www.1bilgi.com

1900

SISTER CARRIE

by Theodore Dreiser

Chapter I.

THE MAGNET ATTRACTING: A WAIF AMID FORCES

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her

total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation

alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow

leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her

sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It

was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and

full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret

at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for

advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s

farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the

flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as

the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the

threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were

irretrievably broken.

To be sure there was always the next station, where one might

descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by

these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very

far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours-

a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her

sister’s address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now

passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its

impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.

Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she

rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.

Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no

possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the

infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces

which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the

most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as

effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye.

Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is

accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar

of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished

senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to whisper

cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe

into the unguarded ear! Unrecognised for what they are, their

beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the

simpler human perceptions.

Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately

termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power

of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but

not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm

with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the

formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness

and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair

example of the middle American class- two generations removed from the

emigrant. Books were beyond her interest- knowledge a sealed book.

In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss

her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet,

though small, were set flatly. And yet she was interested in her

charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to

gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was,

venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild

dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and

subject- the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman’s slipper.

"That," said a voice in her ear, "is one of the prettiest little

resorts in Wisconsin."

"Is it?" she answered nervously.

The train was just pulling out of Waukesha. For some time she had

been conscious of a man behind. She felt him observing her mass of

hair. He had been fidgetting, and with natural intuition she felt a

certain interest growing in that quarter. Her maidenly reserve, and

a certain sense of what was conventional under the circumstances,

called her to forestall and deny this familiarity, but the daring

and magnetism of the individual, born of past experiences and

triumphs, prevailed. She answered.

He leaned forward to put his elbows upon the back of her seat and

proceeded to make himself volubly agreeable.

"Yes, that is a great resort for Chicago people. The hotels are

swell. You are not familiar with this part of the country, are you?"

"Oh, yes, I am," answered Carrie. "That is, I live at Columbia City.

I have never been through here, though."

"And so this is your first visit to Chicago," he observed.

All the time she was conscious of certain features out of the side

of her eye. Flush, colourful cheeks, a light moustache, a grey

fedora hat. She now turned and looked upon him in full, the

instincts of self-protection and coquetry mingling confusedly in her

brain.

"I didn’t say that," she said.

"Oh," he answered, in a very pleasing way and with an assumed air of

mistake, "I thought you did."

Here was a type of the travelling canvasser for a manufacturing

house- a class which at that time was first being dubbed by the

slang of the day "drummers." He came within the meaning of a still

newer term, which had sprung into general use among Americans in 1880,

and which concisely expressed the thought of one whose dress or

manners are calculated to elicit the admiration of susceptible young

women- a "masher." His suit was of a striped and crossed pattern of

brown wool, new at that time, but since become familiar as a

business suit. The low crotch of the vest revealed a stiff shirt bosom

of white and pink stripes. From his coat sleeves protruded a pair of

linen cuffs of the same pattern, fastened with large, gold plate

buttons, set with the common yellow agates known as "cat’s-eyes."

His fingers bore several rings- one, the ever-enduring heavy seal- and

from his vest dangled a neat gold watch chain, from which was

suspended the secret insignia of the Order of Elks. The whole suit was

rather tight-fitting, and was finished off with heavy-soled tan shoes,

highly polished, and the grey fedora hat. He was, for the order of

intellect represented, attractive, and whatever he had to recommend

him, you may be sure was not lost upon Carrie, in this, her first

glance.

Lest this order of individual should permanently pass, let me put

down some of the most striking characteristics of his most

successful manner and method. Good clothes, of course, were the

first essential, the things without which he was nothing. A strong

physical nature, actuated by a keen desire for the feminine, was the

next. A mind free of any consideration of the problems or forces of

the world and actuated not by greed, but an insatiable love of

variable pleasure. His method was always simple. Its principal element

was daring, backed, of course, by an intense desire and admiration for

the sex. Let him meet with a young woman once and he would approach

her with an air of kindly familiarity, not unmixed with pleading,

which would result in most cases in a tolerant acceptance. If she

showed any tendency to coquetry he would be apt to straighten her tie,

or if she "took up" with him at all, to call her by her first name. If

he visited a department store it was to lounge familiarly over the

counter and ask some leading questions. In more exclusive circles,

on the train or in waiting stations, he went slower. If some seemingly

vulnerable object appeared he was all attention- to pass the

compliments of the day, to lead the way to the parlor car, carrying

her grip, or, failing that, to take a seat next her with the hope of

being able to court her to her destination. Pillows, books, a

foot-stool, the shade lowered; all these figured in the things which

he could do. If, when she reached her destination, he did not alight

and attend her baggage for her, it was because, in his own estimation,

he had signally failed.

