Gifts


    Gifts of one who loved me--
    'Twas high time they came;
    When he ceased to love me,
    Time they stopped for shame.


1. It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the
world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into
chancery,[457] and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency,
which involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of
the difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year, and other times,
in bestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be generous,
though very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in the
choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my head that a present is due
from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity
is gone. Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because
they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the
utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat
stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of
a work-house. Nature does not cocker us:[458] we are children, not
pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or
favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look
like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell
us that we love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it,
because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.
Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us: what am I to whom
these sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are acceptable gifts,[459]
because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic
values being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a
hundred miles to visit him, and should set before me a basket of fine
summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the
labor and the reward.

2. For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day,
and one is glad when an imperative leaves him no option, since if the
man at the door have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you
could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always pleasing to see a
man eat bread or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is
always a great satisfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity
does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it
seems heroic to let the petitioner[460] be the judge of his necessity,
and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be
a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of
punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to
that of the Furies.[461] Next to things of necessity, the rule for a
gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is that we might convey to
some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was
easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment
and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are
not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of
thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem;
the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the
sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a
handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it
restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's
biography[462] is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an
index of his merit. But it is a cold lifeless business when you go to
the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and
talent, but a goldsmith's. That is fit for kings, and rich men who
represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of
gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering,[463] or
payment of blackmail.[464]

3. The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful
sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of a man to receive
gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not
quite forgive a forgiver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of
being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of
receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to
bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems
something of degrading dependence in living by it.

    "Brother, if Jove[465] to thee a present make,
    Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take."

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society, if
it do not give us besides earth, and fire, and water, opportunity,
love, reverence, and objects of veneration.

4. He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad
or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I
think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a
gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes
from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported;
and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the
donor should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not
him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me,
correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level,
then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine
his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of oil, or this flagon
of wine, when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this
gift seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things
for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the
beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons,[466]
not at all considering the value of the gift, but looking back to the
greater store it was taken from, I rather sympathize with the
beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord, Timon. For, the
expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the
total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to
get off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the ill
luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business,[467] this of
being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A
golden text for these gentlemen is that which I admire in the
Buddhist,[468] who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your
benefactors."

5. The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that there is no
commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything
to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts
you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend
is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend
stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve
his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my
friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.
Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so
incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments
of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and
humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content
with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a
direct benefit, which is directly received. But rectitude scatters
favors on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the
thanks of all people.

6. I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is
the genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to
prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There
are persons from whom we always expect fairy tokens; let us not cease
to expect them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our
municipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought
and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the
will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to you; you do not need
me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of doors, though you
proffer me house and lands. No services are of any value, but only
likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services,
it proved an intellectual trick--no more. They eat your service like
apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel for you, and
delight in you all the time.

Nature


    The rounded world is fair to see,
    Nine times folded in mystery:
    Though baffled seers cannot impart
    The secret of its laboring heart,
    Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
    And all is clear from east to west.
    Spirit that lurks each form within
    Beckons to spirit of its kin;
    Self-kindled every atom glows,
    And hints the future which it owes.


1. There are days[470] which occur in this climate, at almost any
season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the
air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature
would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the
planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest
latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when
everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle
that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These
halcyons[471] may be looked for with a little more assurance in that
pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian
Summer.[472] The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills
and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours,
seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely.
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced
to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The
knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes
into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and
reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the
circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a
god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and
crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic
beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape
the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the
sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us.
The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is
stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places
creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like
iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us
to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no
history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and
the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into opening
landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding
each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out
of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present,
and we were led in triumph by nature.

2. These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are
plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make
friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would
persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its
old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our
eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what
health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and
brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest
face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our
nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out
daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much
scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of
natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her
dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul.
There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to
which the chilled traveler rushes for safety,--and there is the
sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our
living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances
from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the
remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and
reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we
dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel[473] and Uriel,[474]
the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.

