 THE THREE GREAT VIRTUES 3 Essays by Emerson Section 4, Love Part 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Love Part 1 Quote I was a gem concealed. Me, my burning ray, revealed. And, quote, the Koran. Love Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments. Each of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking in the first sentiment of kindness, anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life, which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and works a revolution in his mind and body, unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage and gives permanence to human society. The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of a mature philosophy as chilling with age and pendentry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the court and parliament of love, but from these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors, for it is to be considered that the passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsake not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it no less than the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the world and all nature with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose some of its latter, he who paints it at the last some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and the muses aid we may attain to that inward view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful. So central that it shall commend itself to the eye at whatever angle beholden. And the first condition is that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured as the life of man is not to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas, I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter a mature life the remembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect or as truth, but all is sour if seen as experience. Details are melancholy. The plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world the painful kingdom of time and place dwell care and canker and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing, but grief cleaves two names and persons, and the partial interests of today and yesterday. The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over the novels of passion when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature? And what fastens attention in the intercourse of life like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again, but we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the course and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the schoolhouse door, but today he comes running into the entry and meets one fair child disposing her satchel. He holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him, and these two little neighbors that were so close just now have learned to respect each other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging half-artful, half-artless ways of schoolgirls who go into the country shops to buy a skin of silk or a sheet of paper and talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop boy? In the village they are on perfect equality, which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations with what they're fun and they're earnest about Edgar and Jonas and Elmyra, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing school, and when the singing school would begin and other nothings concerning which the parties could. By and by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men. I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words, for persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay as treasonable to nature ought derogatory to the social instincts. For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison and putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty years. Yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is wreath of flowers to the oldest brows. But here in a strange fact it may seem to many men in revising their experience that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft. Surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances, in looking backward they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this grouping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things anew, which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art, which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound with the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory. When he became all I when one was present, and all memory when one was gone, when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage, when no place is too solitary and none too silent for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest can give him. For the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images written in water, but as Plutarch said, quote, enameled in fire, end quote, and make the study of midnight, quote, thou art not gone being gone, where ere thou art thou leavest in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart, end quote. In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear, for he touched the secret of the matter who said of love, quote, all other pleasures are not worth its pains, end quote. And when the day was not long enough but the night too must be consumed in keen recollections, when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on, when the moonlight was a pleasing fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and the air was coined into song, when all business seemed an impertinence and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets mere pictures. The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent, and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite, yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men, quote, fountain heads and pathless groves, places which pale passion loves, moonlight walks when all the fowls are safely housed, save bats and owls. A midnight bell, a passing groan, these are the sounds we feed upon, end quote. Behold there in the wood the fine madman. He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights. He dilates. He is twice a man. He walks with arms akimbo. He soliloquizes. He accosts the grass and the trees. He feels the blood of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins. And he talks with the brook that wets his foot. The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances. The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment. It makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society. He is somewhat. He is a person. He is a soul. And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun, wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy, poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft budding informing loveliness is society for itself. And she teaches his eye why beauty was pictured with lovers and grace attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich, though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy. She indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother or her sisters or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds. End of Love Part One Recording by Robert Scott July the 6th, 2007 The Three Great Virtues Three Essays by Emerson Love Part Two This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Love Part Two The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue, who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one another face and form. We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find where at this dainty emotion. This wandering gleam points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization, nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society. But as it seems to me, to quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshadow, we cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline dove's neck lusters, hovering and even-essent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Gene Paul Richter signify when he said to music, Quote, away, away, thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find. The same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand. But demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting and poetry. The success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor inquires, quote, whether it is not to be referred to some pure state of sensation and existence, end quote. In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when it dissatisfies us with any end, when it becomes a story without an end, when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions, when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness, when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar, he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset. Hence arose the saying, quote, if I love you, what is that to you? End quote. We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will but above it. It is not you but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know. This agrees well with that high philosophy of beauty which the ancient writers delighted in, for they said that the soul of man embodied here on earth went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun and unable to see any other objects than those of this world which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair, and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty and the cause of the beauty. If, however, from too much conversing with material objects the soul was gross and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow, body being unable to fulfill the promise which beauty holds out, but if accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed, by conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities and a quicker apprehension of them, then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same, and beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls. Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, Epuleus, taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world. Wiltsed one eye is prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering tubs, worst when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim. But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circle ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics and geography and history. But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher and more interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits, persons lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive idealizing instinct predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelligence of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf buds. From exchanging glances they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting trough and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied and the body is wholly ensouled. Quote, her pure and eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks and so distinctively wrought that one might almost say her body thought. End quote. Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life with this pair has no other aim, asks no more than Juliet, then Romeo, night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion are all contained in this form full of soul. In this soul which is all form, the lovers delight in endearments, in avals of love, in comparisons of their regards, when alone they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh their affection and adding up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exalt in discovering that, willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow and pain arrive to them as to all. Love, praise. It makes covenants with eternal power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus affected and which adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray. And bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments as toys, and puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue, and these signs are there, however, eclipsed. They appear and reappear and continue to attract, but the regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman. Quote, the person love does to us fit, like manna, has the taste of all in it. The world rolls, the circumstances vary every hour, the angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such. They confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the good offices which man and woman are severely appointed to discharge in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance. Whether present or absent of each other's designs, at last they discover that all which at first drew them together, those once sacred features, that magical play of charms, was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built, and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage. Forseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness, looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophecies this crisis from early infancy. At the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium. Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex nor person nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers and thereby learners. That is our permanent state, but we are often made to feel that our affections are but tense of a night, though slowly and with pain the objects of the affections change. As the objects of thought do, there are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons, but in health the mind is presently seen again. It's overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable light, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their infinite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose anything by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful and so on forever. End of Love by Emerson Recording by Robert Scott July the 6th, 2007 The Three Great Virtues Three Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson Section 6, Friendship Part 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Friendship Part 1 Friendship A ruddy drop of manly blood, the surging sea outweighs, the world uncertain comes and goes, the lover-rooted stays. I fancied he was fled, and after many a year glowed unexhausted kindliness like daily sunrise there. My careful heart was free again. Oh friend, my bosom said, through thee alone the sky is arched, through thee alone the rose is red. All things through thee take nobler form and look beyond the earth. The mill round of our fate appears a sun-path in thy worth. Me too, thy nobleness has taught to master my despair. The fountains of my hidden life are through thy friendship fair. Friendship We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Mawr, all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world. The whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, who we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us. How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom though silently we warmly rejoice to be with. Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The Heart-Knoweth The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire, so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of goodwill they make the sweetness of life. Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression. But it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and forthwith troops of gentle thought invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes, a commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up at dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger only the good report is told by others. Only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversations with him. We talk better than we are want. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last, and the best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now when he comes he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart and the communications of the soul no more. What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again. What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling, how beautiful on their approach to this beating heart the steps and forms of the gifted and true. The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed. There is no winter and no night, all tragedies, all annuies vanish, all duties even. Nothing fills the preceding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years. I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts. I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time. Nor is nature so poor, but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations. And as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the deity in me. In them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first bard, poetry without stop, hymn, ode, and epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not, for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the genius of my life being thus social. The same affinity will exert its energy, on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be. I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to, quote, crush the sweet poison of misused wine, end quote, of the affections. A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours. But the joy ends in the day. It yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it. My action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friends' accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We overestimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is he, his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships. And in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a universal success, even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantage, no powers, no gold, or force can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles, the planet has a faint moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, oh friend, that the vast shadow of the phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity. The also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Though art not being as truth is and justice is, thou art not my soul, but a picture and an effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently by the germination of new buds extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude, and it goes alone for a season that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love. Dear friend, if I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise, my moods are quite attainable, and I respect thy genius, it is to me as yet unfathomed. Yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment, thine ever or never. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them in a texture of wine and dreams instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a hidden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain we are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which as soon as we meet begin to play and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted. After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirit, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude. I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many friends I have and what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself if then I made my other friends my asylum. Quote, the valiant warrior, famous for fight, after a hundred victories once foiled, is from the Book of Honor raised quite, and all the rest forgot for which he toiled. Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the natural Langsamkite, which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven, which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth. Let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth impossible to be overturned of his foundations. The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave for the time all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common. So much is this pure, and nothing is so much divine. