 S.A.'s Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson. How near to good is what is fair. Which we know sooner see, but with the lines and outward error our sense is taken be. Again yourselves compose, and now put all the aptness on a figure that portion or color can disclose, that if those silent arts were lost, design and picture, they might boast from you a newer ground, instructed by the heightening sense of dignity and reverence in their true motions found. Ben Johnson. Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our exploring expedition saw the Fiji islanders getting their dinner off human bones, and they are said to eat their own wives and children. The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Guernu, west of old Thebes, is philosophical to a fault. To set up their housekeeping nothing is requisite but two or three earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please them they walk out and enter another, as there are several hundred at their command. It is somewhat singular, adds Belzoni, to whom we owe this account, to talk of happiness among people who live in sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation which they know nothing of. In the deserts of Borgu, the rock taboos still dwell in caves like cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to the whistling of birds. Again, the Bornus have no proper names. Those are called after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the gold for which these horrible regions are visited, find their way into countries where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals and man's dealers. Countries where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool, honors himself with architecture, writes laws and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many nations, and especially establishes a select society running through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy or fraternity of the best, which without written law or exact usage of any kind perpetuates itself, colonizes every new planted island and adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears. What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation of the gentleman. Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and in English literature half the drama and all the novels from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott paint this figure. The word gentleman, which like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding centuries by the importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated with the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed to the valuable properties which it designates. An element which unites all the most forcible persons of every country, makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual lack the Masonic sign cannot be any casual product, but must be an average result of the character and faculties universally found in men. This seems a certain permanent average, as the atmosphere is a permanent composition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded. Comme il faut is the Frenchman's description of good society, as we must be. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than the talent of men, and is a compound result into which every great force enters as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power. There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. The word gentleman has not any correlative abstract to express the quality. Gentility is mean, and gentleness is obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular the distinction between fashion, a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which the gentleman imports. The usual words, however, must be respected. They will be found to contain the root of the matter. The point of distinction in all this class of names as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is now in question, although our words intimate well enough the popular feeling that the appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior not in any manner dependent or servile, either on persons or opinions or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good nature or benevolence, good first and then gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune, but that is a natural result of personal force and love that they should possess and dispense the goods of the world. In times of violence every imminent person must fall in with many opportunities to approve his stoutness and worth, therefore every man's name that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages rattles in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of fashion. That is still paramount today, and in the moving crowd of good society, the men of valor and reality are known and rise to their natural place. The competition is transferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in these new areas. For a first or no leading class. In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door, but whenever used in strictness and with emphasis the name will be found to point at original energy. It describes a man standing in his own right and working after untaught methods. In a good Lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, but they must have these, giving in every company the sense of power which makes things easy to be done which don't the wise. The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage and of attempts which intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane or a sea fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons, but memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge in the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work of the world and equal to their versatile office, men of the right cesarean pattern who have great range of affinity. I am far from believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland, that for ceremony there must go to to it, since a bold fellow will go through the cunningness forms, and am of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken through, and only that plentious nature is rightful master which is the complement of whatever person it converses with. My gentleman gives the law where he is. He will outpray saints in chapel, out general veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates and good with academicians, so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him. He has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself as him. The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of this strong grip. Soledin, Sapor, the Sid, Julius, Caesar, Scypio, Alexander, Pericles, and the Lordelius personages. They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any condition at a high rate. A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary in the popular judgment to the completion of this man of the world, and it is a material deputy which walks through the dance which the first has led. Money is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends the habits of clique and caste, and makes itself felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion. And if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already of his own order, he is not to be feared. The Arjunis, Socrates, and Epaminondas are gentlemen of the best blood, who have chosen the condition of poverty when that of wealth was equally open to them. I use these old names, but the men I speak of are my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every generation one of these well-appointed knights, but every collection of men furnishes some example of the class, and the politics of this country and the trade of every town are controlled by these hardy and irresponsible doers, who have invention to take the lead and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellowship with crowds and makes their action popular. The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion by men of taste. The association of these masters with each other and with men intelligent of their merits is mutually agreeable and stimulating. The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By swift consent everything superfluous is dropped, everything graceful is renewed. Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler science of defense to parry and intimidate, once matched by the skill of the other party they drop the point of the sword. Points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere where in life is a less troublesome game and not a misunderstanding rises between the players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments and to bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation as a railway aids traveling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with the more key that it becomes a badge of social and civil distinctions. Thus grows up fashion and equivocal semblance, the most puissant and the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed and which morals and violence assault in vain. There exists a strict relation between the class of power and the exclusive and polished circles. The last are always filled or filling from the first. The strong men usually give some allowance even to the petulances of fashion for that affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court the faux-bourge Saint-Joumin, doubtless with the feeling that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed. It is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great. It is a hall of the past. It usually sets its face against the great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls. They are absent in the field. They are working, not triumphant. Fashion is made up of their children, of those who, through the value and virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of cultivation and generosity, and in their physical organization a certain health and excellence which secures to them, if not the highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, the working heroes, the Cortes, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as they. That fashion is funded talent. Is Mexico Marengo and Trafalgar beaten out thin? That the brilliant names of fashion run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and their sons in the ordinary course of things must yield the possession of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes and stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year 1805 it is said every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted and exploded long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before yesterday that is city and court today. Erestocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least favored class and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the excluding minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk. And if the people should destroy class after class until two men only were left, one of these would be the leader and would be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life and is one of the estates of the realm. I am the more struck with this tenacity when I see its work. It respects the administration of such unimportant matters that we should not look for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet men under some strong moral influence as a patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man and nature. We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this of caste or fashion, for example, yet come from year to year and see how permanent that is in this Boston or New York life of man, where too it has not the least countenance from the law of the land, not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line. Here are associations whose ties go over and under and through it, a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a college class, a fire club, a professional association, a political, a religious convention. The persons seem to draw inseparably near, yet that assembly wants dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in the scale of good society. Porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen, earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society. Its doors bar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. The natural gentleman finds his way in and will keep the oldest patrician out who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself. Good breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of each other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris by the purity of their tumour. To say what good a fashion we can, it rests on reality and hates nothing so much as pretenders. To exclude and mystify pretenders and send them into everlasting coventry is its delight. We condemn in turn every other gift of man of the world, but the habit even in little and the least matters of not appealing to any but our own sense of propriety constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. But so will jock the teamster pass in some crisis that brings him thither, and find favour as long as his head is not giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and cattillions. But there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed, or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way, and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All that fashion demands is composure and self-content. A circle of men perfectly well-bred would be a company of sensible persons in which every man's native manners and character appeared. If the fashionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be of mine or any man's good opinion. But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is an underling. I have nothing to do with him. I will speak with his master. A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere and society with him. Not bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams and will be an orphan in the merriest club. If you can see Vichy Yenvor with his tail on, but Vichy Yenvor must always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace. There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation and whose glance will at any time determine for the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods, accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftiest deities, and allow them all their privilege. They are clear in their office, nor could they be thus formidable without their own merits. But do not measure the importance of this class by their pretension, but imagine that a fob can be the dispenser of honor and shame. They pass also at their just rate. For how can they otherwise in circles which exist as a sort of herald's office for the sifting of character? As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so that appears in all forms of society. We pointedly and by name introduce the parties to each other. Know you before all heaven and earth that this is Andrew and this is Gregory. They look each other in the eye, they grasp each other's hand to identify and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman never donges, his eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has been met. For what is it that we seek in so many visits and hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or do we not insatiably ask, was a man in the house? I may easily go into a great household where there is much substance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any amphitrion who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come to see and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal etiquette that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were the Tuileries or the Escurial, is good for anything without a master. Then yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality. Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, ecoupage, and all manner of toys as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if a man were of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rancontre front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent convenience whether the guest is too great or too little. We call together many friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people and guard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprata, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them and speedily managed to rally them off, and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough with eight hundred thousand troops at his back to face a pair of free-born eyes, but fenced himself with etiquette and within triple barriers of reserve. And as all the world knows from Madame de Steyer was once when he found himself observed to discharge his face of all expression. The emperors and rich men are by no means the most skillful masters of good manners. No rents roll nor army list can dignify skulking and dissimulation, and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good breeding point that way. I have just been reading in Mr. Haslett's translation Montagne's account of his journey into Italy, and I'm struck with nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time. His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event of some consequence. Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty to himself and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which he has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentleman. The compliment of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the points of good breeding I must require and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne and hold a king. I prefer a tendency to statelyness to an excess of fellowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence. Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures that he might not want the hint of tranquility and self-poise. We should meet each morning as from foreign countries, and spending the day together should depart at night as into foreign countries. In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate, let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all around Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion. This is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push this deference to a Chinese etiquette, but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise. A lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at these invaders, who fill a studious house with blast and running to secure some paltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbor's needs. Must we have a good understanding with one another's palates? As foolish people who have lived long together know one each once salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate as if I knew already. Every natural function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should signify, however remotely, the recollection of the grandeur of our destiny. Perfect flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling. But if we dare to open another leaf and explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a union of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a perception of and an homage to beauty in our companion. Other virtues are in request in the field and work-yard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a slavin and un-presentable person. Spiritual qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature it respects everything which tends to unite men, it delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams or uses the superlative degree or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a proditious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social instrument. Beauty will pardon much to genius and special gifts, but being in its nature a convention, it loves what is conventional or what belongs to coming together. That makes the good and bad of manners, namely what helps and hinders fellowship, for fashion is not good sense absolute but relative, not good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome egotistical solitary and gloomy people, hates whatever can interfere with total blending of parties, while it values all peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And besides the general infusion of which to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit. The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must leave the omniscience of business at the door when he comes in to the palace of beauty. Society loves creole natures and the sleepy languishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace, and good will. The hour of drowsy strength which disarms criticism, perhaps because such a person seems to reserve himself for the rest of the game and not spend himself on surfaces. An ignoring eye which does not see the annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences that cloud the brow and smother the voice of the sensitive. Therefore besides personal force and so much perception as constitutes unearing taste, society demands in its partition class another element already intimated which it significantly terms good nature. Expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige up to the heights of magnanimity and love, insight we must have, or we shall run against one another and miss the way to our food, but intellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the company cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there finds in every turn of the conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say. The favourites of society, and what it calls whole souls, are able men and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shooting-match. England which is rich in gentlemen, furnished in the beginning of the present century a good model of that genius in which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the most social disposition and real love of men. Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate in which Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons, when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with such tenderness that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close to my matter that I must hazard the story. A tradesman who had long done him for the note of three hundred guineas found him one day counting gold and demanded payment. No, said Fox, I owe this money to Sheridan, it is a debt of honour. If an accident should happen to me he has nothing to show. Then said the creditor, I change my debt into a debt of honour, and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence and paid him, saying his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait. Before of liberty, friend of the Hindu, friend of the African slave, he possessed a great personal popularity, and Napoleon said of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris in 1805, Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries. We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say, but I will neither be driven from some allowance to fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain that, if we can, but by all means we must affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to its sharp contrasts. Fashion which affects to be honour is often, in all men's sense, only a ballroom code. Yet so long as it is the highest circle in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in it, for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous, and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt if we should enter the acknowledged first circles and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. There is not only the right of conquest, which genius pretends, the individual demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the best, but less claims will pass for the time, for fashion loves lions and points like Circe to her home company. This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark, and that is my Lord ride who came yesterday from Baghdad, here is Captain Freese from Cape Tirmigan, and Captain Symes from the interior of the earth, and Monsieur Jovers who came down this morning in a balloon, Sir Hobnail the reformer, and Reverend Jules-Botte who has converted the whole Torre zone in his Sunday school, and Senior Torre del Greco who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring it into the bay of Naples, Spahy the Persian ambassador, and Toul-Wil-Shan the exiled Nabob of Nepal, whose saddle is the new moon. But these are monsters of one day, and tomorrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens. For in these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and in general the clericy wins their way up into these places and get represented here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in cologne water and perfumed and dined and introduced and properly grounded in all the biography and politics and anecdotes of the Boudoirs. Yet these finaries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed and commandments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of politeness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees. What if they are in the mouths of selfish men and used as means of selfishness? What if the false gentleman always bows the true out of the world? What if the false gentleman contrives so as to address his companion as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and also to make them feel excluded? Real service will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is not merely French and sentimental, nor is it to be concealed that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last distinguish God's gentlemen from fashions. The epitaph of Sir Jankin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age. Here lies Sir Jankin Grout, who loved his friend and persuaded his enemy. What his mouth ate, his hand paid for. What his servants robbed, he restored. If a woman give him pleasure, he supported her in pain. He never forgot his children, and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body. Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man. There is still some absurd inventor of charities, some guide and comforter of runaway slaves, some friend of Poland, some Phil Helene, some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation and orchards when he has grown old, some well-conceived piety, some just man happy in an ill fame, some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And these are the centers of society, on which it returns for fresh impulses. These are the creators of fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this church, Scypio and the Sid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant heart who worshipped beauty by word and by deed. The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the actual aristocracy, or only on its edge, as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the Sannishals, who do not know their sovereign when he appears. The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off their coming. It says, with the Elder Gods, As heaven and earth are fairer far than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs, and as we show beyond that heaven and earth, in form and shape compact and beautiful, so on our heels of fresh perfection treads, at power more strong in beauty, born of us, and faded to excel us, as we pass in glory that old darkness, for tis the eternal law, that first in beauty shall be first in might. Therefore within the ethical circle of good society there is a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its inner and imperial court. The parliament of love and chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native, with the love of beauty, the delight in society, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review in such manner as that we could at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman and no lady, for although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars we should detect offence, because elegance comes of no breeding but of burr. There must be romance of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of impertenencies will not avail. It must be genius which takes that direction. It must be not courteous, but courtesy. My behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and conversation of the superior classes. The kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths before the days of Waverly. But neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart, epigrammatic speeches. But the dialogue is in costume and does not please on the second reading. It is not warm with life. In Shakespeare alone the speakers do strut and bridle. The dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles that have been the best-bred man in England and in Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face. A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form. It gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures. It is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet by the moral quality radiating from his countenance he may abolish all considerations of magnitude and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding and held out protection and prosperity, one who did not need the aid of a courtsuit, but carried the holiday in his eye, who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence, who shook off the captivity of etiquette with happy spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood. But with the port of an emperor, if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of million. The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers are the places where man executes his will. Let him yield or divide the scepter at the door of the house. Woman with her instinct of behavior instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or in short any want of that large, flowing and magnanimous deportment which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it excels in women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise to the new chivalry on behalf of women's rights. Certainly let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature that I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into heroic and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polimnia, and by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the courses calculators that another road exists than that which their feet know. But besides those who make good in our imagination the place of muses and delphic sibles, are there not women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs over and fills the house with perfume, who inspire us with courtesy, who unloose our tongues and we speak, who anoint our eyes and we see. We say things we never thought to have said. For once our walls of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large. We were children playing with children in a wild field of flowers. Steep us, we cried in these influences for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and will write in many colored words the romance that you are. Was it Hafiz or Fidusi, as said of his Persian lila, she was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life when I saw her day after day radiating every instant redundant joy and grace on all around her. She was a solvent, powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society, like air or water, an element of such a great range of affinities that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where she is present all others will be more than they are want. She was a unit and whole, so that whatever she did became her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say her matters were marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion. She did not study Persian grammar nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seem to be written upon her, for though the bias of her nature was not to thought but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature as to meet intellectual persons by the fullness of her heart, warming her by her sentiments, believing as she did that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble. I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its golden book, and in whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is showy and relative. It is great by their allowance. Its proudest gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility. The advantages which fashion values are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely, out of this precinct they go for nothing, or of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought and virtue. But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart of law. This is the royal blood, this the fire which, in all countries and contingencies, will work after its kind and conquer and expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? To succour the unfashionable and the eccentric? Rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon? The itinerant with his consul's paper which commends him to the charitable? The swarthy Italian with his few broken words of English? The lame pauper haunted by overseers from town to town? Even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or woman? Feel the noble exception of your presence and your house from the general bleakness and stoniness? To make such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is gentle but to allow it and give their heart and yours one holiday from the national caution? Without the rich heart wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of Shiraz could not afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and deep that although his speech was so bold and free with the Koran as to disgust all the dervishes, yet there was never a poor outcast, eccentric or insane man, some fool who had cut off his beard or who had been mutilated under a vow or had a pet madness in his brain but fled at once to him. That great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness which he harbored he did not share. Is not this to be rich, this only to be rightly rich? But I shall hear without pain that I play the courtier very ill and talk of that which I do not well understand. It is easy to see that what is called by distinction society and fashion has good law as well as bad, as much that is necessary and much that is absurd. Too good for banning and too bad for blessing it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythology in an attempt to settle its character. I overheard Jov one day, said Silenus, talking of destroying the earth. He said it had failed. They were all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse as fast as the days exceeded each other. Manurva said she hoped not. They were only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance that they had a blur or indeterminate aspect seen far or seen near. If you called them bad they would appear so. If you called them good they would appear so. And there was no one person or action among them who would not puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally bad or good. End of Essay Number 4. Gifts of one who loved me to as high time they came, when he ceased to love me, time they stopped for shame. It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery and be sold. I do not think that this general insolvency, which involves in some sort all of the population, to be the reason of the difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year and other times in bestowing gifts, since it is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in the choosing. If at any time it comes into my head that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are always fit presents. Flowers because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature. They are like music heard out of a workhouse. Nature does not conquer us. We are children, not pets. She is not fond. Everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men used to tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure the flowers give us. What am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities and admit of fantastic values being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him, and should set before me a basket of fine summer fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the labor and the reward. For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, and one is glad when an imperative leaves him no option, since if the man at the door have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you could procure him a paint box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man eat bread or drink water in the house or out of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply these first ones. Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the fury. Most things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is that we might convey to some person that which property belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore, the poet brings his poem, the shepherd his lamb, the farmer coin, the miner a gem, the sailor coral and shells, the painter his picture, the girl a handkerchief of her own sowing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property to make presence of gold and silver stuffs as a kind of symbolic sin offering or payment of blackmail. The law of benefits is a difficult channel which requires careful sailing or brood boats. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them! We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves, but not from anyone who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seem something of degrading dependence in living by it. Brother, if jove to thee a present make, take heed that from his hands thou nothing take. We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arrange society if it do not give us, besides earth and fire and water, opportunity, love, reverence, and objects of veneration. He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I think is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported. And if the gift pleases me over much, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart and see that I love his commodity and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondence to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, how can you give me this part of oil or this flagon of wine when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all timings, not at all considering the value of the gift, but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, I rather sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my Lord Timon, for the expectation of gratitude is mean and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart burning from one who has had the ill luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and who says, do not flatter your benefactor. The reason of these discords I conceive to be that there is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that goodwill I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely stroke a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one. We seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit which is directly received. But rectitude scatters favors on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people. I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is the genius and God of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There are persons from whom we always expect fairy tokens that us not cease to expect them. This is prerogative and not to be limited by our municipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to you. You do not need me. You do not feel me. Then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick. No more. They eat your service like apples and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you and delight in you all the time. Essays, second series by Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Essay number six, Nature, read by Bob Neufeld. The rounded world is fair to see. In times folded in mystery, though baffled seers cannot impart the secret of its laboring heart, throb thine with nature's throbbing breast, and all is clear from east to west. Spirit that lurks each form within beckons to spirit of its kin, self-kindled every atom glows, and hints the future in which it owes. There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring. When in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba. And everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These Halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god, all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, meet the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to entrancess. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The ageately reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history or church or state is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature. These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We can never part with it, the mind loves its old home. As water to our thirst, so is rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water, it is cold flame. What health, what affinity. Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we chat effectively with strangers, comes in this honest face and takes a grave liberty with us and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest administrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety, and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if we should be wrapped away into all that we dream of heaven and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture. It seems as if the day is not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object, the fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form, the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water and over plains, the waving rye field, the mimic waving of acres of Houstonia, whose innumerable florets whitened and ripple before the eye, the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes, the musical steaming odorous south wind which converts all trees to wind-harps, the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine logs which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room. These are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land with limited outlook and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty. We dip our hands in this painted element. Our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a veledjatura, a royal brevel, the proudest, most heart-bejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste ever decked and enjoyed establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the porousness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am over-instructed from my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance. But a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging gardens, villas, garden houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invites, not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, not these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said. We know of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company. But the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles or Paphos or Tessaphone. Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works of art, which were otherwise bubbles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature on imaginative minds. Ah, if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches. A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp, and this supernatural Tilarira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters and huntresses. And a musical note be so lofty, so hotly beautiful. To the poor young poet, thus fabulous, is his picture of society. He is loyal, he respects the rich. They are rich for the sake of his imagination, how poor his fancy would be if they were not rich. That they have some high-fenced grove which they call a park, that they live in larger and better garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering places and to distant cities, these make the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation out of the air and clouds and forests that skirt the road, a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genie to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air. The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempies so easily may not always be found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock, as well as from the top of the Alleghenies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campania or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uproar clouds and the colors of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which schoolmen call natura naturata or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called the subject of religion. A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity. He goes to see a woodlot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fouling piece or a fishing rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wordcraft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as woodcutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take place in the most sumptuous drawing rooms of all the wreaths and florist chaplets of the bookshops. Yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphemism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or in curiosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because, there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it. It wants men, and the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking until the landscape has human figures that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen. Nature is erect and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dullness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescence, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction. If our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology, psychology mesmerism, with intent to show where our spoons are gone, and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry. But taking timely warning and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the efficient nature, natura naturans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd, and in indescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and speculae through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature and taught us to disuse our Dame School measures and exchange our mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil and opened the door for the remote flora, fauna, series, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite? How far the quadruped? How inconceivably remote is man? All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster, farther yet to play-toe in the preaching of the immortality of the soul, yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides. Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of nature, motion and rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of the brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells. The addition of matter from year to year arrives at last at the most complex forms. And yet so poor is nature with all her craft that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one stuff, but one stuff with its two ends to serve up all her dreamlike variety. Compounded how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff and betrays the same property. Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures, but by clothing the sides of the bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omni presence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage. Otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor, but they grope ever upward towards consciousness. The trees are imperfect men and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated. The maples and ferns are still uncorrupt, yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us. We have had our day, now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness. Things are so strictly related that, according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtyard in the bourgeois of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and biedu, to Himalaya mountain chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are natures, we need not be superstitious about town, as if that terrific or benific force did not find us there also, and fashion cities, nature who made the mason made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool, disengaged air of natural objects makes them enviable to us, chafed in irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat roots, but let us be men instead of woodchucks, and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk. This guiding entity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the peace, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is characterized in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secret. Every known fact in natural science was devised by the presentiment of somebody before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature. Moon, plants, gas, crystal are a concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davey and Black is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discover. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter-action runs also into organization. The astronomers said, give us matter and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter. We must also have a single impulse, one sharp to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew. A very unreasonable postulate said the metaphysicians, and a plain begging of the question, could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection as well as the continuation of it? Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls ruled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse, though to every creature, Nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way, in every instance a slight generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity, the air would rot, and without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it, and when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man who sees how paltry a game is played and refuses to play, but blabs the secret, how then, is the bird flown? Oh no, the weary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aim, makes them a little wrong-headed in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl for a generation or two more. The child, with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted ship to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred, but Nature has answered her purpose with the curly dimple lunatic. She has tasked every faculty and has secured the symmetrical grove of the bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions, and end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline luster, plays round the top of every toy to his eye to ensure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please. We do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that if thousands perish, thousands may plant them so, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that at least one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake or at a sudden noise, protects us through a multitude of groundless alarms from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection with no prospective end, and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely progeny or the perpetuity of the race. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane. Each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great cases are never tried on their merits, but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the sides of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be mistaken that God himself cannot do without wise men. Jacob Bayman and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant. He reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star. He wets them with his tears. They are sacred, too good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born of the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend codely turns them over and passes from the writing to conversation with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself, days and nights of fervent life of communion with angels of darkness and of light have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence, or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience, and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature, and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace, the truth would not the less bespoken might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive in particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world, or do anything well who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity. In like manner there is, throughout nature, something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary, a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink, but bread and wine mix and cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances, our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method. What a train of means to secure a little conversation. This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipages, this bank stock and the file of mortgages, trade to all the world, country house and college by the waterside, all for a little conversation, eye clear and spiritual. Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No. All these things came from successive efforts by these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life and give opportunity. Conversation, character, where the avowed ends. Wealth was good, as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner table in a different apartment. Thought virtue beauty were the ends. But it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this object. The old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world are cities and governments of the rich, and the masses are not men, but poor men. That is, men who would be rich. This is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere. When all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations, where the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of men. Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is, in woods and waters, a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour as forlooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. It's splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset. But who can go where they are or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world for ever and ever. It is the same among the men and women as among the silent trees, always a referred existence and absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible. The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star. She cannot be heaven if she stooped to such a one as he. What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse of this flattery and bulking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petrolence at rest and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts herself into a vast promise and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives, he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas, the same sorcery has spoiled the skill. No syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it and report of the return of the Curve. But it also appears that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with nature or deal with her as we deal with her essence. If we measure our individual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workmen streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry and over them of life pre-existing within us in their highest form. The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the rest or identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours, and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Their servitude to particulars betrays into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive or a balloon. The new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electromagnetism your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner. It is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of objects. But nothing is gained, nature cannot be cheated. Man's life is but seventy solids long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought, hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distills its essence into every drop of rain, every moment instructs, and every object, for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood, it convulsed us as pain, it slid into us as pleasure, it enveloped us in dull melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor. We did not guess its essence until after a long time. End of essay number 6.