J.F.

Cooper The Pioneers Chapter III “The Slauther of the Pigeons”

“All that thou see'st is Natures handiwork; Those rocks that upward throw their mossy brawl
Like castled pinnacles of elder times; These venerable stems, that slowly rock Their towering
branches in the wintry gale; That field of frost, which glitters in the sun, Mocking the whiteness
of a marble breast! Yet man can mar such works with his rude taste, Like some sad spoiler of a
virgin’s fame.” —Duo. Some little while elapsed ere Marmaduke Temple was sufficiently
recovered from his agitation to scan the person of his new companion. He now observed that he
was a youth of some two or three and twenty years of age, and rather above the middle height.
Further observation was prevented by the rough overcoat which was belted close to his form by a
worsted sash, much like the one worn by the old hunter. The eyes of the Judge, after resting a
moment on the figure of the stranger, were raised to a scrutiny of his countenance. There had
been a look of care visible in the features of the youth, when he first entered the sleigh, that had
not only attracted the notice of Elizabeth, but which she had been much puzzled to interpret. His
anxiety seemed the strongest when he was en joining his old companion to secrecy; and even
when he had decided, and was rather passively suffering himself to be conveyed to the village,
the expression of his eyes by no means indicated any great degree of self-satisfaction at the step.
But the lines of an uncommonly prepossessing countenance were gradually becoming composed;
and he now sat silent, and apparently musing. The Judge gazed at him for some time with
earnestness, and then smiling, as if at his own forgetfulness, he said:
“I believe, my young friend, that terror has driven you from my recollection; your face is very
familiar, and yet, for the honor of a score of bucks’ tails in my cap, I could not tell your name.”
“I came into the country but three weeks since,” returned the youth coldly, “and I understand you
have been absent twice that time.”
“It will be five to-morrow. Yet your face is one that I have seen; though it would not be strange,
such has been my affright, should I see thee in thy winding-sheet walking by my bedside to-
night. What say’st thou, Bess? Am I compos mentis or not? Fit to charge a grand jury, or, what is
just now of more pressing necessity, able to do the honors of Christmas eve in the hall of
Templeton?”
“More able to do either, my dear father.” said a playful voice from under the ample inclosures of
the hood, “ than to kill deer with a smooth-bore.” A short pause followed, and the same voice,
but in a different accent, continued. “We shall have good reasons for our thanksgiving to night,
on more accounts than one,”
The horses soon reached a point where they seemed to know by instinct that the journey was
nearly ended, and, bearing on the bits as they tossed their heads, they rapidly drew the sleigh
over the level land which lay on the top of the mountain, and soon came to the point where the
road descended suddenly, but circuitously, into the valley. The Judge was roused from his
reflections, when he saw the four columns of smoke which floated above his own chimneys. As
house, village, and valley burst on his sight, he exclaimed cheerfully to his daughter:
“See, Bess, there is thy resting-place for life! And thine too, young man, if thou wilt consent to
dwell with us.”
The eyes of his auditors involuntarily met; and, if the color that gathered over the face of
Elizabeth was contradicted by the cold expression of her eye, the ambiguous smile that again
played about the lips of the stranger seemed equally to deny the probability of his consenting to
form one of this family group. The scene was one, however, which might easily warm a heart
less given to philanthropy than that of Marmaduke Temple.The side of the mountain on which
our travellers were journeying, though not absolutely perpendicular,was so steep as to render
great care necessary in descending the rude and narrow path which, in that early day, wound
along the precipices. The negro reined in his impatient steeds, and time was given Elizabeth to
dwell on a scene which was so rapidly altering under the hands of man, that it only resembled
in its outlines the picture she had so often studied with delight in childhood. Immediately beneath
them lay a seeming plain, glittering without in equality, and buried in mountains. The latter were
precipitous, especially on the side of the plain, and chiefly in forest. Here and there the hills fell
away in long, low points, and broke the sameness of the outline, or setting to the long and wide
field of snow, which,without house, tree, fence, or any other fixture, resembled so much spot less
cloud settled to the earth. A few dark and moving spots were, however, visible on the even
surface, which the eye of Elizabeth knew to be so many sleighs going their several ways to or
from the village. On the western border of the plain, the mountains, though equally high, were
less precipitous, and as they receded opened into irregular valleys and glens, or were formed into
terraces and hollows that admitted of cultivation. Although the evergreens still held dominion
over many of the hills that rose on this side of the valley, yet the undulating outlines of the
distant mountains, covered with forests of beech and maple, gave a relief to the eye, and the