3. It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have
given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still
air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet
over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving rye-fields;
the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets
whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers
in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which
converts all trees to wind-harps;[475] the crackling and spurting of
hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls
and faces in the sitting-room,--these are the music and pictures of
the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
outlook, and on the skirt of the village.[476] But I go with my
friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] and with one stroke
of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes,
and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted
man to enter without novitiate and probation.[479] We penetrate bodily
this incredible beauty: we dip our hands in this painted element: our
eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a
villeggiatura,[480] a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing
festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and
enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these
delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances,
signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention,
the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned
that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty.
I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to
please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and
sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman
shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what
sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the
heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal
man. Only as far as masters of the world have called in nature to
their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the
meaning of their hanging-gardens,[481] villas, garden-houses, islands,
parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these
strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be
invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe
and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these
tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what
the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his
company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of
these beguiling stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to
realize in some Versailles,[482] or Paphos,[483] or Ctesiphon.[484]
Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for
the background, which save all our works of art, which were otherwise
baubles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness,
they should consider the effect of man reputed to be the possessors of
nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor
fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night,
and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before him.
He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch
Mountains,[485] for example, which converts the mountains into an
Æolian harp,[486] and this supernatural _tiralira_ restores to him the
Dorian[487] mythology, Apollo,[488] Diana,[489] and all divine hunters
and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily
beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of
society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake
of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not
rich! That they have some high-fenced grove, which they call a park;
that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has
visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant,
to watering-places, and to distant cities, are the groundwork from
which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their
actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays
her son, and enhances the gift of wealthy and well-born beauty, by a
radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the
road,--a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to
patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of
the air.

4. The moral sensibility which makes Edens[490] and Tempes[491] so
easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never
far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como
Lake,[492] or the Madeira Islands.[493] We exaggerate the praises of
local scenery. In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the
meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first
hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night
stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common,[494] with all the
spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna,[495] or on the
marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning
and evening, will transfigure maples and alders. The difference
between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great
difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any
particular landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which
every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty
breaks in everywhere.

5. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this
topic, which school-men called _natura naturata_, or nature passive.
One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to
broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A
susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind,
without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a
wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral
from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a
fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A
dilettantism[496] in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields
is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters
and inquisitive of woodcraft and I suppose that such a gazetteer as
wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take place in
the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's
chaplets"[497] of the book-shops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too
clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men
begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most
unfit tribute to Pan,[498] who ought to be represented in the
mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous
before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot
renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude
of false churches[499] accredits the true religion. Literature,
poetry, science, are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret,
concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or
incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the
city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The
sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the
beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the
landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there
were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the
king is in the palace nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is
gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn
from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested
by the pictures and architecture. The critics who complain of the
sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done,
must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from
our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and
serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or
absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and
selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are
convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with
compunction; if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should
shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not
with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied
as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology,
mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy
and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.

6. But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this
topic, but not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, _natura
naturans_, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven
snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and
multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus,[500] a
shepherd), and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in
creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation
on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate
results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little
motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly
cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes
pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of
boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the
secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures,
and exchange our Mosaic[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large
style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn
what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed,
then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has
disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door
for the remote Flora,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to
come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how
inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] and then race after
race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to
Plato,[508] and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all
must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.

7. Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second
secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be
written on the thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling
bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the
mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A
little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the
simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at
last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her
craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has
but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her
dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water,
tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.

8. Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her
own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms
and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and,
at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it.
Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird
with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction
is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials, and
begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage:
otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch
a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world,
vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their
imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and
probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having
tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated:
the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come
to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly
belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their
beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors
with our ridiculous tenderness.

9. Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest
curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude
and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himalaya
mountain-chains[509] and the axis of the globe. If we consider how
much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if
that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion
cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear
too much of rural influences. The cool, disengaged air of natural
objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures
with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp
out and eat roots, but let us be men instead of wood-chucks, and the
oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of
ivory on carpets of silk.

10. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore
is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it
was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas,
crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its
own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment.
The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and
Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which
now it discovers.

11. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
also into organization. The astronomers said,[514] "Give us matter,
and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not
enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse,
one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the
centrifugal and centripetal[515] forces. Once heave the ball from the
hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew." "A very
unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain begging
of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of
projection, as well as the continuation of it?" Nature, meanwhile, had
not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the
impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push,
but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no
end of the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through
every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and
through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration
is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the
world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the
planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every
creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper
path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight
generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot,
and without this violence of direction which men and women have,
without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We
aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of
exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad,
sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to
play, but blabs the secret;--how then? is the bird flown? O no, the
wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths,
with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their
several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in
which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl,
for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the
fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any
power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a
painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this
day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered
her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every
faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame,
by all these attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance,
which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This
glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his
eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics[516] say
what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because
the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does
not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single
seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds,
that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that
hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least,
one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated
profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged
round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or a sudden
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from
some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private
felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in
his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the
race.

12. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind
and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in
his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make
sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to
heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is
reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the
contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the
overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The
poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any
hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent
Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God
himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George
Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial
tracts, and James Naylor[520] once suffered himself to be worshiped as
the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his
thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may
discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the
people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A
similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and
ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and
penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to
him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by midnight and by
the morning star; he wets them with his tears: they are sacred; too good
for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is
the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in
the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has
elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed
experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to
his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them
over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition,
which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot
suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion
with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy
characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or
the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit
that one may have impressive experience, and yet may not know how to put
his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom
has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our
peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously
the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, so long as he does not
feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does
not see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from
the instinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his
mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who does not think
that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do
anything well, who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work
may be of none, but I must not think it is of none, or I shall not do it
with impunity.