A woman should some day write the complete philosophy of clothes. No

matter how young, it is one of the things she wholly comprehends.

There is an indescribably faint line in the matter of man’s apparel

which somehow divides for her those who are worth glancing at and

those who are not. Once an individual has passed this faint line on

the way downward he will get no glance from her. There is another line

at which the dress of a man will cause her to study her own. This line

the individual at her elbow now marked for Carrie. She became

conscious of an inequality. Her own plain blue dress, with its black

cotton tape trimmings, now seemed to her shabby. She felt the worn

state of her shoes.

"Let’s see," he went on, "I know quite a number of people in your

town. Morgenroth the clothier and Gibson the dry goods man."

"Oh, do you?" she interrupted, aroused by memories of longings their

show windows had cost her.

At last he had a clew to her interest, and followed it deftly. In

a few minutes he had come about into her seat. He talked of sales of

clothing, his travels, Chicago, and the amusements of that city.

"If you are going there, you will enjoy it immensely. Have you

relatives?"

"I am going to visit my sister," she explained.

"You want to see Lincoln Park," he said, "and Michigan Boulevard.

They are putting up great buildings there. It’s a second New York-

great. So much to see- theatres, crowds, fine houses- oh, you’ll

like that."

There was a little ache in her fancy of all he described. Her

insignificance in the presence of so much magnificence faintly

affected her. She realised that hers was not to be a round of

pleasure, and yet there was something promising in all the material

prospect he set forth. There was something satisfactory in the

attention of this individual with his good clothes. She could not help

smiling as he told her of some popular actress of whom she reminded

him. She was not silly, and yet attention of this sort had its weight.

"You will be in Chicago some little time, won’t you?" he observed at

one turn of the now easy conversation.

"I don’t know," said Carrie vaguely- a flash vision of the

possibility of her not securing employment rising in her mind.

"Several weeks, anyhow," he said, looking steadily into her eyes.

There was much more passing now than the mere words indicated. He

recognised the indescribable thing that made up for fascination and

beauty in her. She realised that she was of interest to him from the

one standpoint which a woman both delights in and fears. Her manner

was simple, though for the very reason that she had not yet learned

the many little affectations with which women conceal their true

feelings. Some things she did appeared bold. A clever companion- had

she ever had one- would have warned her never to look a man in the

eyes so steadily.

"Why do you ask?" she said.

"Well, I’m going to be there several weeks. I’m going to study stock

at our place and get new samples. I might show you ’round."

"I don’t know whether you can or not. I mean I don’t know whether

I can. I shall be living with my sister, and-"

"Well, if she minds, we’ll fix that." He took out his pencil and a

little pocket note-book as if it were all settled. "What is your

address there?"

She fumbled her purse which contained the address slip.

He reached down in his hip pocket and took out a fat purse. It was

filled with slips of paper, some mileage books, a roll of

greenbacks. It impressed her deeply. Such a purse had never been

carried by any one attentive to her. Indeed, an experienced traveller,

a brisk man of the world, had never come within such close range

before. The purse, the shiny tan shoes, the smart new suit, and the

air with which he did things, built up for her a dim world of fortune,

of which he was the centre. It disposed her pleasantly toward all he

might do.

He took out a neat business card, on which was engraved Bartlett,

Caryoe & Company, and down in the lefthand corner, Chas. H. Drouet.

"That’s me," he said, putting the card in her hand and touching

his name. "It’s pronounced Drew-eh. Our family was French, on my

father’s side."

She looked at it while he put up his purse. Then he got out a letter

from a bunch in his coat pocket. "This is the house I travel for,"

he went on, pointing to a picture on it, "corner of State and Lake."

There was pride in his voice. He felt that it was something to be

connected with such a place, and he made her feel that way.

"What is your address?" he began again, fixing his pencil to write.

"Carrie Meeber," she said slowly. "Three hundred and fifty-four West

Van Buren Street, care S. C. Hanson."

He wrote it carefully down and got out the purse again. "You’ll be

at home if I come around Monday night?" he said.

"I think so," she answered.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes

we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great

inaudible feelings and purposes. Here were these two, bandying

little phrases, drawing purses, looking at cards, and both unconscious

of how inarticulate all their real feelings were. Neither was wise

enough to be sure of the working of the mind of the other. He could

not tell how his luring succeeded. She could not realise that she

was drifting, until he secured her address. Now she felt that she

had yielded something- he, that he had gained a victory. Already

they felt that they were somehow associated. Already he took control

in directing the conversation. His words were easy. Her manner was

relaxed.

They were nearing Chicago. Signs were everywhere numerous. Trains

flashed by them. Across wide stretches of flat, open prairie they

could see lines of telegraph poles stalking across the fields toward

the great city. Far away were indications of suburban towns, some

big smoke-stacks towering high in the air.