promise of a kinder soil. Occasionally spots of white were discoverable amidst the forests of the
opposite hills, which announced, by the smoke that curled over the tops of the trees, the
habitations of man and the commencement of agriculture. These spots were sometimes, by the
aid of united labor, enlarged into what were called settlements, but more frequently were small
and insulated; though so rapid were the changes, and so persevering the labors of those who had
cast their fortunes on the success of the enterprise, that it was not difficult for the imagination of
Elizabeth to conceive they were enlarging under her eye while she was gazing, in mute wonder,
at the alterations that a few short years had made in the aspect of the country. The points on the
western side of this remarkable plain, on which no plant had taken root, were both larger and
more numerous than those on its eastern, and one in particular thrust itself forward in such a
manner as to form beautifully curved bays of snow on either side. On its extreme end an oak
stretched forward, as if to overshadow with its branches a spot which its roots were forbidden to
enter. It had released itself from the thraldom that a growth of centuries had imposed on the
branches of the surrounding forest trees, and threw its gnarled and fantastic arms abroad, in the
wildness of liberty. A dark spot of a few acres in extent at the southern extremity of this beautiful
flat, and immediately under the feet of our travellers, alone showed by its rippling surface, and
the vapors which exhaled from it, that what at first might seem a plain was one of the mountain
lakes, locked in the frosts of winter. A narrow current rushed impetuously from its bosom at the
open place we have mentioned, and was to be traced for miles, as it wound its way toward the
south through the real valley, by its borders of hemlock and pine, and by the vapor which arose
from its warmer surface into the chill atmosphere of the hills. The banks of this lovely basin, at
its outlet, or southern end, were steep, but not high; and in that direction the land continued, far
as the eye could reach, a narrow but graceful valley, along which the settlers had scattered their
humble habitations, with a profusion that bespoke the quality of the soil andthe comparative
facilities of intercourse, Immediately on the bank of the lake and at its foot, stood the village of
Templeton. It consisted of some fifty buildings, including those of every description, chiefly
built of wood, and which, in their architecture, bore no great marks of taste, but which also, by
the unfinished appearance of most of the dwellings, indicated the hasty manner of their
construction, To the eye, they presented a variety of colors. A few were white in both front and
rear, but more bore that expensive color on their fronts only, while their economical but
ambitious owners had covered the remaining sides of the edifices with a dingy red. One or two
were slowly assuming the russet of age; while the uncovered beams that were to be seen through
the broken windows of their second stories showed that either the taste or the vanity of their
proprietors had led them to undertake a task which they were unable to accomplish. The whole
were grouped in a manner that aped the streets of a city, and were evidently so arranged by the
directions of one who looked to the wants of posterity rather than to the convenience of the
present incumbents. Some three or four of the better sort of buildings, in addition to the
uniformity of their color, were fitted with green blinds, which, at that season at least, were rather
strangely contrasted to the chill aspect of the lake, the mountains, the forests, and the wide fields
of snow. Before the doors of these pretending dwellings were placed a few saplings, either
without branches or possessing only the feeble shoots of one or two summers’ growth, that
looked not unlike tall grenadiers on post near the threshold of princes. In truth, the occupants of
these favored habitations were the nobles of Templeton, as Marmaduke was its king. They were
the dwellings of two young men who were cunning in the law; an equal number of that class who
chaffered to the wants of the community under the title of storekeepers; and a disciple of
Aesculapius, who, for a novelty, brought more subjects into the world than he sent out
of it. In the midst of this incongruous group of dwellings rose the mansion of the Judge, towering
above all its neighbors. It stood in the centre of an inclosure of several acres, which was covered
with fruit-trees. Some of the latter had been left by the Indians, and began already to assume the
moss and inclination of age, therein forming a very marked contrast to the infant plantations that
peered over most of the picketed fences of the village. In addition to this show of cultivation
were two rows of young Lombardy poplars, a tree but lately introduced into America, formally
lining either side of a pathway which led from a gate that opened on the principal street to the
front door of the building. The house itself had been built entirely under the superintendence of a
certain Mr. Richard Jones, whom we have already mentioned,and who, from his cleverness in
small matters, and an entire willingness to exert his talents, added to the circumstance of their
being sisters’ children, ordinarily superintended all the minor concerns of Marmaduke Temple.