13. In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking,
something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith
with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of
approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is
also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in
nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to
drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us
hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all
our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself
are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which
reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the
end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from
the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an
operose[521] method! What a train of means to secure a little
conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this
kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and file
of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the
water-side, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual!
Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these
things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove
friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation,
character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the
animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door,
brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the
children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought,
virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought
and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good
time, whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in
the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main
attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been
lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is
the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the
governments generally of the world, are cities and governments of the
rich, and the masses are not men, but _poor men_, that is, men who
would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive
with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for
nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a
company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say.
The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of
aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to
exact this immense sacrifice of men?

14. Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be
expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external
nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and
flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction.
This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the
softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead,
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst
yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as
fore-looking to such pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is
an odd jealousy; but the poet finds himself not near enough to this
object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does
not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but
outskirt and far-off reflection[522] and echo of the triumph that has
passed by, and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance
in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the
adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of
stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid
distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the
sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his
foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It
is the same among men and women as among the silent trees; always a
referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is
it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscapes is
equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the
wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven
whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven, if she stoops
to such a one as he.

15. What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first
projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many
well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe
a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious
resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and
fools of nature? One looks at the face of heaven and earth lays all
petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the
intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not
be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an
Oedipus[523] arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain.
Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape
on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the
deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and
report of the return of the curve. But it also appears, that our
actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we
designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual
agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy
words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we
measure our individual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if
we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of
identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the
workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning
dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and
chemistry, and, over them, of life preëxisting within us in their
highest form.

16. The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain
of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition
of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel.
Wherever the impulse exceeds the Rest or Identity insinuates its
compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the
prunella[524] or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the
fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to
particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We
anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon;
the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by
electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your
fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but
nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy
salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and
impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in
impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And
the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the
center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and
religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent
ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile
essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.
Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural
objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power
which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the
particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and
distills its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs
and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been
poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as
pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of
cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long
time.

Shakespeare: Or, The poet



[Transcriber's Note: Shakspeare is spelled as "Shakspeare" as well as
"Shakespeare" in this book. The original spellings have been retained.]


1. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
sight and of arm, to come to the desired point. The greatest genius is
the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
uppermost and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

2. The Genius[526] of our life is jealous of individuals and will not
have any individual great, except through the general. There is no
choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning,
and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic
continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and
find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I
foresee a new mechanic power:" no, but he finds himself in the river
of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities
of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.
The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out
the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by
her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out
of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the
mind.

3. Shakspeare's youth[527] fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offense easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The
Puritans,[528] a growing and energetic party and the religious among
the Anglican Church,[529] would suppress them. But the people wanted
them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous inclosures
at country fairs, were the ready theaters of strolling players. The
people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress
newspapers now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could
king, prelate, or puritan,--alone or united, suppress an organ, which
was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch,[530] and library,
at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their
own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national
interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would
have thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit
less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a
baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers
which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene,[531]
Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford,
Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

4. The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when[532] he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on
the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy,[533] which the audience will
bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Cæsar,[534]
and other stories out of Plutarch,[535] which they never tire of; a
shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut[536] and
Arthur,[537] down to the royal Henries,[538] which men hear eagerly;
and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales,[539] and
Spanish voyages,[540] which all the London prentices know. All the
mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright,
and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the
property of the Theater so long, and so many rising geniuses have
enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or
adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work
of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in
that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had
best lie where they are.

5. Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried.
Had the _prestige_[541] which hedges about a modern tragedy existed,
nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body
which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a
ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again,
may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the
people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so
much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full
strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet
owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in
Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was
the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on
pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was
projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with
reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and
treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still
enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as
the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple
or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of
poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which
no single genius,[542] however extraordinary, could hope to create.

6. In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's[543] laborious computations
in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in
which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation
hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII, I
think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy,[544] and the following
scene from Cromwell,[545] where,--instead of the meter of Shakspeare,
whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading
for the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
traits of Shakspeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the
coronation,[546] are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to
Queen Elizabeth[547] is in bad rhythm.[548]

7. Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
to value his memory[549] equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether
through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in
distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they
are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very
near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a
good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken
wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high
place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer,[550]
perhaps; of Chaucer,[551] of Saadi.[552] They felt that all wit was
their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as
poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales
of the world,--

   "Presenting Thebes'[553] and Pelops' line
    And the tale of Troy divine."