Frequently there were two-story frame houses standing out in the

open fields, without fence or trees, lone outposts of the

approaching army of homes.

To the child, the genius with imagination, or the wholly

untravelled, the approach to a great city for the first time is a

wonderful thing. Particularly if it be evening- that mystic period

between the glare and gloom of the world when life is changing from

one sphere or condition to another. Ah, the promise of the night. What

does it not hold for the weary! What old illusion of hope is not

here forever repeated! Says the soul of the toiler to itself, "I shall

soon be free. I shall be in the ways and the hosts of the merry. The

streets, the lamps, the lighted chamber set for dining, are for me.

The theatre, the halls, the parties, the ways of rest and the paths of

song- these are mine in the night." Though all humanity be still

enclosed in the shops, the thrill runs abroad. It is in the air. The

dullest feel something which they may not always express or

describe. It is the lifting of the burden of toil.

Sister Carrie gazed out of the window. Her companion, affected by

her wonder, so contagious are all things, felt anew some interest in

the city and pointed out its marvels.

"This is Northwest Chicago," said Drouet. "This is the Chicago

River," and he pointed to a little muddy creek, crowded with the

huge masted wanderers from far-off waters nosing the black-posted

banks. With a puff, a clang, and a clatter of rails it was gone.

"Chicago is getting to be a great town," he went on. "It’s a wonder.

You’ll find lots to see here."

She did not hear this very well. Her heart was troubled by a kind of

terror. The fact that she was alone, away from home, rushing into a

great sea of life and endeavour, began to tell. She could not help but

feel a little choked for breath- a little sick as her heart beat so

fast. She half closed her eyes and tried to think it was nothing, that

Columbia City was only a little way off.

"Chicago! Chicago!" called the brakeman, slamming open the door.

They were rushing into a more crowded yard, alive with the clatter and

clang of life. She began to gather up her poor little grip and

closed her hand firmly upon her purse. Drouet arose, kicked his legs

to straighten his trousers, and seized his clean yellow grip.

"I suppose your people will be here to meet you?" he said. "Let me

carry your grip."

"Oh, no," she said. "I’d rather you wouldn’t. I’d rather you

wouldn’t be with me when I meet my sister."

"All right," he said in all kindness. "I’ll be near, though, in case

she isn’t here, and take you out there safely."

"You’re so kind," said Carrie, feeling the goodness of such

attention in her strange situation.

"Chicago!" called the brakeman, drawing the word out long. They were

under a great shadowy train shed, where the lamps were already

beginning to shine out, with passenger cars all about and the train

moving at a snail’s pace. The people in the car were all up and

crowding about the door.

"Well, here we are," said Drouet, leading the way to the door.

"Good-bye, till I see you Monday."

"Good-bye," she answered, taking his proffered hand.

"Remember, I’ll be looking till you find your sister."

She smiled into his eyes.

They filed out, and he affected to take no notice of her. A

lean-faced, rather commonplace woman recognised Carrie on the platform

and hurried forward.

"Why, Sister Carrie!" she began, and there was a perfunctory embrace

of welcome.

Carrie realised the change of affectional atmosphere at once. Amid

all the maze, uproar, and novelty she felt cold reality taking her

by the hand. No world of light and merriment. No round of amusement.

Her sister carried with her most of the grimness of shift and toil.

"Why, how are all the folks at home?" she began; "how is father, and

mother?"

Carrie answered, but was looking away. Down the aisle, toward the

gate leading into the waiting-room and the street, stood Drouet. He

was looking back. When he saw that she saw him and was safe with her

sister he turned to go, sending back the shadow of a smile. Only

Carrie saw it. She felt something lost to her when he moved away. When

he disappeared she felt his absence thoroughly. With her sister she

was much alone, a lone figure in a tossing, thoughtless sea.

Chapter II.

WHAT POVERTY THREATENED: OF GRANITE AND BRASS

Minnie’s flat, as the one-floor resident apartments were then

being called, was in a part of West Van Buren Street inhabited by

families of labourers and clerks, men who had come, and were still

coming, with the rush of population pouring in at the rate of 50,000 a

year. It was on the third floor, the front windows looking down into

the street, where, at night, the lights of grocery stores were shining

and children were playing. To Carrie, the sound of the little bells

upon the horse-cars, as they tinkled in and out of hearing, was as

pleasing as it was novel. She gazed into the lighted street when

Minnie brought her into the front room, and wondered at the sounds,

the movement, the murmur of the vast city which stretched for miles

and miles in every direction.