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork. But the solidest thing we know, for now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend. It might well be built like a festal bower or arch to entertain him a single day. Happier if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law. He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up like an Olympian to the great games where the first born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contest where time, want, danger are in the lists. And he alone is Victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud, I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those under most garments of dissimilation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere, at the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows us not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, requires to be humored. He has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being. In all its height, variety, and curiosity reiterated in a foreign form so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. End of Friendship Part 1. Recording by Robert Scott. August the 7th, 2007. The Three Great Virtues. Three Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Section 7. Friendship Part 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Friendship Part 2. The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holding two men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle. But we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me and I have touched the goal of fortune, I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says, quote, I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those who I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted, end quote. I wish that friendship should have feet as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans. It is a good neighbor. It watches with the sick. It holds the pall at the funeral and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the God under this disguise of a subtler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity. I have the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of plowboys and tinpedlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides and a curicle and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce, the most strictly and homely that can be joined, more strict than any of which we have experienced. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery. Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted and with all so circumstanced, open perenns, for even in that particular a poet says, love demands that the parties are all together paired and perenns. That its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of God-like men and women, variously related to each other and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one-to-one preemptory from conversation which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourses at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you shall not have one new and hardy word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two across the table as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul, exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondness of brother to sister, of wife to husband are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party and not poorly limited to his own. Now this conversation which good sense demands destroys the high freedom of great conversation which requires an absolute running of two souls into one. No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler relations, yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other, will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation, no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence. He cannot for all that say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour, among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue. Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that picks each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine is that the not mine is mine. I hated where I looked for a manly furtherance or at least a manly resistance to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition with which friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large formidable natures mutually beheld, mutually feared before yet they recognize the deep identity which between these disparities unites them. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous, who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy, who is not swift to inter-metal with his fortunes. Let him not inter-metal with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside, give those merits room, let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars that he may come near to the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property and to suck a short and all confounding pleasure instead of the noblest benefit. Let us buy our inheritance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit, a message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news nor potage. I can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Aught I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify but raise it to that standard, the great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his main and action. Do not pick yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities, wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart, let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untameable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial convenience to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. No-fanes, nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good. Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can be another's. There it is at least this satisfaction in crime according to the Latin proverb. You can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crime in quos in quainat, a quat. To those who we admire and love at first we cannot. Yet the least effect of self-possession vitiates in my judgment the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the whole world. What is so great as friendship? Let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say anything to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how grateful and bland, there are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say ought is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue. The only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer to a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us. Why should we intrude? Late, very late, we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuitudes, or habits of society would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire. But solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree is in them. Then shall we meet as water with water, and if we should not meet them then we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul. The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world, friends such as we desire our dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart that elsewhere in other regions of the universal power souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of non-age, of follies, of blunders, and of shame is passed in solitude. And when we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great, you demonstrate yourself so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the firstborn of the world those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as specters and shadows merely. It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular views we make from insight nature will be sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we, the Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons, the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them saying, Who are you? Unhand me. I will be dependent no more. Ah, siest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each others because we are more our own. A friend is Janus-faced. He looks to the past and to the future. He is the child of all foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that way. I may seize them. I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars and come down to warm sympathies with you, but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true next week I shall have languid moods when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects. Then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind and wish you were by my side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions not with yourself, but with your lustres. And I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtle and pure. We will meet as though we met not and part as though we parted not. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew to have met them. More possible than I knew to carry a friendship greatly on one side without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of its rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space. And only a small part of the reflecting planet let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal he will presently pass away, but thou art enlarged by thy own shining and no longer a mate for frogs and worms. Dust soar and burn with the gods of the Imperian. It is, though, a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal. And when the poor interposed men in their mask crumbles, it is not said, but feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the shore. Yet these things may heartily be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, total magnanimity, and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both. End of FRIENDSHIP Recording by Robert Scott July the 7th, 2007