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been
beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556]
Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and
Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the
Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560]
Ovid,[561] and Statius.[562] Then Petrarch,[563] Boccaccio,[564] and
the Provençal poets,[565] and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the
Rose[566] is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide,[567] from Lollius of Urbino: The
Cock and the Fox,[568] from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of
Fame,[569] from the French or Italian: and poor Gower[570] he uses as
if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build
his house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no worth
where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to
be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once
shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to
steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately
place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts;
but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our
own.

8. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.
The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at
Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency,
and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of
their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by
correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence,
anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and
resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert
Peel[572] and Mr. Webster[573] vote, so Locke[574] and Rousseau[575]
think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around
Homer,[576] Menu,[577] Saada,[578] or Milton,[579] from which they
drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all
perished,--which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard
speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any
companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there
at last in his breast a Delphi[580] whereof to ask concerning any
thought or thing whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have
answer, and rely on that? All the debts which such a man could
contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of
originality: for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a
whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has
conversed.

9. It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in
the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a
thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English
Bible[581] is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the
English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a
time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,[582]
admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the
world. Grotius[583] makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's
Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already
in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms.[584] He picked
out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law,[585]
the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial
truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where
these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by
being translation on translation. There never was a time when there
was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and
all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like
the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas,[586] Æsop's
Fables,[587] Pilpay,[588] Arabian Nights,[589] Cid,[590] Iliad,[591]
Robin Hood,[592] Scottish Minstrelsy,[593] are not the work of single
men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market
thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop,
all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word;
every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the
generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his
originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the
recorder and embodiment of his own.

10. We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
Society,[594] for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from
the Mysteries[595] celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the
final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays,
from Ferrex and Porrex,[596] and Gammer Gurton's Needle,[597] down to
the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare
altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success,
and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no
book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old
yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope
to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached[598] or not, whether he
held horses at the theater-door, whether he kept school, and why he
left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

11. There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing
age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth,[599] and King James,[600] and the Essexes,[601]
Leicesters,[602] Burleighs,[603] and Buckinghams;[604] and lets pass
without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which
alone will cause the Tudor dynasty[605] to be remembered,--the man who
carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and
on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some
ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias.
A popular player,--nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race;
and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men,
as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon,[606] who took the
inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned
his name. Ben Jonson,[607] though we have strained his few words of
regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first
vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has
conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question,
the better poet of the two.

12. If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's
time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton[608] was
born four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after
him; and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the
following persons:[609] Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip
Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton,
Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Berlarmine,
Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus
Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of
his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom
doubtless[610] he saw,--Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont,
Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest. Since the
constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of
Pericles,[611] there was never any such society;--yet their genius
failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask
was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century
to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after
his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.
It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for
he is the father of German literature: it was on the introduction of
Shakspeare into German, by Lessing,[612] and the translation of his
works by Wieland[613] and Schlegel,[614] that the rapid burst of
German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the
nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living
Hamlet,[615] that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized.
His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our
ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge[616] and
Goethe[617] are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a
silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
Christianity, qualifies the period.

[Transcriber's Note: Number runs from 12 to 14. Number 13 omitted]

14. The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions,
advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that
will lead to proof; and with what result? Beside some important
illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have
adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and
dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It appears that, from
year to year, he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars'
Theater:[618] its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: and he
bought an estate in his native village, with his earnings, as writer
and shareholder; that he lived in the best house in Stratford;[619]
was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of
borrowing money, and the like; and he was a veritable farmer. About
the time when he was writing Macbeth,[620] he sues Philip Rogers, in
the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence,
for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects,
appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or
excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in
the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other
actors and managers. I admit the importance of this information. It is
well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

15. But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
have come to an end of this gossip no ray of relation appears between
it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random
into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would
have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring,
like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish
the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and
Collier,[621] have wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent
Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont,[622] have vainly assisted.
Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready,[623] dedicate their
lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express.
The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word
leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly
torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I
remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer,[624] the
pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now
remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no
part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--

                            "What may this mean,[625]
    That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
    Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly
reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks
of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any
biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer
Night's Dream[626] admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or
parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of
that delicate creation? The forest of Arden,[627] the nimble air of
Scone Castle,[628] the moonlight of Portia's villa,[629] "the antres
vast[630] and desarts idle," of Othello's captivity,--where is the
third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or
private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets?
In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,--in the
Cyclopean architecture[631] of Egypt and India; in the Phidian
sculpture;[632] the Gothic ministers;[633] the Italian painting;[634]
the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,[635]--the Genius draws up the
ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives
way to a new, which sees the works, and ask in vain for a history.

16. Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can
tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most
apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his
tripod,[636] and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique
documents extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and
Collier; and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which
seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but
the man within the breast, has accepted, as words of fate; and tell me
if they match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or,
which gives the most historical insight into the man.

17. Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with
Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey[637] and Rowe,[638] we
have really the information which is material, that which describes
character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man
and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded
convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every
heart,--on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the
prizes of life, and the ways whereby we come at them; on the
characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect
their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which
defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift
in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets,
without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are
no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the
confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same
time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has
he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the
gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his
delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
giving. Let Timon,[639] let Warwick,[640] let Antonio[641] the
merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare's being
the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to
us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of
religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What
mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or
function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king
has he not taught state, as Talma[642] taught Napoleon? What maiden
has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not
out-loved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not
instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

18. Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on
Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit;
that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly
as these critics of his dramatic merit, who still think it secondary.
He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and
images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been
less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how
good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it
turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw
some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose
history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose,
into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the
occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the
universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare
and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he
wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of
England and Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man,
and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of
men and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the
terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.

19. Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as
he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of
doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No
man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
humanity[643] coördinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a
story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has
certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental
prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part,
and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing,
but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no
importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no
cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
readers.

20. This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
compass: the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute
details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the
scrutiny of the solar microscope.

21. In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
power to make one picture. Daguerre[644] learned how to let one flower
etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to
etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never
representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation
of things into song is demonstrated.

22. His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets,
though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as
inimitable as they: and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit
of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so
is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now
as a whole poem.

23. Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism,[645] yet the
sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps
himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is
not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off
with him in some distant direction; he always rides.

24. The finest poetry was first experienced: but the thought has
suffered a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men
often attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy
to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
acquainted with parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and
that is Rachael. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar
with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has
gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost all that
is exuvial. This generosity bides with Shakspeare. We say, from the
truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by
heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.

25. One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
over the universe. Epicurus[646] relates, that poetry hath such charms
that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the
true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer
lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was
rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
repentance?" Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and
cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and
emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.

26. And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and
benefactor, when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations
of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere
lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs
Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection
of humanity.

27. Shakspeare, Homer, Dante,[647] Chaucer, saw the splendor of
meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had
another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the
ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore
a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its
thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute
commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed them as colors to
compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the
step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the
virtue which resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--what
is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements, which
waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master of the
revels[648] to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through
majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the
planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to
glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise
in all towns, "very superior pyrotechny this evening!" Are the agents
of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a
street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the
trumpet-text in the Koran,[649]--"The heavens and the earth, and all
that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long
as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has
not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its
materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it
signify? It is but a Twelfth Night,[650] or Midsummer Night's Dream,
or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or
less? The Egyptian verdict[651] of the Shakspeare Societies comes to
mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this
fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of
keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he
been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of
Bacon, Milton, Tasso,[652] Cervantes,[653] we might leave the fact in
the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to
the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed,
and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into
Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself,--it must even go into
the world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane
life, using his genius for the public amusement.

28. Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,[654] German,[655]
and Swede,[656] beheld the same objects: they also saw through them
that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway
vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an
obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life
became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation,
beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and
curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires
before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener
sank in them.

29. It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The
world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle
with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg
the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal
inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more
beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with
universal wisdom.

Prudence



What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and
that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
lubricity[661] and people without perception. Then I have the same
title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience.
We paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the
man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church
or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find
what he has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in
me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship[662]
with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real
and constant, not to own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of
appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God
taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It
is content to seek health of body by complying with physical
conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.

The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for
itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of
shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own
office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it
works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is
the Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty
of laws within the narrow scope of the senses.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is
sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class lives
to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final
good. Another class live above this mark of the beauty of the symbol,
as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third
class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing
signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the
second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long
time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol
solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst
he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not
offer to build houses and barns thereon reverencing the splendor of
the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.