Mrs. Hanson, after the first greetings were over, gave Carrie the

baby and proceeded to get supper. Her husband asked a few questions

and sat down to read the evening paper. He was a silent man,

American born, of a Swede father, and now employed as a cleaner of

refrigerator cars at the stock-yards. To him the presence or absence

of his wife’s sister was a matter of indifference. Her personal

appearance did not affect him one way or the other. His one

observation to the point was concerning the chances of work in

Chicago.

"It’s a big place," he said. "You can get in somewhere in a few

days. Everybody does."

It had been tacitly understood beforehand that she was to get work

and pay her board. He was of a clean, saving disposition, and had

already paid a number of monthly instalments on two lots far out on

the West Side. His ambition was some day to build a house on them.

In the interval which marked the preparation of the meal Carrie

found time to study the flat. She had some slight gift of

observation and that sense, so rich in every woman- intuition.

She felt the drag of a lean and narrow life. The walls of the

rooms were discordantly papered. The floors were covered with

matting and the hall laid with a thin rag carpet. One could see that

the furniture was of that poor, hurriedly patched together quality

sold by the instalment houses.

She sat with Minnie, in the kitchen, holding the baby until it began

to cry. Then she walked and sang to it, until Hanson, disturbed in his

reading, came and took it. A pleasant side to his nature came out

here. He was patient. One could see that he was very much wrapped up

in his offspring.

"Now, now," he said, walking. "There, there," and there was a

certain Swedish accent noticeable in his voice.

"You’ll want to see the city first, won’t you?" said Minnie, when

they were eating. "Well, we’ll go out Sunday and see Lincoln Park."

Carrie noticed that Hanson had said nothing to this. He seemed to be

thinking of something else.

"Well," she said, "I think I’ll look around to-morrow. I’ve got

Friday and Saturday, and it won’t be any trouble. Which way is the

business part?"

Minnie began to explain, but her husband took this part of the

conversation to himself.

"It’s that way," he said, pointing east. "That’s east." Then he went

off into the longest speech he had yet indulged in, concerning the lay

of Chicago. "You’d better look in those big manufacturing houses along

Franklin Street and just the other side of the river," he concluded.

"Lots of girls work there. You could get home easy, too. It isn’t very

far."

Carrie nodded and asked her sister about the neighbourhood. The

latter talked in a subdued tone, telling the little she knew about it,

while Hanson concerned himself with the baby. Finally he jumped up and

handed the child to his wife.

"I’ve got to get up early in the morning, so I’ll go to bed," and

off he went, disappearing into the dark little bedroom off the hall,

for the night.

"He works way down at the stock-yards," explained Minnie,

"What time do you get up to get breakfast?" asked Carrie. "so he’s

got to get up at half-past five."

"At about twenty minutes of five."

Together they finished the labour of the day, Carrie washing the

dishes while Minnie undressed the baby and put it to bed. Minnie’s

manner was one of trained industry, and Carrie could see that it was a

steady round of toil with her.

She began to see that her relations with Drouet would have to be

abandoned. He could not come here. She read from the manner of Hanson,

in the subdued air of Minnie, and, indeed, the whole atmosphere of the

flat, a settled opposition to anything save a conservative round of

toil. If Hanson sat every evening in the front room and read his

paper, if he went to bed at nine, and Minnie a little later, what

would they expect of her? She saw that she would first need to get

work and establish herself on a paying basis before she could think of

having company of any sort. Her little flirtation with Drouet seemed

now an extraordinary thing.

"No," she said to herself, "he can’t come here."

She asked Minnie for ink and paper, which were upon the mantel in

the dining-room, and when the latter had gone to bed at ten, got out

Drouet’s card and wrote him.

"I cannot have you call on me here. You will have to wait until

you hear from me again. My sister’s place is so small."

She troubled herself over what else to put in the letter. She wanted

to make some reference to their relations upon the train, but was

too timid. She concluded by thanking him for his kindness in a crude

way, then puzzled over the formality of signing her name, and

finally decided upon the severe, winding up with a "Very truly," which

she subsequently changed to "Sincerely." She sealed and addressed

the letter, and going in the front room, the alcove of which contained

her bed, drew the one small rocking-chair up to the open window, and

sat looking out upon the night and streets in silent wonder.

Finally, wearied by her own reflections, she began to grow dull in her

chair, and feeling the need of sleep, arranged her clothing for the

night and went to bed.