Richard was fond of saying that this child of invention consisted of nothing more nor less than
what should form the groundwork of every clergyman’s discourse, viz., a firstly and a lastly. He
had commenced his labors, in the first year of their residence, by erecting a tall, gaunt edifice of
wood, with its gable toward the highway. In this shelter for it was little more, the family resided
three years. By the end of that period, Richard had completed his design. He had availed himself,
in this heavy undertaking, of the experience of a certain wandering eastern mechanic, who, by
exhibiting a few soiled plates of English architecture, and talking learnedly of friezes,
entablatures, and particularly of the composite order, had obtained a very undue influence over
Richard’s taste in everything that pertained to that branch of the fine arts. Not that Mr. Jones did
not affect to consider Hiram Doolittle a perfect empiric in his profession, being in the constant
habit of listening to his treatises on architecture with a kind of indulgent smile; yet, either from
an inability to oppose them by anything plausible from his own stores of learning or from secret
admiration, Richard generally submitted to the arguments of his co-adjutor. Together, they had
not only erected a dwelling for Marmaduke, but they had given a fashion to the architecture of
the whole county. The composite order, Mr. Doolittle would contend, was an order composed of
many others, and was intended to be the most useful of all, for it admitted into its construction
such alterations as convenience or circumstances might require. To this proposition Richard
usually assented; and when rival geniuses who monopolize not only all the reputation but most
of the money of a neighborhood, are of a mind, it is not uncommon to see them lead the fashion,
even in graver matters. In the present instance, as we have already hinted, the castle, as Judge
Templeton’s dwelling was termed in common parlance, came to be the model, in some one or
other of its numerous excellences, for every aspiring edifice within twenty miles of it. The house
itself, or the “ lastly,” was of stone: large, square, and far from uncomfortable. These were four
requisites, on which Marmaduke had insisted with a little more than his ordinary pertinacity. But
everything else was peaceably assigned to Richard and his associate. These worthies found the
material a little too solid for the tools of their workmen, which, in General, were employed on a
substance no harder than the white pine of the adjacent mountains, a wood so proverbially soft
that it is commonly chosen by the hunters for pillows. But for this awkward dilemma, it is
probable that the ambitious tastes of our two architects would have left us much more to do in
the way of description. Driven from the faces of the house by the obduracy of the material, they
took refuge in the porch and on the roof. The former, it was decided, should be severely
classical, and the latter a rare specimen of the merits of the Composite order. A roof, Richard
contended, was a part of the edifice that the ancients always endeavored to conceal, it being an
excrescence in architecture that was only to be tolerated on account of its usefulness. Besides,
as he wittily added, a chief merit in a dwelling was to present a front on whichever side it might
happen to be seen; for, as it was exposed to all eyes in all weathers, there should be no weak
flank for envy or unneighborly criticism to assail. It was therefore decided that the roof should be
flat, and with four faces.To this arrangement, Marmaduke objected the heavy snows that lay for
months, frequently covering the earth to a depth of three or four feet. Happily the facilities of the
composite order presented themselves to effect a compromise, and the rafters were lengthened,
so as to give a descent that should carry off the frozen element. But, unluckily, some mistake was
made in the admeasurement of these material parts of the fabric; and, as one of the greatest
recommendations of Hiram was his ability to work by the “square rule,” no opportunity was
found of discovering the effect until the massive timbers were raised on the four walls of the
building. Then, indeed, it was soon seen that, in defiance of all rule, the roof was by far the most
conspicuous part of the whole edifice. Richard and his associate consoled themselves with the
relief that the covering would aid in concealing this unnatural elevation; but every shingle that
was laid only multiplied objects to look at. Richard essayed to remedy the evil with paint, and
four different colors were laid on by his own hands. The first was a sky- blue, in the vain
expectation that the eye might be cheated into the belief it was the heavens themselves that hung
so imposingly over Marmaduke’s dwelling; the second was what he called a “cloud-color,” being
nothing more nor less than an imitation of smoke; the third was what Richard termed an invisible
green, an experiment that did not succeed against a background of sky. Abandoning the attempt
to conceal, our architects drew upon their invention for means to ornament the offensive
shingles.After much deliberation and two or three essays by moonlight, Richard ended the affair
by boldly covering the whole beneath a color that he christened “sunshine,” a cheap way, as he
assured his cousin the Judge, of always keeping fair weather over his head. The platform, as well
as the caves of the house,were surmounted by gaudily painted railings, and the genius of Hiram
was exerted in the fabrication of divers urns and mouldings, that were scattered profusely around
this part of their labors. Richard had originally a cunning expedient, by which the chimneys were
intended to be so low, and so situated, as to resemble ornaments on the balustrades; but comfort
required that the chimneys should rise with the roof, in order that the smoke might bc carried off,
and they thus became four extremely conspicuous objects in the view.As this roof was much the
most important architectural undertaking in which Mr. Jones was ever engaged, his failure
produced a correspondent degree of mortification At first, he whispered among his acquaintances
