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Self-Reliance
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 Fletchers
Honest Mans Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
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 such lines, 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 good-humored 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 mans 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.

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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 behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes!
That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and
means 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 parlour 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 be not 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.

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

Whoso 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 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 Devils 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

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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 meeting-houses to the vain end to which
many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold 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 intrinsic right. 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 worlds 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 Bible-society,
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 blindmans-buff 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 not possibly 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 where to 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
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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 friends parlour. 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-eyed present, 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 to-morrow 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.
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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 Chathams voice, and dignity into Washingtons port, and America into Adamss eye. Honor
is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. 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, selfderived, 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 so much, 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 dukes house, washed and dressed and laid in the dukes 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 days
work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred,
and 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.

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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.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by

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,

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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.

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.

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.

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 mens. 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. The power 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.

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. That thought, 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 foot-prints 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 self-existence 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 self-reliance? 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 selfrelying soul.

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 truths.
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 mens, 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 you may 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 name of 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, neighbour, 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.

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding

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
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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 parlour 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 his life. 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 Fletchers Bonduca, when
admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, -His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;
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 selfhelping 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
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hated him. To the persevering mortal, said Zoroaster, the blessed Immortals are swift.

As mens 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 brothers, or his brothers brothers 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 mans relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same
delight in subordinating 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 masters 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 fools 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,
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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 lifes 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. Shakspeare will 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 his
wit; 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 Plutarchs
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
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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 Casas, 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 nation to-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.