When she awoke at eight the next morning, Hanson had gone. Her

sister was busy in the dining-room, which was also the sitting-room,

sewing. She worked, after dressing, to arrange a little breakfast

for herself, and then advised with Minnie as to which way to look. The

latter had changed considerably since Carrie had seen her. She was now

a thin, though rugged, woman of twenty-seven, with ideas of life

coloured by her husband’s, and fast hardening into narrower

conceptions of pleasure and duty than had ever been hers in a

thoroughly circumscribed youth. She had invited Carrie, not because

she longed for her presence, but because the latter was dissatisfied

at home, and could probably get work and pay her board here. She was

pleased to see her in a way, but reflected her husband’s point of view

in the matter of work. Anything was good enough so long as it paid-

say, five dollars a week to begin with. A shop girl was the destiny

prefigured for the newcomer. She would get in one of the great shops

and do well enough until- well, until something happened. Neither of

them knew exactly what. They did not figure on promotion. They did not

exactly count on marriage. Things would go on, though, in a dim kind

of way until the better thing would eventuate, and Carrie would be

rewarded for coming and toiling in the city. It was under such

auspicious circumstances that she started out this morning to look for

work.

Before following her in her round of seeking, let us look at the

sphere in which her future was to lie. In 1889 Chicago had the

peculiar qualifications of growth which made such adventuresome

pilgrimages even on the part of young girls plausible. Its many and

growing commercial opportunities gave it widespread fame, which made

of it a giant magnet, drawing to itself, from all quarters, the

hopeful and the hopeless- those who had their fortune yet to make

and those whose fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax

elsewhere. It was a city of over 500,000, with the ambition, the

daring, the activity of a metropolis of a million. Its streets and

houses were already scattered over an area of seventy-five square

miles. Its population was not so much thriving upon established

commerce as upon the industries which prepared for the arrival of

others. The sound of the hammer engaged upon the erection of new

structures was everywhere heard. Great industries were moving in.

The huge railroad corporations which had long before recognised the

prospects of the place had seized upon vast tracts of land for

transfer and shipping purposes. Street-car lines had been extended far

out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth. The city

had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions

where, perhaps, one solitary house stood out alone- a pioneer of the

populous ways to be. There were regions open to the sweeping winds and

rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long,

blinking lines of gas-lamps, fluttering in the wind. Narrow board

walks extended out, passing here a house, and there a store, at far

intervals, eventually ending on the open prairie.

In the central portion was the vast wholesale and shopping district,

to which the uninformed seeker for work usually drifted. It was a

characteristic of Chicago then, and one not generally shared by

other cities, that individual firms of any pretension occupied

individual buildings. The presence of ample ground made this possible.

It gave an imposing appearance to most of the wholesale houses,

whose offices were upon the ground floor and in plain view of the

street. The large plates of window glass, now so common, were then

rapidly coming into use, and gave to the ground floor offices a

distinguished and prosperous look. The casual wanderer could see as he

passed a polished array of office fixtures, much frosted glass, clerks

hard at work, and genteel business men in "nobby" suits and clean

linen lounging about or sitting in groups. Polished brass or nickel

signs at the square stone entrances announced the firm and the

nature of the business in rather neat and reserved terms. The entire

metropolitan centre possessed a high and mighty air calculated to

overawe and abash the common applicant, and to make the gulf between

poverty and success seem both wide and deep.

Into this important commercial region the timid Carrie went. She

walked east along Van Buren Street through a region of lessening

importance, until it deteriorated into a mass of shanties and

coal-yards, and finally verged upon the river. She walked bravely

forward, led by an honest desire to find employment and delayed at

every step by the interest of the unfolding scene, and a sense of

helplessness amid so much evidence of power and force which she did

not understand. These vast buildings, what were they? These strange

energies and huge interests, for what purposes were they there? She

could have understood the meaning of a little stone-cutter’s yard at

Columbia City, carving little pieces of marble for individual use, but

when the yards of some huge stone corporation came into view, filled

with spur tracks and flat cars, transpierced by docks from the river

and traversed overhead by immense trundling cranes of wood and

steel, it lost all significance in her little world.

It was so with the vast railroad yards, with the crowded array of

vessels she saw at the river, and the huge factories over the way,

lining the water’s edge. Through the open windows she could see the

figures of men and women in working aprons, moving busily about. The

great streets were wall-lined mysteries to her; the vast offices,

strange mazes which concerned far-off individuals of importance. She

could only think of people connected with them as counting money,

dressing magnificently, and riding in carriages. What they dealt in,

how they laboured, to what end it all came, she had only the vaguest

conception. It was all wonderful, all vast, all far removed, and she

sank in spirit inwardly and fluttered feebly at the heart as she

thought of entering any one of these mighty concerns and asking for

something to do- something that she could do- anything.

Chapter III.

WE QUESTION OF FORTUNE: FOUR-FIFTY A WEEK

Once across the river and into the wholesale district, she glanced

about her for some likely door at which to apply. As she

contemplated the wide windows and imposing signs, she became conscious

of being gazed upon and understood for what she was- a wage-seeker.

