, the genesis
of either; but the springs of justice and courage do not fail any more
than salt or sulphur springs.

The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but
the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of
condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these
fine communications. Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign
is cheerfulness,--an open and noble temper. There was never poet who
had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil,
wrote,--

  “Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true,
  Whom man delights in, God delights in too.”

All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of health, prosperity, and the
favor of God. Everything lasting and fit for men, the Divine Power
has marked with this stamp. What delights, what emancipates, not what
scares and pains us, is wise and good in speech and in the arts. For,
truly, the heart at the centre of the universe with every throb hurls
the flood of happiness into every artery, vein, and veinlet, so that
the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. The plenty of the
poorest place is too great: the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound
ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays.

One more trait of true success. The good mind chooses what is positive,
what is advancing,--embraces the affirmative. Our system is one of
poverty. ’Tis presumed, as I said, there is but one Shakspeare, one
Homer, one Jesus,--not that all are or shall be inspired. But we must
begin by affirming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. It is true
there is evil and good, night and day: but these are not equal. The day
is great and final. The night is for the day, but the day is not for
the night. What is this immortal demand for more, which belongs to our
constitution? this enormous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar
as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins to content us. We
know the satisfactoriness of justice, the sufficiency of truth. We
know the answer that leaves nothing to ask. We know the Spirit by its
victorious tone. The searching tests to apply to every new pretender
are amount and quality,--what does he add? and what is the state of
mind he leaves me in? Your theory is unimportant; but what new stock
you can add to humanity, or how high you can carry life? A man is a man
only as he makes life and nature happier to us.

I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all
points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion,
the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the
other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other
hospitality of mind.

We may apply this affirmative law to letters, to manners, to art,
to the decorations of our houses, etc. I do not find executions or
tortures or lazar-houses, or grisly photographs of the field on the day
after the battle fit subjects for cabinet pictures. I think that some
so-called “sacred subjects” must be treated with more genius than I
have seen in the masters of Italian or Spanish art to be right pictures
for houses and churches. Nature does not invite such exhibition. Nature
lays the ground-plan of each creature accurately,--sternly fit for
all his functions; then veils it scrupulously. See how carefully she
covers up the skeleton. The eye shall not see it: the sun shall not
shine on it. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and skin
and hair and beautiful colors of the day over it, and forces death down
underground, and makes haste to cover it up with leaves and vines, and
wipes carefully out every trace by new creation. Who and what are you
that would lay the ghastly anatomy bare?

Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables
and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate
preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions.
Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in
rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the
criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody;

  “For every gift of noble origin
  Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.”

The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much
perception. As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges,
and so it empowers it. Good-will makes insight, as one finds his way
to the sea by embarking on a river. I have seen scores of people who
can silence me, but I seek one who shall make me forget or overcome the
frigidities and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter Giotto,
Vasari tells us, renewed art, because he put more goodness into his
heads. To awake in man and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his
feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action,
that is the only aim.

’Tis cheap and easy to destroy. There is not a joyful boy or an
innocent girl buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all the street
full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with
a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine.
The cynic has only to follow their hint with his bitter confirmation,
and they check that eager courageous pace and go home with heavier step
and premature age. They will themselves quickly enough give the hint he
wants to the cold wretch. Which of them has not failed to please where
they most wished it? or blundered where they were most ambitious of
success? or found themselves awkward or tedious or incapable of study,
thought, or heroism, and only hoped by good sense and fidelity to do
what they could and pass unblamed? And this witty malefactor makes
their little hope less with satire and scepticism, and slackens the
springs of endeavor. Yes, this is easy; but to help the young soul, add
energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem
defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the
work of divine men.

We live on different planes or platforms. There is an external life,
which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher, and trade;
taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put himself forward,
to make himself useful and agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue,
and contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer, and possess.

But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor
value these feats at all. ’Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves
truth, because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing
else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of
it as now; is just the same now in maturity and hereafter in age, it
was in youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers,
connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account
of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great.
This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no
attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world.
A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, “I will
pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.” And
Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”




OLD AGE.




OLD AGE.


On the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, in 1861,
the venerable President Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well
as senior alumnus of the University, was received at the dinner with
peculiar demonstrations of respect. He replied to these compliments
in a speech, and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary
society, entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age, and,
aiding himself by notes in his hand, made a sort of running commentary
on Cicero’s chapter “De Senectute.” The character of the speaker, the
transparent good faith of his praise and blame, and the _naïveté_ of
his eager preference of Cicero’s opinions to King David’s, gave unusual
interest to the College festival. It was a discourse full of dignity,
honoring him who spoke and those who heard.