The world is filled with the proverbs[663] and acts and winkings of a
base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no
other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear;
a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes,
which gives never, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of
any project,--Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening
of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture,
revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the
perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health
and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several
faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and
its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great
fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal
influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as
proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and
immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may
be a good wheel or pin,[664] but he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This
recognition once made,--the order of the world and the distribution
of affairs and times being studied with the co-perception of their
subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention. For, our
existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the
returning moon and the periods which they mark; so susceptible to
climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of
splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and debt,--reads all its
primary lessons out of these books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is? It takes the
laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and
keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects
space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity,[665] growth
and death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all
sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies
stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here
is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced
and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which
impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which
blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too
hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and
divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A
door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or
meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax;
and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and
the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these
eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies.[666] If
we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes. If we go a-fishing we
must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle
persons. We often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but
still we regard the clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and
years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the
northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the
fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At
night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild
date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for
his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must
brew, bake, salt and preserve his food. He must pile wood and coal. But
as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new
acquaintance with nature; and as nature is inexhaustibly significant,
the inhabitants of these climates[667] have always excelled the
southerner in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who
knows other things can never know too much of these. Let him have
accurate perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes,
measure and discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of
chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less is
he willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that
disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and
innocent action. The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his
kitchen clock and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on
the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of. The application of
means to ends ensures victory and the songs of victory not less in a
farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband
finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in
the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns[668]
or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a
work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber,
and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein
he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of
garrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long
housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard--very paltry places it may
be--tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for
optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in
every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the
law--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions. There is
more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you
think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do
not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of
cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose
and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have
said,[669]--"If the child says he looked out of this window, when he
looked out of that,--whip him." Our American character is marked by a
more than average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by
the currency of the by-word, "No mistake."

But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about
facts, inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. The
beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude,
are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands,
instead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words and actions to be
fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant sound is the whetting of the
scythe in the mornings of June; yet what is more lonesome and sad than
the sound of a whetstone or mower's rifle[670] when it is too late in
the season to make hay? Scatter brained and "afternoon men" spoil much
more than their own affairs in spoiling the temper of those who deal
with them. I have seen a criticism on some paintings, of which I am
reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to
their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar,[671] a man of superior
understanding, said: "I have sometimes remarked in the presence of
great works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a
certain property contributes to the effect which gives life to the
figures, and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is the
hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity. I
mean the placing the figures firm upon their feet, making the hands
grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even
lifeless figures, as vessels and stools--let them be drawn ever so
correctly--lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their
centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating
appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery[672] (the only great
affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most
passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the
Virgin and child. Nevertheless it awakens a deeper impression than the
contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, beside all the resistless
beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the
perpendicularity of all the figures." This perpendicularity we demand
of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their
feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let
them discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed.
Let them call a spade a spade.[673] Let them give us facts, and honor
their own senses with trust.

But what man shall dare task another with imprudence? Who is prudent?
The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain
fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting all our modes
of living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have
aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of
Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why
health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than
the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and
animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same;
but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be
coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead
the civil code and the day's work. But now the two things seem
irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand
amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason
and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of
every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare.
Health or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be the
child of genius, and every child should be inspired; but now it is not
to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial
half lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to
money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well
to-morrow; and society is officered by _men of parts_,[674] as they
are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to
refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic; and piety,
and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they
find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out[675] fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but
no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his
transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them
nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art rebukes him.
That never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to
reap where he had not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from
his holiness, and less for every defect of common sense. On him who
scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge.
He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.
Goethe's Tasso[676] is very likely to be a pretty fair historical
portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine
grief when some tyrannous Richard III.[677] oppresses and slays a
score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently
right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this world and
consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divine
sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without
submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot
untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of
genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws,
self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a
"discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold[678] life. Whilst something higher
than prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted,
he is an encumbrance. Yesterday, Cæsar[679] was not so great; to-day,
Job[680] not so miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an
ideal world in which he lives, the first of men, and now oppressed by
wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself, none is so
poor to do him reverence. He resembles the opium eaters whom
travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who
skulk about all day, the most pitiful drivellers, yellow, emaciated,
ragged, sneaking; then at evening, when the bazaars are open, they
slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become tranquil,
glorious and great. And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent
genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at
last sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant
slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and
mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him,
as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his
own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position,
have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem
Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure
of our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let
him control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may
be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom
may be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on
every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the
better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard,[681] or
the State-street[682] prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the
foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick[683] in a tree
between whiles, because it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence
which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, little
portions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of
prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger's, will rust;
beer, if not brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour;
timber of ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will
strain, warp and dry-rot. Money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is
liable to loss; if invested, is liable to depreciation of the
particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white.
Keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and
the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much
on the extreme of this prudence. It saves itself by its activity. It
takes bank notes,--good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the
speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour,
nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks
depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any
one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice our
safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that
everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by
luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command
let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, and not at that of
others, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other
men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the
minor virtues.[684] How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let him
not make his fellow creatures wait. How many words and promises are
promises of conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a
folded and sealed scrap of paper float around the globe in a pine ship
and come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming
population, let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate his
being across all these distracting forces, and keep a slender human
word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive us hither
and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man
reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most
distant climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that
only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The
prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by
one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another,
but they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time,
persons, property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots
in the soul, and, if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or
would become some other thing, therefore the proper administration of
outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause
and origin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the
single-hearted the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only a
sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human
society. On the most profitable lie the course of events presently
lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness proves to be the best
tactics, for it invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient
footing and makes their business a friendship. Trust men and they will
be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves
great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules
of trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not
consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk
in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw
himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst
apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fears
groundless. The Latin proverb says,[685] "in battles the eye is first
overcome." The eye is daunted and greatly exaggerates the perils of
the hour. Entire self-possession may make a battle very little more
dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football. Examples are
cited by soldiers of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire
given to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The
terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin.
The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews
itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of
June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes
readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but
it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently
strong. To himself he seems weak; to others formidable. You are afraid
of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
good will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill will. But the
sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip
up _his_ claims, is as thin and timid as any; and the peace of society
is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten: bring them hand to
hand, and they are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that "courtesy costs nothing"; but calculation might
come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but
kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an
eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground
remains,--if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for
both,--the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the
boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air.
If he set out to contend,[686] almost St. Paul will lie, almost St.
John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an
argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls. Shuffle
they will and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that
they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either
party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither
should you put yourself in a false position to your contemporaries by
indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in
straight antagonism[687] to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment,
assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the
flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not
the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate
deliverance. The natural emotions of the soul are so much better than
the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice in dispute.
The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not
show itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears extorted,
hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall presently
be granted, since really and underneath their all external
diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly
footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited
for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?
To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us.
Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are
too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater
or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and
consuetudes[688] that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the
feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily
whisper names prouder and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's
imagination hath its friends; and pleasant would life be with such
companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you
cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes
the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their
flavor in garden beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the virtues
range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a
present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we
will[689] we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten
commandments.