that it proceeded from ignorance of the square rule on the part of Hiram; but, as his eye became
gradually accustomed to the object, he grew better satisfied with his labors, and instead of
apologizing for the defects, he commenced praising thc beauties of the mansion-house; he soon
found hearers, and, as wealth and comfort are at all times attractive, it was, as has been said,
made a model for imitation on a small scale. In less than two years from its erection, he had the
pleasure of standing on theelevated platform, and of looking down on three humble imitators of
its beauty. Thus it is ever with fashion, which even renders the faults of the great subjects of
admiration. Marmaduke bore this deformity in his dwelling with great good-nature, and soon
contrived, by his own improvements, to give an air of respectability and comfort to his place of
residence. Still, there was much of in congruity, even immediately about the mansion-house.
Although poplars had been brought from Europe to ornament the grounds, and willows and other
trees were gradually springing up nigh the dwelling, yet many a pile of snow betrayed the
presence of the stump of a pine; and even, in one or two instances, unsightly remnants of trees
that had been partly destroyed by fire were seen rearing their black, glistening columns twenty or
thirty feet above the pure white of the snow, These, which in the language of the country are
termed stubs, abounded in the open fields adjacent to the village, and were accompanied,
occasionally, by the ruin of a pine or a hemlock that had been stripped of its bark, and which
waved in melancholy grandeur its naked limbs to the blast, a skeleton of its former glory. But
these and many other unpleasant additions to the view were unseen by the delighted Elizabeth,
who, as the horses moved down the side of the mountain, saw only in gross the cluster of houses
that lay like a map at her feet; the fifty smokes that were curling from the valley to the clouds;
the frozen lake as it lay imbedded in mountains of evergreen, with the long shadows of the pines
on its white surface, lengthening in the setting sun; the dark ribbon of water that gushed from the
outlet and was winding its way toward the distant Chesapeake—the altered, though still
remembered, scenes of her child hood. Five years had wrought greater changes than a century
would produce in countries where time and labor have given permanency to the works of man.
To our young hunter and the Judge the scene had less novelty; though none ever emerge from the
dark forests of that mountain, and witness the glorious scenery of that beauteous valley, as it
bursts unexpectedly upon them, without a feeling of delight. The former cast one admiring
glance from north to south, and sank his face again beneath the folds of his coat; while the latter
contemplated, with philanthropic pleasure, the prospect of affluence and comfort that was
expanding around him; the result of his own enterprise, and much of it the fruits of his own
industry.The cheerful sound of sleigh-bells, however, attracted the attention of the whole party,
as they came jingling up the sides of the mountain, at a rate that announced a powerful team and
a hard driver. The bushes which lined the highway interrupted the view, and the two sleighs were
close upon each other before either was seen.
“Ne te quaesiveris extra.”
“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s
Honest Man’s Fortune.
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet.
II. SELF-RELIANCE
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not
conventional.The soul always hears an admonition in suchlines, let the subject be what it may.
The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain.To believe your
own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—
that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in
due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the
Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to
Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men,
but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he
dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our
own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art
have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous
impression with goodhumored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the
other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have
thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another. There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is
ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion;
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but
through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which
resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he
know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much
impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished
harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular
ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us
represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully
imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay
when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise
shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius
deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that
iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you,the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided
themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely
trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny;
and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but
guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the
Dark. What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and behavior of children,
babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our
arithmetic has computed the strength andmeans opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their
mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are
disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes
four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and
manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its
claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he
cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic.