She had never done this thing before, and lacked courage. To avoid a

certain indefinable shame she felt at being caught spying about for

a position, she quickened her steps and assumed an air of indifference

supposedly common to one upon an errand. In this way she passed many

manufacturing and wholesale houses without once glancing in. At

last, after several blocks of walking, she felt that this would not

do, and began to look about again; though without relaxing her pace. A

little way on she saw a great door which, for some reason, attracted

her attention. It was ornamented by a small brass sign, and seemed

to be the entrance to a vast hive of six or seven floors. "Perhaps,"

she thought, "they may want some one," and crossed over to enter. When

she came within a score of feet of the desired goal, she saw through

the window a young man in a grey checked suit. That he had anything to

do with the concern, she could not tell, but because he happened to be

looking in her direction her weakening heart misgave her and she

hurried by, too overcome with shame to enter. Over the way stood a

great six-story structure, labelled Storm and King, which she viewed

with rising hope. It was a wholesale dry goods concern and employed

women. She could see them moving about now and then upon the upper

floors. This place she decided to enter, no matter what. She crossed

over and walked directly toward the entrance. As she did so, two men

came out and paused in the door. A telegraph messenger in blue

dashed past her and up the few steps that led to the entrance and

disappeared. Several pedestrians out of the hurrying throng which

filled the sidewalks passed about her as she paused, hesitating. She

looked helplessly around, and then, seeing herself observed,

retreated. It was too difficult a task. She could not go past them.

So severe a defeat told sadly upon her nerves. Her feet carried

her mechanically forward, every foot of her progress being a

satisfactory portion of a flight which she gladly made. Block after

block passed by. Upon street-lamps at the various corners she read

names such as Madison, Monroe, La Salle, Clark, Dearborn, State, and

still she went, her feet beginning to tire upon the broad stone

flagging. She was pleased in part that the streets were bright and

clean. The morning sun, shining down with steadily increasing

warmth, made the shady side of the streets pleasantly cool. She looked

at the blue sky overhead with more realisation of its charm than had

ever come to her before.

Her cowardice began to trouble her in a way. She turned back,

resolving to bunt up Storm and King and enter. On the way she

encountered a great wholesale shoe company, through the broad plate

windows of which she saw an enclosed executive department, hidden by

frosted glass. Without this enclosure, but just within the street

entrance, sat a grey-haired gentleman at a small table, with a large

open ledger before him. She walked by this institution several times

hesitating, but, finding herself unobserved, faltered past the

screen door and stood humbly waiting.

"Well, young lady," observed the old gentleman, looking at her

somewhat kindly, "what is it you wish?"

"I am, that is, do you- I mean, do you need any help?" she

stammered.

"Not just at present," he answered smiling. "Not just at present.

Come in some time next week. Occasionally we need some one."

She received the answer in silence and backed awkwardly out. The

pleasant nature of her reception rather astonished her. She had

expected that it would be more difficult, that something cold and

harsh would be said- she knew not what. That she had not been put to

shame and made to feel her unfortunate position, seemed remarkable.

Somewhat encouraged, she ventured into another large structure. It

was a clothing company, and more people were in evidence- well-dressed

men of forty and more, surrounded by brass railings.

An office boy approached her.

"Who is it you wish to see?" he asked.

"I want to see the manager," she said.

He ran away and spoke to one of a group of three men who were

conferring together. One of these came towards her.

"Well?" he said coldly. The greeting drove all courage from her at

once.

"Do you need any help?" she stammered.

"No," he replied abruptly, and turned upon his heel.

She went foolishly out, the office boy deferentially swinging the

door for her, and gladly sank into the obscuring crowd. It was a

severe setback to her recently pleased mental state.

Now she walked quite aimlessly for a time, turning here and there,

seeing one great company after another, but finding no courage to

prosecute her single inquiry. High noon came, and with it hunger.

She hunted out an unassuming restaurant and entered, but was disturbed

to find that the prices were exorbitant for the size of her purse. A

bowl of soup was all that she could afford, and, with this quickly

eaten, she went out again. It restored her strength somewhat and

made her moderately bold to pursue the search.

In walking a few blocks to fix upon some probable place, she again

encountered the firm of Storm and King, and this time managed to get

in. Some gentlemen were conferring close at hand, but took no notice

of her. She was left standing, gazing nervously upon the floor. When

the limit of her distress had been nearly reached, she was beckoned to

by a man at one of the many desks within the near-by railing.

"Who is it you wish to see?" he inquired.

"Why, any one, if you please," she answered. "I am looking for

something to do."

"Oh, you want to see Mr. McManus," he returned. "Sit down," and he

pointed to a chair against the neighbouring wall. He went on leisurely

writing, until after a time a short, stout gentleman came in from

the street.

"Mr. McManus," called the man at the desk, "this young woman wants

to see you."

The short gentleman turned about towards Carrie, and she arose and

came forward.

