 SA's Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Red by Bob Neufeld. The Lords of Life, the Lords of Life. I saw them pass in their own guise. Like and unlike, portly and grim, use and surprise, surface and dream, succession swift and spectral wrong, temperament without a tongue and the inventor of the game Omnipresent without name. Some to see, some to be guessed. They marched from east to west. Little man, least of all, among the legs of his guardians tall, walked about with puzzled look. Him by the hand, dear nature, took. Dearest nature, strong and kind, whispered, Darling, never mind, to-morrow they will wear another face. Thou founder thou, these are thy race. Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair. There are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended. There are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the genius, which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter and gives us the lethy to drink that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah, that our genius were a little more of a genius. We are like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams. If any of us knew what we were doing or where we were going, then when we think we best know. We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that is wonderful where and when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with the dice of the moon that Osiris might be born. It is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Our ship is a romantic object except what we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating in reference. Oh, yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field, as the quarrelous farmer, only holds the world together. I quote another man saying, unluckily that other withdraws himself in the same way and quotes me. Tis the trick of nature thus to degrade today, a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye until it is lifted. Then we find tragedy, and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethy, and the men ask, What's the news, as if the old were so bad? How many individuals can we count in society? How many actions? How many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature, take the net result of Tyrabusky, Wharton, or Schlegel, is a sum of very few ideas and very few original tales, all the rest being variation of these. So in this great society, wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity. What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough, rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought. Tadea is gentle, over men's heads walking aloft, with tender feet treading so soft. People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at last we should find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth, but it turns out to be scene painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Baskovitch who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An inevitable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate. No more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years. But it would leave me as it found me, neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity. It does not touch me. Something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me or enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was Kadukas. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should not blow on him nor water flow to him nor fire burn him is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer rain, and we the pericoats that shed every drop. Nothing has left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying there, at least, is reality that will not donge us. I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make, all our blows glance, all our hits our accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual. Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountains. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of a man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius, but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown if he falls asleep in his chair, or if he laugh and giggle, or if he apologize or is infected with egotism, or thinks of his dollar, or cannot go buy food, or has gotten a child in his boyhood? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for results to stimulate him to experiment and hold him up in it? Or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception without due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same old lawbreaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment yield when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons of the year and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant experience at some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt. They die young and dodge the account, or if they live they lose themselves in the crowd. Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given temperament which will appear in a given character whose boundaries they will never pass. We look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse, in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and enjoyment. I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For temperament is a power which no man willingly hears any one praise but himself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to route. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard or the slope of his occupant reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists, but they are. Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness, oh, so thin! But the definition of spiritual should be that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love, what to religion, one would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with. I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities, in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what guise so-ever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood, hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me for assent. But sir, medical history, the report to the institute, the proven facts! I distrust the facts and the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation power in the constitution, may justly apply to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but absurdly offer it as a bar to original equity. When virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. In such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a stye of sensualism and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our sucker, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state. The secrets of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us, pero si muove. And at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence. But health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane and must humor them, then conversation dies out. Since I took such delight in Montaigne that I thought I should not read any other book, before that in Shakespeare, then in Plutarch, then in Plotinus, at one time in Bacon, afterwards in Goethe, even in Batin. But now I turn the pages of either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we feign would continue to be pleased in that manner. How strongly I have felt of pictures that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it. You shall never see it again. I have had good lessons from pictures which I have since seen without emotion or remark. Their opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is no wise to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing. The child asks, Mama, why don't I like the story as well as when you told it to me yesterday? Alas, child, it is even so with the oldest cherubim of knowledge, but will it answer thy question to say, because thou art born to a whole, and this story is a particular? The reason of the pain this discovery causes us, and we make it late in respect to works of art and intellect, is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friendship, and love. That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador's spar, which has no luster as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle, then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced. We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would feign have the praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of man who was not superfluous sometimes, but is not this pitiful? Life is not worth the taking to do tricks in. Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The party-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is earned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whatever loses, there are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures and folly is also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bow to bow, is the power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one and for another moment from that one. But what help from these finaries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. Maybe I think in these times have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. He would not rake or pitch a ton of hay. He would not rub down a horse, and the men and maidens left pale and hungry. A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough with planted trees on either side to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended in a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So does culture with us. It ends in headache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those who a few months ago were dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times. There is now no longer any right course of action nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis. Objections and criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections to every course of life and action, and practical wisdom infers an indifference from the omnipresent sense of objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifference. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, children, eat your victuals and say no more of it. To fill the hour, that is happiness. To fill the hour and leave no crevice for our repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest moldiest conventions a man of native force propers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journeys and in every step of the road to live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth carrying whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised and wise and our own today. Let us treat the men and women well, treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies. The only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour. I settle myself ever firmer, in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do brought justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot, without affection, deny to any set of men or women a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The course and frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way of sincere homage. The fine young people despise life, but in me and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good. It is a great excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for company. I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the potluck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar room. I am thankful for small mercies. I compare notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clanger and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account in sorts and bores also. They give me a reality to the circumjacent picture, with such a vanishing, meteoric appearance can ill-spare. In the morning I wake and find the old world, wife, babies and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless poetry, a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience, everything good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the picture shops of Europe for a landscape of poussin, a crayon-sketchel salvatore. With the transfiguration, the last judgment, the communion of Saint Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizi, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them, to say nothing of nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently bought at public auction in London for a hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare. But for nothing a schoolboy can read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest books, the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Then we are impatient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the woodcraft of Indians, trappers and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast and bird, but the exclusion reaches them also, reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered, and forefooted man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenets of the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt Adam and Adam, shows that the world is all outside. It has no inside. The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, gen twos, and cornetors, she does not distinguish by any favor. She becomes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law. Do not come out of Sunday school, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength, we must not harbour such disconsolate consciences, borrowed to from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled, which it is of the first importance to settle, and pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two, new and old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international copyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our books for the most we can. Equity of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought is questioned. Much is to say on both sides, and while the fat walks as hot thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, at a line every hour, and between wiles at a line. Right to hold land, right of property is disputed, and the conventions convene. And before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden and spend your earnings as a way for God sent to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble, and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will, but thou, God's darling, heed thy private dream, thou will not be missed in the scorning and skepticism. There are enough of them. Stay there in thy closet, and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit require that thou do this or avoid that. But know that thy life is a fleeting state, attend for the night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shall not be worse, and the universe which holds thee dear shall be the better. Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be invariably kept, if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to excess. Every good quality is noxious if unmixed, and to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man's peculiarity to super abound. Here among the farms we adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery. They are nature's victims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, to near, and find your life no more excellent than that of the mechanics or farmers, and themselves victims of partiality very hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures, not heroes, but quacks, conclude very reasonably that these arts are not for men, but are disease. Yet nature will not hear you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more of such every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing or a cast. Yet what are these millions who read and behold but incipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he began to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hare's breadth. The wise, through excess of wisdom, is made a fool. How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits and adjust ourselves, once and for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, I have appeared so plain a business that manly resolution and adherence to the multiplication table through all the weathers will ensure success. But ah, presently comes a day, or is it only a half hour, with its angel whispering, which discomforts the conclusions of nations and of years. Tomorrow again everything looks real and angular. The habitual standards are reinstated. Common sense is as rare as genius, is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise. And yet, he who should do his business on this understanding would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite another row than the term pikes of choice and will, namely the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists and doctors and considerate people. There are no dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky and another behind us of purest sky. You will not remember, he seems to say, and you will not expect. All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great. There hates calculators. Her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses, our organic movements are such, and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate, and the mind goes antagonizing on and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely and not by the direct stroke. Men of genius, but not yet accredited, one gets the cheer of their light without paying too great a tax. There is the beauty of the bird or the morning light and not of art. In the thought of genius there is always a surprise and the moral sentiment is well called the newness, for it is never other, as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child. The kingdom that cometh without observation. In like manner for practical success there must not be too much design. A man will not be observed in doing that which he can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action which stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life is a pudency and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility until he is born. Everything impossible until we see a success. The artist of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism that nothing is of us or our works, that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral and keep due meats and bounds which I dearly love and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last in success or failure than more or less a vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company converse and come and go and decide and execute many things and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things and drew in other persons as co-agitors, quarreled with some or all, blundered much and something is done. All are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself. The ancients struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of human life to calculation exalted chance into a divinity, but that is to say too long at the spark which glitters truly at one point, but the universe is warm with a latency of the same fire. The miracle of life which will not be expounded but will remain a miracle introduces a new element. In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Holm I think noticed that the evolution was not from one central point but co-active from three or more points. Life was no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is co-existent or ejaculated from a deeper cause as yet far from being conscious knows not its own tendency. So it is with us, now skeptical or without unity, because immersed informs and affects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value and now religious whilst in the reception of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions with this co-etaneous growth of the parts. They will one day be members and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars is a musical perfection, the ideal journeying across with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions as when being thirsty I drink water, or go to the fire being cold. No, but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. While persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, were on flocks, grays, and shepherds, pipe, and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it. I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make, oh no, I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sun-bright mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens. I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this now yet unapproachable America I have found in the West. Since neither now nor yesterday began these thoughts which have been ever, nor yet can a man be found who their first entrance knew. If I discovered life as a flux of moods, I must now add that there is that in us which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the first cause, and now with the flesh of his body. Life above life, in infinite degrees, the sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is not what you have been or foreborn, but at whose command you have done or foreborn it. Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost. These are quaint names too narrow to cover this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel before this cause which refuses to be named. Ineffable cause, which every fine genius has essayed to represent by some emphatic symbol as fails by water, an exeminis by air, an axagoras by new thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus in the moderns by love, and the metaphor of each has become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius has not been the least successful in his generalization. I fully understand language, he said, and nourish well my vast flowing vigor. I beg to ask what you call vast flowing vigor, said his companion. The explanation, replied Mencius, is difficult. This vigor is supremely great, and in the greatest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly, and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth. This vigor accords with, and assists justice and reason, and leaves no hunger. In our more correct writing we give to this generalization the name of being, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can go. Place it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. Our life seems not present so much as prospective, not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of faculty, information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap, that we are very great. So in particulars our greatness is always in a tendency or direction. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe. Now we describe this cause as that which works directly. The spirit is not helpless or needful of immediate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct effects. I am explained without explaining. I am felt without acting and where I am not. And therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves and are content that new actions should do them that office. They believe that we communicate without speech and above speech and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends at whatever distance. For the influence of action is not to be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself because a circumstance has occurred which hinders my presence where I was expected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I am should be as useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom as would be my presence in that place. I exert the same quality of power in all places. Dust journeys the mighty ideal before us. It never was known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and Onward. In liberated moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible. The elements already exist in many minds around you of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs. It is very unhappy but too late to be helped the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the fall of man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but immediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorted lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject lenses have a creative power. Perhaps there are no objects. Perhaps we lived in what we saw. Now the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects, successfully tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are a subjective phenomena. Every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the fob continued to dress his bailiffs in his livery and make them wait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and insultable in us. It is the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the providential man, is a good man on whom many people are agreed that these optical laws shall take place. By love on one part, and by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time settled, that we will look at him in the center of the horizon and ascribe to him the properties that will attach any man so seen. But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescent self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage, in what is called the spiritual world, is impossible because of the inequality between every subject and every object. The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt. Nor can any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or awakes forever in every subject. Neither can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee as between the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point. And whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of their spheres are inert. Their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of apotency the parts not in union acquire. Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think. Every other man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is no wise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside and on the outside, in its quality and in its consequences. Here in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romances will have it. It does not unsettle him or fright him with his ordinary notice of trifles. It is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes at spring from love seem right and fair from the actor's point of view, but when acted are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime to him is as black as in the felon, because the intellect qualifies, in our own case, the moral judgments, for there is no crime to the intellect. That is, antinomian, or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder, said Napoleon, speaking of the language of the intellect. To it the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal? Saints are sad because they behold sin even when they speculate from the point of view of the conscience and not of the intellect, a confusion of thought. Sin seen from the thought is a diminution, or less, seen from the conscience, or will, it is poverty or bad. The intellect names its shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not. It has objective existence, but no subjective. Thus invariably does the universe wear our color, and every object falls successfully into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges. All things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see. Use what language we will. We could never say anything but what we are. Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte are the mind's ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the newcomer like a traveling geologist who passes through our estate and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed. But every part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate. And meantime it is only puss at her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance. A subject and an object. It takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and the Sphere, Columbus and America, a reader and his book, or puss with her tail? It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these developments, and we'll find a way to punish the chemist who publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects or saturated with our humours. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and buy more vigorous self-recoveries all through the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mournful, but it is not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. It does not attempt another's work nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people's facts, but I possess such a key to my own as persuades me against all their denials that they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger they will drown in him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, come out of that, as the first condition of advice. In this hour talking America we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the important frivolity of other people, an attention and to an aim which makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine answer and leaves no appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Humanities of Escalus, Orestes supplicates Apollo whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold. The face of the God expresses a shade of regret and compassion, but is calm with the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into the eternal and beautiful. The man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoil of the earth into which his nature cannot enter, and the Humanities lying there express pictorially this disparity. The God is surcharge with his divine destiny. Illusion, temperament, succession, surface, surprise, reality, subjectiveness, these are threads on the loom of time. These are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures, not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. But who will ask where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit that I should not ask for a rash effect from mediations, councils, or the hyping of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this town and county, an overt effect on the instant month and year. The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It works on periods in which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception. I am and I have. But I do not get, and when I have fancied I have gotten anything. I found I did not. I worship with wonder the great fortune. My reception has been so large that I am not annoyed by receiving this or that super abundantly. I say to the genius, if he will pardon the proverb, In for a mill, in for a million. When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square. Or if I should die, I could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overrun the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving. Also that hankering after an overt or practical effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hardest, roughest action is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing the intellectual life and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertainment, and would suffice me a great while. I know a little would be worth the expense of this world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, that every soul which had acquired any truth should be safe from harm until another period. I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepancy, but I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they foam with a mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe that in the history of mankind there is never a solitary example of success, taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry. Why not realize your world? But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism, since there never was a right endeavor, but it succeeded. Patience and patience we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a great deal of time to eat or to sleep or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the threshold with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week. But in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in this passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat, up again, old heart, it seems to say, there is victory yet for all justice, and the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power. CHAPTER II Red by Bob Neufeld The sun set, but set not his hope. Stars rose, his faith was earlier up. Fixed on the enormous galaxy, deeper and older seemed his eye, and matched his suffering sublime the taciturnity of time. He spoke, and words more soft than rain brought the age of gold again. His action won such reverence sweet as hid all measure of defeat. Grock of his hand, he nor commends nor grieves, pleads for itself the fact, as unrepentant nature leaves her every act. I have read that those who listened to Lord Charum felt that there was something finer in the man than anything which he said. It has been complained of our brilliant English historian of the French Revolution, that when he has told all his facts about Mirebo, they do not justify his estimate of his genius. The Grocki, Agus, Cleomanes, and others of Plutarch's heroes do not in the record of facts equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh are men of great figure, and of few deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the personal weight of Washington in the narrative of his exploits. The authority of the name of Shiller is too great for his books. This inequality of the reputation to the works or anecdotes is not accounted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunderclap, but somewhat resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran all their performance. The largest part of their power was latent. This is that which we call character, a reserved force which acts directly by presence and without means. He is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart, which is company for him, so that such men are often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not need society, but can entertain themselves very well alone. The purest literary talent appears at one time great, at another time small, but character is of a stellar and undiminishable greatness. What others affect by talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes by some magnetism. Half his strength he put not forth. His victories are by demonstration of superiority and not by crossing of bayonets. He conquers because his arrival alters the face of affairs. Oh, Iole, how did you know that Hercules was a God? Because, answered Iole, I was content the moment my eyes fell on him. When I beheld Thesius, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in the chariot race. But Hercules did not wait for a contest. He conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he did. Then ordinarily appendance to events, only half attached, and that awkwardly to the world he lives in, in these examples appears to share the life of things, and to be an expression of the same laws which control the tides in the sun, numbers, and quantities. But to use a more modest illustration and nearer home, I observe that in our political elections, where this element, if it appears at all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently understand its incomparable rate. The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely the power to make his talent trusted. They cannot come at their ends by sending to Congress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one who, before he was appointed by the people to represent him, was appointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself, so that the most confident and the most violent persons learn that here is resistance on which both impudence and terror are wasted, namely faith in a fact. The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent. Nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and true as in them, nowhere so pure from selfish infusion. The constituency at home hearkens to their words, watches the color of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. Our frank countrymen of the West and South have a taste for character, and like to know whether the New Englander is a substantial man or whether the hand can pass through him. The same motive force appears in trade. There are geniuses in trade, as well as in war or the state or letters, and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told, it lies in the man. That is all anybody can tell you about it. See him, and you will know as easily why he succeeds as if you see Napoleon, you would comprehend his fortune. In the new objects we recognize the old game, the habit of fronting the fact and not dealing with it at second hand through the perceptions of somebody else. Nature seems to authorize trade as soon as you see the natural merchant, who appears not so much a private agent as her factor and minister of commerce. His natural probity combines with his insight into the fabric of society to put him above tricks, and he communicates to all his own faith that contracts are of no private interpretation. The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity and public advantage, and he inspires respect and the wish to deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of honour which attends him, and for the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability affords. This immensely stretched trade which makes the capes of the southern ocean his wharves and the Atlantic sea his familiar port centers in his brain only, and nobody in the universe can make his place good. In his parlor I see very well that he has been at hard work this morning with that knitted brow and that settled humour which all his desire to be courteous cannot shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts have been done, how many valiant knows have this day been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. I see with the pride of art and skill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote combination the consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world. He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man must be born to trade, for he cannot learn it. This virtue draws the mind more when it appears in action to ends not so mixed. It works with most energy in the smallest companies and in private relations. In all cases it is an extraordinary and incomputable agent. The excess of physical strength is paralysed by it. Higher natures overpower lower ones by affecting them with a certain sleep. The faculties are locked up and offer no resistance. Perhaps that is the universal law. When the high cannot bring up the low to itself, it benums it, as man charms down the resistance of the lower animals. Men exert on each other a similar occult power. How often has the influence of a true master realized all the tales of magic? A river of command seemed to run down from his eyes into all those who beheld him, a torrent of strong, sad light like an Ohio or Danube which pervaded them with his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. What means did you employ, was the question asked of the wife of Concini in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici, and the answer was only that influence which every strong mind has over a weak one. Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the person of Hippo or Thrasso the turnkey. Is an iron handcuff so immutable a bond? Suppose a slaver on the coast of Concini should take on board a gang of negroes which should contain persons of the stamp of Toussaint L'Overture, or let us fancy under those swarthy masks he has a gang of Washington's in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative order of the ship's company be the same? Is there nothing but rope and iron? Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never a glimpse of right in a poor slave captain's mind, and cannot these be supposed available to break or elude or in any manner overmatch the tension of an inch or two of iron ring? This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperates with it. The reason we feel one man's presence and do not feel in others is as simple as gravity. Life is the summit of being, justice is the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale, according to the purity of this element in them. The will of the pure runs down from them into other natures, as water runs down from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force is no more to be withstood than any natural force. We can drive a stone upward for a moment into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will forever fall, and whatever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft or of a lie which somebody credited justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to make itself believed. Character is this moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature, and individual is an enclosure. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought are left at large no longer. Now the universe is a close or pound. All things exist in the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With what quality is in him he infuses all nature that he can reach, nor does he tend to lose himself in vastness, but how long a curve so ever all his regards return into his own good at last. He animates all he can and sees only what he animates. He encloses the world as a patriot does his country as a material basis for his character and a theater for action. A healthy soul stands united with the just and the true as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and who so journeys towards the sun journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level. Thus men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong. The natural measure of this power is the resistance of circumstances. Impure men consider life as it is reflected in opinions, events, and persons. They cannot see the action until it is done. Yet its moral element pre-existed in the actor, and its quality as right or wrong it was easy to predict. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative. Will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north. It shares the magnetic currents of the system. The feeble souls are drawn to the south, or negative pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the action. They never behold a principle until it is lodged in a person. They do not wish to be lovely, but to be loved. Men of character like to hear of their faults. The other class do not like to hear of faults. They worship events, secure to them a fact, a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask no more. The hero sees that the event is ancillary. It must follow him. A given order of events has no power to secure to him the satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it. The soul of goodness escapes from any set of circumstances. Whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind and will introduce that power and victory which is its natural fruit, a given order of events has no power to secure to him the satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it. The soul of goodness escapes from any set of circumstances. Whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind and will introduce that power and victory which is its natural fruit into any order of events. No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character. We boast our emancipation from many suggestions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer emulate a bold joe for to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate, that I do not tremble before the Humanities, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinist Judgment Day? If I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it, or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of murder. If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and if we are capable of fear we readily find terrors. The covetousness or the malignity which saddens me when I ascribe it to society is my own. I am always environed by myself. On the other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy, but by serenity, which is joy, fixed, or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation of our truth and worth. The capitalist does not run every hour to the broker to coin his advantages into current money of the realm. He is satisfied to read in the quotations of the market that his stocks have risen. The same transport which the occurrence of the best events in the best order would occasion me, I must learn to taste purer in the perception that my position is every hour maleurated and does already command those events I desire. That exultation is only to be checked by the foresight of an order of things so excellent as to throw all our prosperities into the deepest shade. The face which character wears to me is self-sufficiness. I revert the person who is riches, so that I cannot think of him as alone or poor or exiled or unhappy or a client, but as perpetual patron, benefactor, and beatified man. Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or oversat. A man should give us a sense of mass. Society is frivolous and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an ingenious man, I shall think myself poorly entertained if he give me nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette. Rather, he shall stand stoutly in his place, and let me apprehend if it were only his resistance. Know that I have encountered a new and positive quality, great refreshment for both of us. It is much that he does not accept the conventional opinions and practices, that non-conformity will remain a goad and remembrance her, and every inquirer will have to dispose of him in the first place. There is nothing real or useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let pass in silence but must either worship or hate, and to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion and the obscure and eccentric, he helps. He puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, Man is a doll, let us eat and drink, as the best we can do, by illuminating the untried and unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment and appeal to the public indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and which must see a house built before they can comprehend the plan of it. The wise man not only leaves out his thought the many, but leaves out the few. Fountains the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because he is commanded, the assured, the primary, they are good, for these announce the instant presence of supreme power. Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. In nature there are no false valuations. A pound of water in the ocean tempest has no more gravity than in a mid-summer pond. All things work exactly according to their quality and according to their quantity. Attempt nothing they cannot do. Except man only. He has pretension. He wishes and attempts things beyond his force. I read in a book of English memoirs, Mr. Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, said he must have the treasury. He had served up to it and would have it. Xenophon and his ten thousand were quite equal to what they attempted and did it, so equal that it was not suspected to be a grand and inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that fact unrepeated, a high-water mark in military history. We have attempted it since and not been equal to it. It is only on reality that any power of action can be based. No institution will be better than the institute. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who undertook a practical reform, yet I was never able to find in him the enterprise of love he took in hand. He adopted it by ear and by the understanding from the books he had been reading. All his action was tentative. A piece of the city carried out into the fields, and was the city still, and no new fact, and could not inspire enthusiasm. Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible, undemonstrated genius agitating and embarrassing his demeanor, we had watched for its advent. It is not enough that the intellect should see the evils and their remedy. We shall still postpone our existence, nor take the ground to which we are entitled, whilst it is only a thought and not a spirit that incites us. We have not yet served up to it. These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice of incessant growth. Men should be intelligent and earnest. They must also make us feel that they have a controlling, happy future opening before them, whose early twilight's already kindled in the passing hour. The hero is misconceived and misreported. He cannot therefore wait to unravel any man's blunders. He is again on his road, adding new powers and honors to his domain and new claims on your heart, which will bankrupt you if you have loitered about the old things, and have not kept your relation to him by adding to your wealth. New actions are the only apologies and explanations of old ones which the noble can bear to offer or to receive. If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage and has doubled his power to serve you, and ere you can rise up again will burden you with blessings. We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is only measured by its works. Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, though he sleep, seems to purify the air and his house to adorn the landscape and strengthen the laws. People always recognize the difference. We know who is benevolent by quite other means than the amount of subscription to soup societies. It is only low merits that can be enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well and say it through, but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike and must suspend their judgment for years to come, you may begin to hope. Therefore it was droll in the good reamer who has written memoirs of Goethe to make out a list of his donations and good deeds, as so many hundred tollers given to Stilling, to Hagel, to Tishbine, a lucrative place found for Professor Foss, a post under the Grand Duke of Herder, a pension from Meijer, two professors recommended to foreign universities, etc., etc. The longest list of specifications of benefit would look very short. A man is a poor creature if he is to be measured so, for all these, of course, are exceptions, and the rule and the hodierno life of a good man is benefaction. The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave Dr. Eckerman of the way in which he had spent his fortune. Each bomo of mine has cost a purse of gold, half a million of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary, and the large income derived from my writings for fifty years back have been expected to instruct me in what I now know. I have besides seen, etc., etc. I own it is poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate traits of this simple and rapid power, and we are painting the lightning with charcoal. But in these long nights and vacations I like to console myself so. Nothing but itself can copy it. A word warm from the heart enriches me. I surrender at discretion. How death-cold is literary genius before this fire of life. These are the touches that reanimate my heavy soul and give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find, where I thought myself poorer, there was I most rich. Fence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be again rebuked by some new exhibition of character, strange alternation of attraction and repulsion. Character reputilates intellect yet excites it, and character passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of moral worth. Nature is nature in its highest form. It is of no use to ape it or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance, and of persistence, and of creation to this power, which will foil all emulation. This masterpiece is best where no hands but natures have been laid on it. Care is taken that the greatly destined shall slip into life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and blaze in every new thought, every blushing emotion of young genius. Two persons lately, very young children of the Most High God, have given me occasion for thought. When I explored the source of their sanctity and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each answered, from my non-conformity. I never listened to your people's law, or what they call their gospel and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own, hence this sweetness. My work never reminds you of that, is pure of that. And nature advertises me in such persons that in democratic America she will not be democratized. How cloistered and constitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal. It was only this morning that I sent away some wildflowers of these wood-gods. They are a relief from literature. These fresh drafts from the sources of thought and sentiment, as we read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first lines of written prose and verse of a nation. How captivating is their devotion to their favorite books, whether Escalus, Dante, Shakespeare, or Scott, as feeling that they have a stake in that book. Who touches that, touches them. And especially the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever read this writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake to comparisons and to be flattered? Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and whatever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends may warn them of the danger of their heads being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. I remember the indignation of an eloquent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a doctor of divinity. My friend, a man can neither be praised nor insulted. But forgive the counsels. They are very natural. I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither? Or prior to that, answer me this, are you victimizable? As I have said, nature keeps these sovereantees in her own hands, and however pertly our sermons and disciplines can divide some share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes her own gate, and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes very light of Gospels and Prophets, as one who has a great many more to produce, and no excess of time to spare on any one. There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently involved with insight and virtue, that they have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accumulation of that power we consider. Divine persons are character-born, or to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory-organized. They are usually received with ill will because they are new, and because they set abound to the exaggeration that it has been made of the personality of the last divine person. Nature never rhymes her children, never makes two men alike. When we see a great man, we fancy a resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his