The speech led me to look over at home--an easy task--Cicero’s famous
essay, charming by its uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical
precepts; with a Roman eye to the claims of the State; happiest,
perhaps, in his praise of life on the farm; and rising at the
conclusion to a lofty strain. But he does not exhaust the subject;
rather invites the attempt to add traits to the picture from our
broader modern life.

Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which cling to the element
of time, and in which Nature delights. Wellington, in speaking of
military men, said, “What masks are these uniforms to hide cowards!”
I have often detected the like deception in the cloth shoe, wadded
pelisse, wig, spectacles, and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself
to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy
hair, short memory and sleep. These also are masks, and all is not Age
that wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and our mates
are yet youths with even boyish remains, one good fellow in the set
prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on
us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does
deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with
a most amusing respect: and this lets us into the secret, that the
venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors.
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders,
and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.

For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art
or Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous: and the essence of age is
intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look into the
eyes of the youngest person, we sometimes discover that here is one who
knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him;
there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him: which
fact the Indian Vedas express when they say, “He that can discriminate
is the father of his father.” And in our old British legends of Arthur
and the Round Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a
babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant
of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him,
tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the
by-standers. Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceived
by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so
ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and
dwarfs an age to an hour. Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old
Persian of a hundred and fifty years who was dying, and was saying to
himself, “I said, coming into the world by birth, ‘I will enjoy myself
for a few moments.’ Alas! at the variegated table of life I partook
of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said, ‘_Enough!_’” That which does
not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one
is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which
always begin at the surface-edges. If, on a winter day, you should
stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the afternoon clouds
would not indicate whether it were June or January; and if we did not
find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we
could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of
twenty. How many men habitually believe that each chance passenger with
whom they converse is of their own age, and presently find it was his
father, and not his brother, whom they knew!

But not to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature,
which are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under
an aspect more conformed to the common sense, if the question be
the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be
unfavorable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the
streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate
of age is low, melancholy, and sceptical. Frankly face the facts,
and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid,
strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup,
which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing
that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us
with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science:
especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.
But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their
stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium.
We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to
write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful
effervescence which we have now lost. We had a judge in Massachusetts
who at sixty proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived a certain,
decay in his faculties; he was dissuaded by his friends, on account
of the public convenience at that time. At seventy it was hinted to
him that it was time to retire; but he now replied, that he thought
his judgment as robust, and all his faculties as good as ever they
were. But besides the self-deception, the strong and hasty laborers of
the street do not work well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth is
everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age
is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state, and ceremony,
in council-chambers, in courts of justice, and historical societies.
Age is becoming in the country. But in the rush and uproar of Broadway,
if you look into the faces of the passengers, there is dejection or
indignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of injury,
and the lip made up with a heroic determination not to mind it. Few
envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not
count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast
inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus.
In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but
immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be
glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us.

This is odious on the face of it. Universal convictions are not to
be shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the
sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their
cheeks. We know the value of experience. Life and art are cumulative;
and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves
to be heard on that subject. A man of great employments and excellent
performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth
anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the
resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men
should be held eligible who were under seventy. But in all governments,
the councils of power were held by the old; and patricians or _patres_,
senate or _senes_, _seigneurs_ or seniors, _gerousia_, the senate of
Sparta, the presbytery of the Church, and the like, all signify simply
old men.

The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is refuted by the universal
prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by
all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace by
which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander,
in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare
exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes
of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and
there is no knowledge that is not power. Béranger said, “Almost all
the good workmen live long.” And if the life be true and noble, we
have quite another sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish
dotards who are falsely old,--namely, the men who fear no city, but
by whom cities stand; who appearing in any street, the people empty
their houses to gaze at and obey them: as at “My Cid, with the fleecy
beard,” in Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; as blind old
Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople
at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious, and elected at
the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he
declined, and died Doge at ninety-seven. We still feel the force of
Socrates, “whom well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men”; of
Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself
better than all their nation; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns
of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of Galileo, of whose
blindness Castelli said, “The noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever
made,--an eye that hath seen more than all that went before him, and
hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him”; of Newton, who
made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five years;
of Bacon, who “took all knowledge to be his province”; of Fontenelle,
“that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France to
be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years”; of Franklin,
Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; of Washington, the
perfect citizen; of Wellington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the
all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclopædia of science.

Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily
count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the
perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief
evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The
insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home. It were
strange, if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of
immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the
old wife says, ‘Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps it
is cancerous,’--he replies, ‘I am yielding to a surer decomposition.’
The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the
froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a
pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the
pain in his knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia
of the cows raged, the butchers said, that, though the acute degree
was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur
among cattle. All men carry seeds of all distempers through life
latent, and we die without developing them; such is the affirmative
force of the constitution; but if you are enfeebled by any cause,
some of these sleeping seeds start and open. Meantime, at every stage
we lose a foe. At fifty years, ’tis said, afflicted citizens lose
their sick-headaches. I hope this _hegira_ is not as movable a feast
as that one I annually look for, when the horticulturists assure me
that the rosebugs in our gardens disappear on the tenth of July;
they stay a fortnight later in mine. But be it as it may with the
sick-headache,--’tis certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are
lulled once for all, as we come up with certain goals of time. The
passions have answered their purpose: that slight but dread overweight,
with which, in each instance, Nature secures the execution of her
aim, drops off. To keep man in the planet, she impresses the terror
of death. To perfect the commissariat, she implants in each a certain
rapacity to get the supply, and a little oversupply, of his wants. To
insure the existence of the race, she reinforces the sexual instinct,
at the risk of disorder, grief, and pain. To secure strength, she
plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo their office,
and invite disease. But these temporary stays and shifts for the
protection of the young animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced
by nobler resources. We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions,
quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors
of mind and heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn the fatal
compensations that wait on every act. Then,--one after another,--this
riotous time-destroying crew disappear.

I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more
or less signifies nothing. Little by little, it has amassed such a
fund of merit, that it can very well afford to go on its credit when
it will. When I chanced to meet the poet Wordsworth, then sixty-three
years old, he told me, “that he had just had a fall and lost a tooth,
and, when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had
replied, that he was glad it had not happened forty years before.”
Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years
too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and
I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly
became him. Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether
his pleading was good and effective. Now it is of importance to his
client, but of none to himself. It has been long already fixed what he
can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from
one or a dozen new performances. If he should, on a new occasion, rise
quite beyond his mark, and achieve somewhat great and extraordinary,
that, of course, would instantly tell; but he may go below his mark
with impunity, and people will say, ‘O, he had headache,’ or, ‘He lost
his sleep for two nights.’ What a lust of appearance, what a load of
anxieties that once degraded him, he is thus rid of! Every one is
sensible of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days
behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for
him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and
work for him when he sleeps.

A third felicity of age is, that it has found expression. The youth
suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and
from a picture in his mind of a career which has, as yet, no outward
reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things
and thoughts. Michel Angelo’s head is full of masculine and gigantic
figures as gods walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel
can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a
hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is
the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for
the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born.
Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into
doleful deserts, until it finds proper vent. All the functions of
human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until
they are performed. He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power,
house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious
wants, æsthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one,
day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his
calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power, and thus,
at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort
of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the
value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He
is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose
condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his
mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a
fair, plump, perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all
the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and
behavior.

The compensations of Nature play in age as in youth. In a world so
charged and sparkling with power, a man does not live long and actively
without costly additions of experience, which, though not spoken, are
recorded in his mind. What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is
in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors
with complacency, but as one who, having long ago known these games,
has refined them into results and morals. The Indian Red Jacket, when
the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, “But the sixties have
all the twenties and forties in them.”

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its
works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth has an excess
of sensibility, before which every object glitters and attracts. We
leave one pursuit for another, and the young man’s year is a heap of
beginnings. At the end of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for
it,--not one completed work. But the time is not lost. Our instincts
drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible
value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall
be wanted. The best things are of secular growth. The instinct of
classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. Linnæus projects his
system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he
has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes.
His seventh class has not one. In process of time, he finds with
delight the little white _Trientalis_, the only plant with seven petals
and sometimes seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh class in
conformity with his system. The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst
as yet he has few shells. He labels shelves for classes, cells for
species: all but a few are empty. But every year fills some blanks, and
with accelerating speed as he becomes knowing and known. An old scholar
finds keen delight in verifying the impressive anecdotes and citations
he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years
of youth. We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all
clew to the author from whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from
Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it. We have an
admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind’s
ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in
vain. We consult the reading men: but, strangely enough, they who know
everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated
thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well,
there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that
is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties,
omniscient at last. The day comes when the hidden author of our story
is found; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who
said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs;
and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet
half-wise, half-thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly
matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related
analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the
superstitious instinct with which we have hoarded it. We remember our
old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an ancient bachelor, amid his folios,
possessed by this hope of completing a task, with nothing to break his
leisure after the three hours of his daily classes, yet ever restlessly
stroking his leg, and assuring himself “he should retire from the
University and read the authors.” In Goethe’s Romance, Makaria,
the central figure for wisdom and influence, pleases herself with
withdrawing into solitude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence.
Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point.
Many of his works hung on the easel from youth to age, and received
a stroke in every month or year. A literary astrologer, he never
applied himself to any task but at the happy moment when all the stars
consented. Bentley thought himself likely to live till fourscore,--long
enough to read everything that was worth reading,--“_Et tunc magna
mei sub terris ibit imago._” Much wider is spread the pleasure which
old men take in completing their secular affairs, the inventor his
inventions, the agriculturist his experiments, and all old men in
finishing their houses, rounding their estates, clearing their titles,
reducing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities, and leaving
all in the best posture for the future. It must be believed that there
is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his
life: there is a calendar of his years, so of his performances.