"What can I do for you, miss?" he inquired, surveying her curiously.

"I want to know if I can get a position," she inquired.

"As what?" he asked.

"Not as anything in particular," she faltered.

"Have you ever had any experience in the wholesale dry goods

business?" he questioned.

"No, sir," she replied.

"Are you a stenographer or typewriter?"

"No, sir."

"Well, we haven’t anything here," he said. "We employ only

experienced help."

She began to step backward toward the door, when something about her

plaintive face attracted him.

"Have you ever worked at anything before?" he inquired.

"No, sir," she said.

"Well, now, it’s hardly possible that you would get anything to do

in a wholesale house of this kind. Have you tried the department

stores?"

She acknowledged that she had not.

"Well, if I were you," he said, looking at her rather genially "I

would try the department stores. They often need young women as

clerks."

"Thank you," she said, her whole nature relieved by this spark of

friendly interest.

"Yes," he said, as she moved toward the door, "you try the

department stores," and off he went.

At that time the department store was in its earliest form of

successful operation, and there were not many. The first three in

the United States, established about 1884, were in Chicago. Carrie was

familiar with the names of several through the advertisements in the

"Daily News," and now proceeded to seek them. The words of Mr. McManus

had somehow managed to restore her courage, which had fallen low,

and she dared to hope that this new line would offer her something.

Some time she spent in wandering up and down, thinking to encounter

the buildings by chance, so readily is the mind, bent upon prosecuting

a hard but needful errand, eased by that self-deception which the

semblance of search, without the reality, gives. At last she

inquired of a police officer, and was directed to proceed "two

blocks up," where she would find "The Fair."

The nature of these vast retail combinations, should they ever

permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the

commercial history of our nation. Such a flowering out of a modest

trade principle the world had never witnessed up to that time. They

were along the line of the most effective retail organisation, with

hundreds of stores coordinated into one and laid out upon the most

imposing and economic basis. They were handsome, bustling,

successful affairs, with a host of clerks and a swarm of patrons.

Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable

displays of trinkets, dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each

separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and attraction.

She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon

her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there

which she could not have used- nothing which she did not long to

own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled

skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all

touched her with individual desire, and she felt keenly the fact

that not any of these things were in the range of her purchase. She

was a work-seeker, an outcast without employment, one whom the average

employee could tell at a glance was poor and in need of a situation.

It must not be thought that any one could have mistaken her for a

nervous, sensitive, high-strung nature, cast unduly upon a cold,

calculating, and unpoetic world. Such certainly she was not. But women

are peculiarly sensitive to their adornment.

Not only did Carrie feel the drag of desire for all which was new

and pleasing in apparel for women, but she noticed too, with a touch

at the heart, the fine ladies who elbowed and ignored her, brushing

past in utter disregard of her presence, themselves eagerly enlisted

in the materials which the store contained. Carrie was not familiar

with the appearance of her more fortunate sisters of the city. Neither

had she before known the nature and appearance of the shop girls

with whom she now compared poorly. They were pretty in the main,

some even handsome, with an air of independence and indifference which

added, in the case of the more favoured, a certain piquancy. Their

clothes were neat, in many instances fine, and wherever she

encountered the eye of one it was only to recognise in it a keen

analysis of her own position- her individual shortcomings of dress and

that shadow of manner which she thought must hang about her and make

clear to all who and what she was. A flame of envy lighted in her

heart. She realised in a dim way how much the city held- wealth,

fashion, ease- every adornment for women, and she longed for dress and

beauty with a whole heart.

On the second floor were the managerial offices, to which, after

some inquiry, she was now directed. There she found other girls

ahead of her, applicants like herself, but with more of that

self-satisfied and independent air which experience of the city lends;

girls who scrutinised her in a painful manner. After a wait of perhaps

three-quarters of an hour, she was called in turn.

"Now," said a sharp, quick-mannered Jew, who was sitting at a

roll-top desk near the window, "have you ever worked in any other

store?"

"No, sir," said Carrie.

"Oh, you haven’t," he said, eyeing her keenly.

"No, sir," she replied.

"Well, we prefer young women just now with some experience. I

guess we can’t use you."

Carrie stood waiting a moment, hardly certain whether the

interview had terminated.

"Don’t wait!" he exclaimed. "Remember we are very busy here."

Carrie began to move quickly to the door.

"Hold on," he said, calling her back. "Give me your name and

address. We want girls occasionally."

When she had gotten safely into the street, she could scarcely

restrain the tears. It was not so much the particular rebuff which she

had just experienced, but the whole abashing trend of the day. She was

tired and nervous. She abandoned the thought of appealing to the other

department stores and now wandered on, feeling a certain safety and

relief in mingling with the crowd.