It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how
to make us seniors very unnecessary. The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and
would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of
human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible,
looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on
their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent,
troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an
independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it
were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he
is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections
must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his
neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the
same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,— must always be formidable.
He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to benot private but necessary,
would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them in fear. These are the voices which we
hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere
is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock
company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder,
to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-
reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Who so would
be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered
by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the
world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued
adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying,
“What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” my friend
suggested,—”But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not
seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can
be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to
that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A
man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and
ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large
societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me
more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice
and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful
cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to
him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that
grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for
black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be
such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have
some edge to it,—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction
of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and
brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, *Whim*. I
hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect
me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a
good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?
I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such
men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by
all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your
miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meetinghouses
to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—
though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar
which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold. Virtues are, in the popular estimate,
rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of
daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their
living in the world,— as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I
do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer
that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and
unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary
evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know
that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned
excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsicright. Few and mean as
my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance
of my fellows any secondary testimony. What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the
people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those
who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live
after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who
in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.The
objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It
loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church,
contribute to a dead Biblesociety, vote with a great party either for the government or against it,
spread your table like base housekeepers,— under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do
your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must
consider what a blindman’sbuff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your
argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the
institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that notpossibly can he say a new and
spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the
grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself
not to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have
bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of
these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors
of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the
real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not
whereto begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of
the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which
does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the
forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation
which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping
wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know
how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the
friend’s parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own he might
well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces,
have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the
discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy
enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their
rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when
to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are
aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and
mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no
concernment. The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for
our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit
than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over
your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of
pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyedpresent, and live ever in a
new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout
motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape
and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and
divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself
with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what
to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—’Ah,
so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras
was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and
Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. I
suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his
being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.
Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian
stanza;—read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing
contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without
prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not
and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow
over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.
We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they
communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a
breath every moment. There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each
honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however
unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought.
One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See
the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine
action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains
nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness
appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done
so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn
appearances and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of
virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the
field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories
behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of
angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into Washington’s
port, and America into Adams’s eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is
always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it
homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and
therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person. I hope in these days
we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous
henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us
never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please
him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would
make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and
squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact
which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working
wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre
of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. Ordinarily,
every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality,
reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be somuch that
he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age;
requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity
seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a
Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is
confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one
man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism,
of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of
Rome”; and all history Resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest
persons. Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or
steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world
which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to
the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god,feels poor when he looks on these. To
him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay
equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his
notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits
for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable
of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and
dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony
like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it
symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes
up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince. Our reading is mendicant and
sycophantic. In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate,
are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day’s
work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this
deference to Alfredand Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear
out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and
renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred
from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen. The world has been instructed by its kings, who
have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere
suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own,
make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but
with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely
signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man. The
magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.
Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?
What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable
elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of
independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as
Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which
analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm
hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light,
from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence
their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see
them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of
action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which
cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which
makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we
discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this
comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its
absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind
and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is
due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and
night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;—the idlest reverie,
the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as
readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do not
distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing.
But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in
course of time all mankind,—although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my
perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so
pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should
communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter
forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new
create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass
away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the
present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,—one as much as another. All things
are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular
miracles disappear. If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you
backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world,
believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the
parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship
of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and
space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light: where it is, is day;
where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a
cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming. Man is timid and apologetic; he is no
longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed
before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference
to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is
no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a
leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless
root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man
postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past,
or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be
happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. This should be plain
enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the
phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a
price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of
grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance
to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the
point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing
to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be
weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the
murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. And now at last the highest truth on this subject
remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the
intuition. Thatthought by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near
you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not
discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any
name;—the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example
and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its
forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In
the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised
over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the selfexistence of Truth and
Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic
Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I
think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my
present, and what is called life, and what is called death. Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates; that the
soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a
shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do
we prate of selfreliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but
agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies
because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise
his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we
speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of
men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities,
nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach
on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the everblessed one. Self-existence is the
attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it
enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. Commerce,
husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my
respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for
conservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature
suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation
of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital
resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore
self-relying soul. Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at homewith the cause. Let us
stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration
of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let
our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and
fortune beside our native riches. But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor
is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean,
but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the
silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how
chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit.
Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit
around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and I have all
men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it.
But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the
whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client,
child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—’Come out unto
us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. Thepower men possess to annoy me I give
them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.“What we love that we
have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.” If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities
of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war and
wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our
smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no
longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to
them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances
hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law
less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish
my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,— but these relations I
must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself.
I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be
the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or
aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon
whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you: if you are not,
I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth
with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and
truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to
live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as
well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last.’—But so may you give
these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.
Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute
truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing. The populace think that your rejection of
popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist
will use the nameof philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are
two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of
duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have
satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of
these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. I
have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are
called duties. But if I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If
any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day. And truly it
demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has
ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that
he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him
as strong as iron necessity is to others! If any man consider the present aspects of what is called
by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics.The sinew and heart of man seem to be
drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid
of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons.
We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most
natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is
mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society
has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is
born. If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young
merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not
installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York,
it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the
rest of hislife. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to
Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his
feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in
not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one
chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are
not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new
powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations; that
he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the
laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more but thank and
revere him;—and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to
all history. It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices
and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living;
their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as
brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some
foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial
and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is
vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the
soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good.
But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not
unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He
will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the
prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature,
though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher’sBonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of
thegod Audate, replies,—“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; Our valors are our best
gods.” Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is
infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own
work and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to
them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth
and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own
reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-
helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes
follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We
solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned
our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said
Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.” As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not God speak
to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.’ Everywhere I am
hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites
fables merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God. Every new mind is a new
classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a
Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In
proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings
within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches,
which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty,
and man’s relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil
takes the same delight insubordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just
learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that
the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master’s mind. But in all
unbalanced minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not for a speedily
exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon
with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their
master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see,—how you can see; ‘It
must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not yet perceive that light,
unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and
call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait
and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young
and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England,
Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or
Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of
the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man
stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his
countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a
sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet. I have no churlish objection to the
circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man
is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he
knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away
from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and
mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins. Travelling is a fool’s
paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at
Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the
stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces.
I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes
with me wherever I go.
3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole
intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness.
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation
but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished
with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the
Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the
artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty,
convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the
American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering
the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the
government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and
sentiment will be satisfied also. Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted
talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best,
none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person
has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master
who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a
unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspearewill
never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope
too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that
of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but
different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven
tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply
to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide
in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce
the Foreworld again.
4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men
plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves. Society never advances.
It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is
barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not
amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and
loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose
property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But
compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal
strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe and in a day or two the
flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send
the white to his grave. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is
supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but
he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so
being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the
sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright
calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries
overload hiswit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question
whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by
a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic
was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? There is no more deviation in the moral
standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A
singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor
can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater
men than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race
progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He
who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his
turn the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume and do not
invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and
Behring accomplished so much in their fishing- boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose
equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a
more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found the New World
in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and
machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great
genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the
triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of
falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to
make a perfect army, says Las Cases, “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries
and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of
corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.” Society is a wave. The wave moves
onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the
valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nationto-day, next
year die, and their experience with them. And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance
on governments which protect it, is the want of selfreliance. Men have looked away from
themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil
institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to
be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by
what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his
nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him by
inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no
root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that
which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property,
which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies,
but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the
Caliph Ali, “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Our dependence on
these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in
numerous conventions; the greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement,
The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the
young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like
manner the reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends!
Will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a
man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is
weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and,
in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that
surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for
good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought,
instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as
a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head. So use all that is
called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do
thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God.