Prudence



What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and
that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
lubricity[661] and people without perception. Then I have the same
title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience.
We paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the
man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church
or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find
what he has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in
me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship[662]
with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real
and constant, not to own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of
appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God
taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It
is content to seek health of body by complying with physical
conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.

The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for
itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of
shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own
office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it
works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is
the Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty
of laws within the narrow scope of the senses.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is
sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class lives
to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final
good. Another class live above this mark of the beauty of the symbol,
as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third
class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing
signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the
second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long
time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol
solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst
he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not
offer to build houses and barns thereon reverencing the splendor of
the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.

The world is filled with the proverbs[663] and acts and winkings of a
base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no
other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear;
a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes,
which gives never, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of
any project,--Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening
of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture,
revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the
perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health
and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several
faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and
its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great
fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal
influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as
proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and
immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may
be a good wheel or pin,[664] but he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This
recognition once made,--the order of the world and the distribution
of affairs and times being studied with the co-perception of their
subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention. For, our
existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the
returning moon and the periods which they mark; so susceptible to
climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of
splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and debt,--reads all its
primary lessons out of these books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is? It takes the
laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and
keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects
space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity,[665] growth
and death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all
sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies
stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here
is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced
and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which
impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which
blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too
hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and
divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A
door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or
meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax;
and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and
the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these
eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies.[666] If
we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes. If we go a-fishing we
must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle
persons. We often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but
still we regard the clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and
years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the
northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the
fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At
night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild
date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for
his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must
brew, bake, salt and preserve his food. He must pile wood and coal. But
as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new
acquaintance with nature; and as nature is inexhaustibly significant,
the inhabitants of these climates[667] have always excelled the
southerner in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who
knows other things can never know too much of these. Let him have
accurate perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes,
measure and discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of
chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less is
he willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that
disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and
innocent action. The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his
kitchen clock and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on
the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of. The application of
means to ends ensures victory and the songs of victory not less in a
farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband
finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in
the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns[668]
or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a
work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber,
and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein
he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of
garrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long
housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard--very paltry places it may
be--tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for
optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in
every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the
law--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions. There is
more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you
think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do
not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of
cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose
and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have
said,[669]--"If the child says he looked out of this window, when he
looked out of that,--whip him." Our American character is marked by a
more than average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by
the currency of the by-word, "No mistake."

But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about
facts, inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. The
beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude,
are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands,
instead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words and actions to be
fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant sound is the whetting of the
scythe in the mornings of June; yet what is more lonesome and sad than
the sound of a whetstone or mower's rifle[670] when it is too late in
the season to make hay? Scatter brained and "afternoon men" spoil much
more than their own affairs in spoiling the temper of those who deal
with them. I have seen a criticism on some paintings, of which I am
reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to
their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar,[671] a man of superior
understanding, said: "I have sometimes remarked in the presence of
great works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a
certain property contributes to the effect which gives life to the
figures, and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is the
hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity. I
mean the placing the figures firm upon their feet, making the hands
grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even
lifeless figures, as vessels and stools--let them be drawn ever so
correctly--lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their
centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating
appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery[672] (the only great
affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most
passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the
Virgin and child. Nevertheless it awakens a deeper impression than the
contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, beside all the resistless
beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the
perpendicularity of all the figures." This perpendicularity we demand
of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their
feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let
them discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed.
Let them call a spade a spade.[673] Let them give us facts, and honor
their own senses with trust.