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The Poet
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizons edge,
Searched with Apollos privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and
have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their
own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should
rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is
some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement
or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that
men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in
our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate
adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to
other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and
volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a
contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented
with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own
experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say,
the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles,
Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not
pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the
same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that
the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws
us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means and materials
he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete
man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth. The young man reveres men of genius,
because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they
more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows
at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his
pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In
love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half
himself, the other half is his expression.
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Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an
interpreter; but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own,
or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate
a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service.
But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield
the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every
man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience,
the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel
the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man
without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience,
and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system
of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or,
theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer.
These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are
equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three
has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world
is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but
Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his
own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the
first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets,
are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province
is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homers words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as
Agamemnons victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and
think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also,
yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who
bring building materials to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into
that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose
ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of
more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the
songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear,
as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also
actions, and actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only
doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he
describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men
of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other
day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate
tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the
question arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a
contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line,
running up from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude
on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains
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and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all
the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children
of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, -- a thought so passionate and alive, that,
like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The
thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.
The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and
all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the
world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning
by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work, and gone rambling
none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was
therein told: he could tell nothing but that all was changed, -- man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly
we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to
put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than
that. Rome, -- what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be
heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What!
that wonderful spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the
oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras
have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may
concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know
not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the value
of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in
good earnest, have availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the
peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and
the unerring voice of the world for that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so
often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it
his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be
broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, -- opaque, though they seem transparent,
-- and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and
renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise;
now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This
day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such
is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven,
whirls me into the clouds, then leaps and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound
heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens,
and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or
the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down
again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility
of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.
But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured
the poets fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a
new, and higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used
as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the carpenters stretched
cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. Things more excellent than every image, says
Jamblichus, are expressed through images. Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol,
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in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression; and there is no body without
its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health;
(and, for this reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful rests
on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches: -So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and
reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into
Variety.
The Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our
science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we
sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. The mighty heaven,
said Proclus, exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being
moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures. Therefore, science always goes abreast
with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index
of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute
and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the
fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man is so far a
poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature: for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe
is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only
poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers,
though they express their affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders
what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you
talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he
is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation, or playing of these
things, would content him; he loves the earnest of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty
not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the
supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere rites.
The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools
of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our
political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to
Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness
the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of
national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit
God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the
blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are
all poets and mystics!
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Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things,
whereby the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity,
in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which
we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol.
Thought makes every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images
excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious,
spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision
is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great
symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the
memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare
lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that
he was accustomed to read in Baileys Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest
experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day
and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles.
We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a
terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation
is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of
the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine
natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.
For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches
things to nature and the Whole, -- re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a
deeper insight, -- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village,
and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not
yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive, or
the spiders geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she
loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit.
Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grains weight. The
spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to
break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen
is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw
such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new
fact, is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which
the belt of wampum, and the commerce of America, are alike.
The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life
is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, -- and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is
named, -- yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools,
words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated
with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual
perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb
and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the
accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns
the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception,
he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform;
that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his
eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the
facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into
the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life,
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and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and
animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow
of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with
animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance,
sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not anothers, thereby rejoicing the
intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is
the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our
words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it
symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been
once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of
the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have
long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step
nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a
leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by
her own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the metamorphosis
again. I remember that a certain poet described it to me thus:
Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind.
Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes
down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of
spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of
seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes
a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but
she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed.
So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or
songs, -- a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of
time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came),
which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty
of the poets soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of
censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At the
end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no
beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.
So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals,
than security, namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew, in my younger days, the
sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to
tell directly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day,
according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came,
and, for many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and, lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the
form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it become
silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem,
in a manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated.
As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole
universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things
into higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the
form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountainridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air,
and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the
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notes, without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the minds faith, that the
poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of
our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a
group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without
falsehood or rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many
admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and
we participate the invention of nature?
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not
come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through
forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go
with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, -- him they will
suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poets part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes
through forms, and accompanying that.
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious
intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of
things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can
draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through
him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are
universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he
speaks somewhat wildly, or, with the flower of the mind; not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the
intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were
wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller
who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horses neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road,
so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this
instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest,
and the metamorphosis is possible.
This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco,
or whatever other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this
extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture,
dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which
are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect
by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into
free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of
individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of
Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and
indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as
it was an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that
advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick.
The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine.
The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration which
we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine
and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water
out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not `Devils wine, but Gods wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the
hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the
plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be
their toys. So the poets habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should
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delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he
should be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every
dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines,
comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New
York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt
find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder
an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem
to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who
come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms.
Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or
nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how
much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every
definition; as, when Aristotle defines space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained; -- or, when
Plato defines a line to be a flowing point; or, figure to be a bound of solid; and many the like. What a joyful sense
of freedom we have, when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can build any house
well, who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of
its maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is
generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or
affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman,
following him, writes, -So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;
when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as that white flower which marks extreme old age; when Proclus calls the
universe the statue of the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of `Gentilesse, compares good blood in mean
condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold
its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse,
the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit; when
Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; -- we
take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies
say, it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die.
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, Those who are free
throughout the world. They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at
first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think
nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried
away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream,
which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and
criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg,
Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic,
astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here
is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a
ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates
to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter
and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the
drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.
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There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in
the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the
brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are
in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, -- you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest.
Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any
form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our
chains, and admits us to a new scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of
thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth,
that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue,
will take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form,
but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new
thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was
a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular
and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morningredness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and
faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally
the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a
myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be
very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, -- All
that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of
this trite rhetoric, -- universal signs, instead of these village symbols, -- and we shall both be gainers. The history
of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at
last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not
know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually
plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he
eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands. The
noise which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of
disputants. The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in darkness:
but, to each other, they appeared as men, and, when the light from heaven shone into their cabin, they complained
of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might see.
There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer, an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same
man, or society of men, may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher
intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children,
who were at some distance, like dead horses: and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires,
whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes,
oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear
as a man to all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if any poet has witnessed
the transformation, he doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes as
considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees, through
the flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare it.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness,
address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with
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bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man,
the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dantes praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography
in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew
the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival
of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks
and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the
same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our
logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations,
the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western
clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles
the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in
my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in
Chalmerss collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, more than poets, though there have been
poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and
Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.
But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my
errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.
Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see
them, not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor,
the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically
and abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the
painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the
others, in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He
hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He
can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me. He pursues a
beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says
are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him.
He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say, `That is yours, this is mine; but the
poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like
eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as an admirable
creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that these things get spoken. What a little
of all we know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these
are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs
and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated
as Logos, or Word.
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, `It is in me, and shall out. Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and
stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which
every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man
is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not
in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer
exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noahs ark, to come forth again
to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace,
not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer,
Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble
a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.
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O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer.
The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any
longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of
towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding
tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex
life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all
courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close
hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations
and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen
and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and
they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in
thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and
the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable
essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without
tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are
only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds
fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and
awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over,
thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