In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter
out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick
or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you
think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but
yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
IX. THE OVER-SOUL
There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent
effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief
moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For
this reason the argument which is always forth coming to silence those who conceive
extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We
give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that
human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this
uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but
the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural
history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said
of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand
years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has
always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose
source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact
calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I
am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call
mine. As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of
regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause,
but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in
the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. The Supreme Critic on
the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great
nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-
soul, within which every man’s particular being is containedand made one with all other; that
common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is
submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every
one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which
evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and
beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul
of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally
related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all
accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the
thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world
piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the
shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be
read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is
innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man’s words who speaks from that life
must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not
speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can
inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the
rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the
heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and
energy of the Highest Law. If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse,
in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in
masquerade,—the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on
our distinctnotice,—we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of
the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates
and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of
comparison, butuses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the
will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,
—an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light
shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man
is the façade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man,
the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself,
but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it
appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it
is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is
love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The
weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims
in some one particular to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to
obey. Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his
colors. It is too subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and
contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, “God comes to
see us without bell;” that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite
heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause,
begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to
the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man
ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to
wound them. The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its
independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes
all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space.
The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls
of time and space have cometo look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these
limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the
force of the soul. The spirit sports with time,—
“Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity.”
We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which is measured from
the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a
thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation
with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of the
intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor,
give us a strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a volume of
Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and instantly we come into a feeling of
longevity. See how the deep divine thought reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself
present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it was when first his
mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my thought has nothing to do with
time. And so always the soul’s scale is one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is
another. Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In common
speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sundered stars to one
concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium
approaches, that a day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when
we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and
the other is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by
one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them
none knows whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any
institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul
looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no
dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of
events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed. After its own law and not by arithmetic is the
rate of its progress to be computed. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can
be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of state, such as can be
represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The
growths of genius are of a certain total character, that does not advance the elect individual first
over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered inferiority,—but by
every throe of growth the man expands there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes,
populations, of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and
finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that
have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno
and Arrian than with persons in the house. This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The
simple rise as by specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of all the virtues.
They are in the spirit which contains them all. The soul requires purity, but purity is not it;
requires justice, but justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better; so that there
is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to urge a
virtue which it enjoins. To the well-born child all the virtues are natural, and not painfully
acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous. Within the same sentiment
is the germ of intellectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility,
of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the sciences and
arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude already
anticipates those special powers which men prize so highly. The lover has no talent, no skill,
which passes for quite nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she may possess of
related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself tothe Supreme Mind finds itself related to all
its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this
primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from our remote station on the circumference
instantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and
anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect. One mode of the divine teaching is the
incarnation of the spirit in a form,—in forms, like my own. I live in society, with persons who
answer to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great instincts to which
I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common nature; and these other souls, these
separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call passion;
of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities
and war. Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for
persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger experience of man
discovers the identical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with
the impersonal. In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third
party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is
God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company
become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual
property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches
over them like a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of
power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of attaining to a
higher self-possession. It shines for all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common
to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and
obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think much less of
property in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any
man’s name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned and thestudious of
thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies
them to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or
profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have long been hunting
in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is
said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each
other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the
same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with
my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove
from behind each of us. Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world,
for which they forsake their native nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks who dwell
in mean houses and affect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve
all their display of wealth for their interior and guarded retirements. As it is present in all
persons, so it is in every period of life. It is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing
with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but
as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves
me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce
my will and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes
looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me. The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth.
We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask
you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, ‘How do you know it is truth, and not
an error of your own?’ We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are
awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone
indicate the greatness of that man’s perception,—”It is no proof of a man’s understanding to be
able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and
that what is false is false,—this is the mark and character of intelligence.” In the book I read, the
good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought
which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away.
We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see
how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For
the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through
us over things. But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the individual’s
experience, it also reveals truth. And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very
presence, and to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul’s communication
of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it
gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that
truth he receives, it takes him to itself. We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its
manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the
emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It
is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct
apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes
through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which
comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated from
the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful
perception. Every moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the
necessity of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s consciousness of that
divine presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the
individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration,— which is its rarer appearance,
—to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all
the families and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to
insanityhas always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been
“blasted with excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision
of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and
his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these
remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited
in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The
rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the
language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic churches; the experiences
of the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the
individual soul always mingles with the universal soul. The nature of these revelations is the
same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions.