America is the country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for
leisure and tranquillity; yet we have had robust centenarians, and
examples of dignity and wisdom. I have lately found in an old note-book
a record of a visit to ex-President John Adams, in 1825, soon after the
election of his son to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and nothing
important passed in the conversation; but it reports a moment in the
life of a heroic person, who, in extreme old age, appeared still erect
and worthy of his fame.

  _----, Feb., 1825._ To-day, at Quincy, with my brother, by
  invitation of Mr. Adams’s family. The old President sat in a large
  stuffed arm-chair, dressed in a blue coat, black small-clothes,
  white stockings; a cotton cap covered his bald head. We made our
  compliment, told him he must let us join our congratulations to those
  of the nation on the happiness of his house. He thanked us, and said:
  “I am rejoiced, because the nation is happy. The time of gratulation
  and congratulations is nearly over with me: I am astonished that I
  have lived to see and know of this event. I have lived now nearly a
  century; [he was ninety in the following October:] a long, harassed,
  and distracted life.”--I said, “The world thinks a good deal of joy
  has been mixed with it.”--“The world does not know,” he replied, “how
  much toil, anxiety, and sorrow I have suffered.”--I asked if Mr.
  Adams’s letter of acceptance had been read to him.--“Yes,” he said,
  and, added, “My son has more political prudence than any man that
  I know who has existed in my time; he never was put off his guard:
  and I hope he will continue such; but what effect age may work in
  diminishing the power of his mind, I do not know; it has been very
  much on the stretch, ever since he was born. He has always been
  laborious, child and man, from infancy.”--When Mr. J. Q. Adams’s age
  was mentioned, he said, “He is now fifty-eight, or will be in July”;
  and remarked that “all the Presidents were of the same age: General
  Washington was about fifty-eight, and I was about fifty-eight, and
  Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Madison, and Mr. Monroe.”--We inquired when he
  expected to see Mr. Adams.--He said: “Never: Mr. Adams will not come
  to Quincy but to my funeral. It would be a great satisfaction to me
  to see him, but I don’t wish him to come on my account.”--He spoke of
  Mr. Lechmere, whom he “well remembered to have seen come down daily,
  at a great age, to walk in the old town-house,”--adding, “And I wish
  I could walk as well as he did. He was Collector of the Customs
  for many years under the Royal Government.”--E. said: “I suppose,
  sir, you would not have taken his place, even to walk as well as
  he.”--“No,” he replied, “that was not what I wanted.”--He talked of
  Whitefield, and “remembered when he was a Freshman in College, to
  have come into town to the _Old South_ church, [I think,] to hear
  him, but could not get into the house;--I however, saw him,” he said,
  “through a window, and distinctly heard all. He had a voice such as
  I never heard before or since. He cast it out so that you might hear
  it at the meeting-house, [pointing towards the Quincy meeting-house,]
  and he had the grace of a dancing-master, of an actor of plays.
  His voice and manner helped him more than his sermons. I went with
  Jonathan Sewall.”--“And you were pleased with him, sir?”--“Pleased!
  I was delighted beyond measure.”--We asked if at Whitefield’s return
  the same popularity continued.--“Not the same fury,” he said, “not
  the same wild enthusiasm as before, but a greater esteem, as he
  became more known. He did not terrify, but was admired.”

We spent about an hour in his room. He speaks very distinctly for so
old a man, enters bravely into long sentences, which are interrupted by
want of breath, but carries them invariably to a conclusion, without
correcting a word.

He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, and “Peep at the Pilgrims,”
and “Saratoga,” with praise, and named with accuracy the characters
in them. He likes to have a person always reading to him, or company
talking in his room, and is better the next day after having visitors
in his chamber from morning to night.

He received a premature report of his son’s election, on Sunday
afternoon, without any excitement, and told the reporter he had
been hoaxed, for it was not yet time for any news to arrive. The
informer, something damped in his heart, insisted on repairing to the
meeting-house, and proclaimed it aloud to the congregation, who were
so overjoyed that they rose in their seats and cheered thrice. The
Reverend Mr. Whitney dismissed them immediately.

       *       *       *       *       *

When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well
spare,--muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works
that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy,
is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions, leaves in
happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that whoever
loves is in no condition old. I have heard, that, whenever the name of
man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves
to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper
comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working
of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just
ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the
moral sentiment.


THE END.


Cambridge: Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company.




FOOTNOTES:


[A] Dr. Thomas Brown.

[B] Iliad, III. 191.

[C] Diary, I. 169.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


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