character and fortune, a result which he is sure to disappoint. None will ever solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his own high, unprecedented way. Character once room must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses caught in the press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective as a great building. It may not, probably does not, form relations rapidly, and we should not require rash explanation either on the popular ethics or on our own of its action. I look on sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait which the artist recorded in stone he had seen in life, and better than his copy. We have seen many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great men. How easily we read in old books when men were few of the smallest action of the patriarchs. We require that a man should be so large and columnar in the landscape that it should deserve to be recorded that he arose and girded up his loins and departed to such a place. The most credible pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance and convinced the senses. As happened to the eastern magician who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht, for Zoroaster. When the Yunani sage arrived at Balk, the Persians tell us, Gush-tasp appointed a day on which the Mo-benz of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdom, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage, unseeing that chief, said, This form and this gate cannot lie, and nothing but truth can proceed from them. Plato said it was impossible not to believe in the children of the gods, though they should speak without probable or necessary arguments. I should think myself very unhappy in my associates if I could not credit the best things in history. John Bradshaw, said Milton, appears like a consul, from which the faces are not to depart with the year, so that not on the tribunal only, but throughout his life you would regard him as sitting in judgment upon kings. I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world. The virtuous prince confronts the gods without any misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes and does not doubt. He who confronts the gods without any misgiving knows heaven. He who waits a hundred ages till a sage comes without knowing knows men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, and for ages shows empire the way. The coldest precision cannot go abroad without encountering inexplicable influences. One man fastens an eye on him, and the graves of the memory render up their dead. The secrets that make him wretched either to keep or to betray must be yielded. Another and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their cartilages. The entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and eloquence to him. And there are persons he cannot choose but remember, who give a transcendent expansion to his thought, and kindled another life in his bosom. What is so excellent as strict relations of amity when they spring from this deep root? The sufficient reply to the skeptic who doubts the power and the furniture of man is in that possibility of joyful intercourse with persons which makes the faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding which can subsist after much exchange of good offices between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap. For when man shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men which at one time we reckoned the romances of youth become in the progress of the character the most solid enjoyment. If it were possible to live in right relations with men, if we could abstain from asking anything of them, from asking their praise or help or pity and content us with compelling them through the virtue of the eldest laws, could we not deal with a few persons with one person after the unwritten statutes and make an experiment of their efficacy? Could we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek him? If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god, and there is a Greek verse which runs, The gods are to each other not unknown. Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity. They gravitate to each other and cannot otherwise. One each the other shall avoid, shall each by each be most enjoyed. Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must seat themselves without seneschal in our Olympus and as they can install themselves by seniority divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken, if the associates are brought a mile to meet, and if it be not society it is a mischievous low degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All the greatness of each is kept back, and every foible in painful activity as if the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff boxes. Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are haunted by some fear or command behind us, but if suddenly we encounter a friend we pause. Our heat and hurry look foolish enough, now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all in all noble relations. A divine person is the prophecy of the mind. A friend is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfillment of these two in one. The ages are opening this moral force. All force is the shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful and strong as it draws its inspiration fence. Men write their names on the world as they are filled with this. History has been mean. Our nations have been mobs. We have never seen a man. The divine form we do not yet know, but only the dream and prophecy of such. We do not know the majestic manners which belong to him, which appease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark and suckers them who never saw it. What greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and encouragements to us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints which the world has written and then worshipped are documents of character. The ages have exalted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged in the tie-burn of his nation, and who by the pure quality of his nature shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact, but the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king, which will rule animal and mineral virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral agents. If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least let us do them homage. In society, high advantages are set down to the possessor as disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in our private estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure to know a fine character and to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last that which we have always longed for is arrived and shines on us with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to be critical, and treat such a visitant with the jabber and suspicion of the streets argues a vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is confession, this is the right insanity, when the soul no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there any religion but this, to know that wherever in the wide desert of being the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me. If none sees it, I see it. I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms I will keep Sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom and my folly and jokes. Here is indulged by the presence of this guest. There are many eyes that can detect and honour the prudent and household virtues. There are many that can discern genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable. But when that love which is all suffering, all abstaining, all aspiring, which has vowed to itself that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it is to own it. End of essay number three.