Experience

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Experience
The lords of life, the lords of life,-I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
Like and unlike,
Portly and grim,
Use and Surprise,
Surface and Dream,
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
Temperament without a tongue,
And the inventor of the game
Omnipresent without name; -Some to see, some to be guessed,
They marched from east to west:
Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look: -Him by the hand dear nature took;
Dearest nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, `Darling, never mind!
Tomorrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou! these are thy race!
Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We
wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs
above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief,
stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too
strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as
night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as
our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some
fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears
to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of
spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest.
Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! We are like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the
factories above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams.
If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know
today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered,
that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that tis
wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on
any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won
with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said, all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered.
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on
every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the
horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference. `Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has
fertile meadow, but my field, says the querulous farmer, `only holds the world together. I quote another mans
saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. Tis the trick of nature thus to
degrade today; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the

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eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe,
and the men ask, `Whats the news? as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society?
how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much
retrospect, that the pith of each mans genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature -- take
the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel, -- is a sum of very few ideas, and of very few original tales, -- all
the rest being variation of these. So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very
few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem
organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.
What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough
rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought. Ate Dea is gentle,
Over mens heads walking aloft,
With tender feet treading so soft.
People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which
we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns
out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That,
like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would
even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact?
Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we
aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago,
I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of
the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps,
for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, -- neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it
does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing
me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief
can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the
wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are
summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a
grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch
hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we
should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy.
Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to
each other are oblique and casual.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and,
as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each
shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see
only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man,
whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a
few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament.
Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective
nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair?
or if he laugh and giggle? or if he apologize? or is affected with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or cannot go by
food? or has gotten a child in his boyhood? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave, and
cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too
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hot, and the man does not care enough for results, to stimulate him to experiment, and hold him up in it? or if the
web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception, without
due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep them? What
cheer can the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons of the year,
and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that
if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.
Very mortifying is the reluctant experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of
genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit
the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see.
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of given temperament,
which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem
alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime,
it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the
conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over everything of time,
place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails
to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure
of activity and of enjoyment.
I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing the
capital exception. For temperament is a power which no man willingly hears any one praise but himself. On
the platform of physics, we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all
divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic
kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by
knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput,
reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent
knowingness. The physicians say, they are not materialists; but they are: -- Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme
thinness: O so thin! -- But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do
they attach to love! what to religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give
them the occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of the
head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact
that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle
in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguise soever he shall appear. I
know he is in the neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future, by taking a high seat, and
kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me for a cent.-- `But, sir, medical history; the report to the Institute; the proven facts! -- I distrust the facts and the inferences.
Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess
in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When virtue is in presence, all subordinate
powers sleep. On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this
trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an
embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to
suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door
which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover
of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers, we awake from ineffectual
struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but
the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When, at night, I look
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at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health
of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects.
Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation
dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in
Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but
now I turn the pages of either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures; each will
bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that
manner. How strongly I have felt of pictures, that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it;
you shall never see it again. I have had good lessons from pictures, which I have since seen without emotion or
remark. A deduction must be made from the opinion, which even the wise express of a new book or occurrence.
Their opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact but is nowise to be trusted
as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing. The child asks, `Mamma, why dont I like the story as
well as when you told it me yesterday? Alas, child, it is even so with the oldest cherubim of knowledge. But will
it answer thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole, and this story is a particular? The reason of the
pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect to works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy
which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friendship and love.
That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. There is
no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never
pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step
that would bring them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand,
until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal
applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping
themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised. We do what we must, and call it by the
best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any
form of man who is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is not worth the taking, to do tricks in.
Of course, it needs the whole society, to give the symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel must revolve very
fast to appear white. Something is learned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoever
loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are
nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government,
church, marriage, and so with the history of every mans bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a
bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and
in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.
But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in
these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and written
much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a
step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the
passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on
the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton
of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political orator wittily
compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to
tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree. So does
culture with us; it ends in head-ache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those, who a few months ago
were dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times. There is now no longer any right course of action,
nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis. Objections and criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections
to every course of life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of
objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about
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your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who
can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when
they say, Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it. To fill the hour, -- that is happiness; to fill the hour,
and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate
well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions, a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest
world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power
and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journeys end in every step
of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of
mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short
a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five
minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and
our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. Men live in
their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies,
and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of
shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but
do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances,
however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. If
these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to
the heart, than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful
man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set of
men and women, a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if
they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way with sincere homage.
The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day
is a sound and solid good, it is a great excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for company. I am grown by
sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me,
the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small mercies. I compared
notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less
than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for
moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account in sots and bores also.
They give a reality to the circumjacent picture, which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In
the morning I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual
world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall
have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle
region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless
science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry,
-- a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience, everything good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all
the picture-shops of Europe, for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration,
the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the
Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothing of natures pictures in every
street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently
bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare: but for
nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. I
think I will never read any but the commonest books, -- the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then
we are impatient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination
delights in the wood-craft of Indians, trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so
intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man, and the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them
also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe,
and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants
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of the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows
that the world is all outside: it has no inside.
The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos and
Grahamites, she does not distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the
great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh
their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength, we must not harbor
such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong
present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first
importance to settle, -- and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the
equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of
copyright and international copyright is to be discussed, and, in the interim, we will sell our books for the most
we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much
is to say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line
every hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the conventions
convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend
to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it,
and as much more as they will, -- but thou, Gods darling! heed thy private dream: thou wilt not be missed in the
scorning and skepticism: there are enough of them: stay there in thy closet, and toil, until the rest are agreed what
to do about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy
life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be
worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better.
Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be invariably kept, if
we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect.
Everything runs to excess: every good quality is noxious, if unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin,
nature causes each mans peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as examples
of this treachery. They are natures victims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near,
and find their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, and themselves victims of partiality, very
hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures, -- not heroes, but quacks, -- conclude very reasonably, that
these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not bear you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and
makes legions more of such, every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing, or a cast: yet
what are these millions who read and behold, but incipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality
which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he began
to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must
walk is a hairs breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once for
all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, life
appears so plain a business, that manly resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through all weathers,
will insure success. But ah! presently comes a day, or is it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering, -- which
discomfits the conclusions of nations and of years! Tomorrow again, everything looks real and angular, the
habitual standards are reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius, -- is the basis of genius, and experience is
hands and feet to every enterprise; -- and yet, he who should do his business on this understanding, would be
quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will, namely, the subterranean
and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate
people: there are no dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if
it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about
us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind
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us of purest sky. `You will not remember, he seems to say, `and you will not expect. All good conversation,
manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature hates
calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and
the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never
prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The most attractive class of
people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yet accredited:
one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird, or the morning
light, and not of art. In the thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called
the newness, for it is never other; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child, -- the kingdom that
cometh without observation. In like manner, for practical success, there must not be too much design. A man
will not be observed in doing that which he can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action, which
stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a
pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; every thing impossible, until we
see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, -- that nothing is of us or our works,
-- that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God, and
all doing and having. I would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow
the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in
success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated
and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company,
converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked
for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors,
quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is
always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.
The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of human life to calculation, exalted Chance into
a divinity, but that is to stay too long at the spark, -- which glitters truly at one point, -- but the universe is warm
with the latency of the same fire. The miracle of life which will not be expounded, but will remain a miracle,
introduces a new element. In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Home, I think, noticed that the evolution was
not from one central point, but co-active from three or more points. Life has no memory. That which proceeds in
succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from
being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed
in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of
spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one day be members,
and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted
into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the
Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination.
When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive
at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, or go to the fire, being cold: no! but I am at first apprised of
my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign
of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds
that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil
eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight
from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold
what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first opening
to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life,
the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new
beauty. I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found
in the West. Since neither now nor yesterday began These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can A man be
found who their first entrance knew. If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add, that there is that
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in us which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a
sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in
infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is,
not, what you have done or forborne, but, at whose command you have done or forborne it.
Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, -- these are quaint names, too narrow to cover this unbounded substance. The
baffled intellect must still kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, -- ineffable cause, which every fine
genius has essayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras
by (Nous) thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love: and the metaphor of each has become a
national religion. The Chinese Mencius has not been the least successful in his generalization. I fully understand
language, he said, and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor. -- I beg to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor?
-- said his companion. The explanation, replied Mencius, is difficult. This vigor is supremely great, and in the
highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly, and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven
and earth. This vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no hunger. -- In our more correct
writing, we give to this generalization the name of Being, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we
can go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe, that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. Our
life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vastflowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of faculty: information is given us not to sell ourselves
cheap; that we are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an action.
It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble. So in accepting
the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the
universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.
Shall we describe this cause as that which works directly? The spirit is not helpless or needful of mediate organs.
It has plentiful powers and direct effects. I am explained without explaining, I am felt without acting, and where
I am not. Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are
content that new actions should do them that office. They believe that we communicate without speech, and above
speech, and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence
of action is not to be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself, because a circumstance has occurred, which
hinders my presence where I was expected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I am, should be as
useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be my presence in that place. I exert the same
quality of power in all places. Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into the rear.
No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!
In liberated moments, we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible; the elements already exist in
many minds around you, of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement
will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For,
skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy
must take them in, and make affirmations out-side of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called
the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but
mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of
computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no
objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all
things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, -- objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of
its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we
cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery, and make
them wait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as
ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable
and insultable in us. Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon,
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and the rounding minds eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name
of hero or saint. Jesus the providential man, is a good man on whom many people are agreed that these optical
laws shall take effect. By love on one part, and by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time
settled, that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will attach
to any man so seen. But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescive self, rooted in
absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in
what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.
The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic
might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt: nor can
any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every subject. Never
can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and
thee, as between the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All private sympathy is partial.
Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other
points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more
energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is
not twin-born, but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal
and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in
ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is
experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think:
or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very
differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and in its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no
such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary
notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and
confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right and fair from the actors point
of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the
crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For
there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. It is worse
than a crime, it is a blunder, said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world is a problem
in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame, and all weak emotions. All stealing
is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal? Saints are sad, because they behold sin, (even
when they speculate,) from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect; a confusion of thought.
Sin seen from the thought, is a diminution or less: seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The
intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil.
This it is not: it has an objective existence, but no subjective.
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The
subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language
we will, we can never say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Buonaparte, are the
minds ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a
travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our
brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction, is a telescope for the objects on which it
is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul attains her
due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might
see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing com-plex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long
conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate, -- and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How
long before our masquerade will end its noise of tamborines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a
solitary performance? -- A subject and an object, -- it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but
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magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere; Columbus and America; a reader
and his book; or puss with her tail?
It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these developments, and will find a way to punish the
chemist, who publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too little of our constitutional
necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of
these bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty,
however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more
firmly. The life of truth is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations.
It does not attempt anothers work, nor adopt anothers facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own
from anothers. I have learned that I cannot dispose of other peoples facts; but I possess such a key to my own,
as persuades me against all their denials, that they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the
dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger,
they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. Charity
would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of that,
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I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference
and shall observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much
was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an
experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they foam at the
mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe, that, in the history of mankind, there is never a solitary example of
success, -- taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, why not realize your
world? But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism, -- since there never was a
right endeavor, but it succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the
deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and
a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat
our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week;
but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage
into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! -- it
seems to say, -- there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be
the transformation of genius into practical power.

In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes
away the power of being greatly useful. A man should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. A
preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people: an attention, and to an
aim which makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no appeal, and no hard thoughts. In
Flaxmans drawing of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on the
threshold. The face of the god expresses a shade of regret and compassion, but calm with the conviction of the
irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into the eternal and beautiful. The man at his
feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there lying
express pictorially this disparity. The god is surcharged with his divine destiny.
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, -- these are threads on the loom of
time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way.
I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can
very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by
some ages to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures
not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let
who will ask, where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, -- that I should not ask for a rash
effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this town
and county, an overt effect on the instant month and year. The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It works on
periods in which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have
fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune. My reception has been
so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the
proverb, In for a mill, in for a million. When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account
square, for, if I should die, I could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and
has overran the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.
Also, that hankering after an overt or practical effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest, I am willing to
spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hardest, roughest action is visionary
also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and
urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertainment, and would
suffice me a great while. To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world. I hear always the law of
Adrastia, that every soul which had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm until another period.
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