They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by
words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after. Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The
popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul the
understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God how
long men shall exist, what their hands shall do and who shall be their company, adding names
and dates and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer
in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description
of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and
tomorrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the
immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They
even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that
sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of
immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of
sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the separation ofthe idea
of duration from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of
the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the
immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of
the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the
adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this
question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom
it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be
finite. These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of sin. God has no
answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary
“decree of God,” but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow;
for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil
which curtains events it instructs the children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of
obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting
the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all
unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and
the answer are one. By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall
dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other,
and what spirit each is of. Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the
several individuals in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint
him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other, though they had
seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who had an
interest in his own character. We know each other very well, —which of us has been just to
himself and whether that which we teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our honest
effort also. We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious
power. The intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels, is one wide,
judicial investigation of character. In full court, or in small committee, or confronted face to face,
accuser and accused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit those
decisive trifles by which character is read. But who judges? and what? Not our understanding.
We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein,
that he does not judge them; he lets them judge themselves and merely reads and records their
own verdict. By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugre our
efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which we
are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues
which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never
voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our head. The infallible index of true progress is
found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor
actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than
his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his
sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it
out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the
disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of
seeking is one, and the tone of having is another. The great distinction between teachers sacred
or literary,— between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope,— between philosophers like
Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh and Stewart,—
between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent
mystic, prophesying half insane under the infinitude of his thought,—is that one class speak from
within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from
without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third
persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. Ican do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks
always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe
beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expectation of the appearance
of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the veil, where the word is one with that
it tells of, let him lowly confess it. The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes
what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated
class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude of
scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather
than of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call it their own; their
talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease.
In these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of vice;
and we feel that a man’s talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius
is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and
not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any
talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of
the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are
content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who
have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers. For
they are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which through their
eyes beholds again and blesses the things which it hath made. The soul is superior to its
knowledge, wiser than any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then
we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise
all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a
wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created,
and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real
nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself
in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day for ever. Why then should I make
account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the soul from which they fell as syllables from the
tongue? This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition than entire
possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is
foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those
whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man
comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries
them. It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life by
quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who thus said or did to him. The ambitious
vulgar show you their spoons and brooches and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments.
The more cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic
circumstance,—the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, the brilliant friend They know;
still further on perhaps the gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they
enjoyed yesterday,—and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul that
ascends to worship the great God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry,
no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest
experience of the common day,—by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having
become porous to thought and bibulous of the sea of light. Converse with a mind that is grandly
simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be
written, yet are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches of the soul it
is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole
earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the circle,
but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession,
and omniscient affirmation. Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the
earth, accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue even,—say rather
your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-
royal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the
mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound themselves! These flatter not. I
do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell and Christina and Charles the Second and
James the First and the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of kings,
and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world. They must always be a godsend to
princes, for they confront them, a king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high
nature the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of even companionship
and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men. Souls like these make us feel that
sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the
utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment you can
pay. Their “highest praising,” said Milton, “is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of
praising.” Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person
who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better
and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how
soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our
mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our
god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart
itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every
side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is
the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn
to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare
is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law tohis mind he is overflowed with a reliance so
universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition
in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee
gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.
If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there is
a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you together, if
it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which your
talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred
to you that you have no right to go, unless youn are equally willing to be prevented from going?
O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou
oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every by word that
belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages.
Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock
thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall,
not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless
circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.
Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the
Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty
is there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his closet
and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must
greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men’s devotion. Even
their prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on
numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made,— no matter how indirectly,—to numbers,
proclamation is then and there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping
thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in that presence, who shall dare tocome in?
When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg
say? It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on
authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal
of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a
position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the
soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself.
Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past biography, however
spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we
cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have
few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no record of
any character or mode of living that entirely contents us. The saints and demigods whom history
worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we
draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the
thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and
pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks
through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not
called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the
stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into
the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of
the great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair
accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature
enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in
thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the
ancient said, that “its beauty is immense,” man will come to see that the world is the perennial
miracle which the soul worketh, and be lessastonished at particular wonders; he will learn that
there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom,
in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will
live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life and be content
with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the
negligency of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the
bottom of the heart.