But what man shall dare task another with imprudence? Who is prudent?
The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain
fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting all our modes
of living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have
aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of
Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why
health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than
the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and
animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same;
but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be
coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead
the civil code and the day's work. But now the two things seem
irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand
amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason
and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of
every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare.
Health or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be the
child of genius, and every child should be inspired; but now it is not
to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial
half lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to
money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well
to-morrow; and society is officered by _men of parts_,[674] as they
are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to
refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic; and piety,
and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they
find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out[675] fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but
no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his
transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them
nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art rebukes him.
That never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to
reap where he had not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from
his holiness, and less for every defect of common sense. On him who
scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge.
He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.
Goethe's Tasso[676] is very likely to be a pretty fair historical
portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine
grief when some tyrannous Richard III.[677] oppresses and slays a
score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently
right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this world and
consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divine
sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without
submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot
untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of
genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws,
self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a
"discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold[678] life. Whilst something higher
than prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted,
he is an encumbrance. Yesterday, Cæsar[679] was not so great; to-day,
Job[680] not so miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an
ideal world in which he lives, the first of men, and now oppressed by
wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself, none is so
poor to do him reverence. He resembles the opium eaters whom
travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who
skulk about all day, the most pitiful drivellers, yellow, emaciated,
ragged, sneaking; then at evening, when the bazaars are open, they
slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become tranquil,
glorious and great. And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent
genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at
last sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant
slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and
mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him,
as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his
own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position,
have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem
Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure
of our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let
him control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may
be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom
may be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on
every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the
better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard,[681] or
the State-street[682] prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the
foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick[683] in a tree
between whiles, because it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence
which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, little
portions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of
prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger's, will rust;
beer, if not brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour;
timber of ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will
strain, warp and dry-rot. Money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is
liable to loss; if invested, is liable to depreciation of the
particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white.
Keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and
the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much
on the extreme of this prudence. It saves itself by its activity. It
takes bank notes,--good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the
speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour,
nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks
depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any
one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice our
safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that
everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by
luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command
let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, and not at that of
others, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other
men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the
minor virtues.[684] How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let him
not make his fellow creatures wait. How many words and promises are
promises of conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a
folded and sealed scrap of paper float around the globe in a pine ship
and come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming
population, let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate his
being across all these distracting forces, and keep a slender human
word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive us hither
and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man
reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most
distant climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that
only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The
prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by
one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another,
but they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time,
persons, property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots
in the soul, and, if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or
would become some other thing, therefore the proper administration of
outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause
and origin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the
single-hearted the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only a
sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human
society. On the most profitable lie the course of events presently
lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness proves to be the best
tactics, for it invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient
footing and makes their business a friendship. Trust men and they will
be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves
great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules
of trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not
consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk
in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw
himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst
apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fears
groundless. The Latin proverb says,[685] "in battles the eye is first
overcome." The eye is daunted and greatly exaggerates the perils of
the hour. Entire self-possession may make a battle very little more
dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football. Examples are
cited by soldiers of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire
given to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The
terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin.
The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews
itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of
June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes
readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but
it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently
strong. To himself he seems weak; to others formidable. You are afraid
of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
good will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill will. But the
sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip
up _his_ claims, is as thin and timid as any; and the peace of society
is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten: bring them hand to
hand, and they are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that "courtesy costs nothing"; but calculation might
come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but
kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an
eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground
remains,--if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for
both,--the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the
boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air.
If he set out to contend,[686] almost St. Paul will lie, almost St.
John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an
argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls. Shuffle
they will and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that
they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either
party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither
should you put yourself in a false position to your contemporaries by
indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in
straight antagonism[687] to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment,
assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the
flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not
the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate
deliverance. The natural emotions of the soul are so much better than
the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice in dispute.
The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not
show itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears extorted,
hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall presently
be granted, since really and underneath their all external
diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly
footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited
for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?
To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us.
Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are
too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater
or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and
consuetudes[688] that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the
feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily
whisper names prouder and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's
imagination hath its friends; and pleasant would life be with such
companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you
cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes
the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their
flavor in garden beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the virtues
range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a
present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we
will[689] we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten
commandments.