In her indifferent wandering she turned into Jackson Street, not far

from the river, and was keeping her way along the south side of that

imposing thoroughfare, when a piece of wrapping paper, written on with

marking ink and tacked up on the door, attracted her attention. It

read, "Girls wanted- wrappers & stitchers." She hesitated a moment,

then entered.

The firm of Speigelheim & Co., makers of boys’ caps, occupied one

floor of the building, fifty feet in width and some eighty feet in

depth. It was a place rather dingily lighted, the darkest portions

having incandescent lights, filled with machines and work benches.

At the latter laboured quite a company of girls and some men. The

former were drabby-looking creatures, stained in face with oil and

dust, clad in thin, shapeless, cotton dresses and shod with more or

less worn shoes. Many of them had their sleeves rolled up, revealing

bare arms, and in some cases, owing to the heat, their dresses were

open at the neck. They were a fair type of nearly the lowest order

of shop-girls- careless, slouchy, and more or less pale from

confinement. They were not timid, however; were rich in curiosity, and

strong in daring and slang.

Carrie looked about her, very much disturbed and quite sure that she

did not want to work here. Aside from making her uncomfortable by

sidelong glances, no one paid her the least attention. She waited

until the whole department was aware of her presence. Then some word

was sent around, and a foreman, in an apron and shirt sleeves, the

latter rolled up to his shoulders, approached.

"Do you want to see me?" he asked.

"Do you need any help?" said Carrie, already learning directness

of address.

"Do you know how to stitch caps?" he returned.

"No, sir," she replied.

"Have you ever had any experience at this kind of work?" he

inquired.

She answered that she had not.

"Well," said the foreman, scratching his ear meditatively, "we do

need a stitcher. We like experienced help, though. We’ve hardly got

time to break people in." He paused and looked away out of the window.

"We might, though, put you at finishing," he concluded reflectively.

"How much do you pay a week?" ventured Carrie, emboldened by a

certain softness in the man’s manner and his simplicity of address.

"Three and a half," he answered.

"Oh," she was about to exclaim, but checked herself and allowed

her thoughts to die without expression.

"We’re not exactly in need of anybody," he went on vaguely,

looking her over as one would a package. "You can come on Monday

morning, though," he added, "and I’ll put you to work."

"Thank you," said Carrie weakly.

"If you come, bring an apron," he added.

He walked away and left her standing by the elevator, never so

much as inquiring her name.

While the appearance of the shop and the announcement of the price

paid per week operated very much as a blow to Carrie’s fancy, the fact

that work of any kind was offered after so rude a round of

experience was gratifying. She could not begin to believe that she

would take the place, modest as her aspirations were. She had been

used to better than that. Her mere experience and the free out-of-door

life of the country caused her nature to revolt at such confinement.

Dirt had never been her share. Her sister’s flat was clean. This place

was grimy and low, the girls were careless and hardened. They must

be bad-minded and hearted, she imagined. Still, a place had been

offered her. Surely Chicago was not so bad if she could find one place

in one day. She might find another and better later.

Her subsequent experiences were not of a reassuring nature, however.

From all the more pleasing or imposing places she was turned away

abruptly with the most chilling formality. In others where she applied

only the experienced were required. She met with painful rebuffs,

the most trying of which had been in a manufacturing cloak house,

where she had gone to the fourth floor to inquire.

"No, no," said the foreman, a rough, heavily built individual, who

looked after a miserably lighted workshop, "we don’t want any one.

Don’t come here."

With the wane of the afternoon went her hopes, her courage, and

her strength. She had been astonishingly persistent. So earnest an

effort was well deserving of a better reward. On every hand, to her

fatigued senses, the great business portion grew larger, harder,

more stolid in its indifference. It seemed as if it was all closed

to her, that the struggle was too fierce for her to hope to do

anything at all. Men and women hurried by in long, shifting lines. She

felt the flow of the tide of effort and interest- felt her own

helplessness without quite realising the wisp on the tide that she

was. She cast about vainly for some possible place to apply, but found

no door which she had the courage to enter. It would be the same thing

all over. The old humiliation of her plea, rewarded by curt denial.

Sick at heart and in body, she turned to the west, the direction of

Minnie’s flat, which she had now fixed in mind, and began that

wearisome, baffled retreat which the seeker for employment at

nightfall too often makes. In passing through Fifth Avenue, south

towards Van Buren Street, where she intended to take a car, she passed

the door of a large wholesale shoe house, through the plate-glass

window of which she could see a middle-aged gentleman sitting a a

small desk. One of those forlorn impulses which often grow out of a

fixed sense of defeat, the last sprouting of a baffled and uprooted

growth of ideas, seized upon her. She walked deliberately through

the door and up to the gentleman, who looked at her weary face with

partially awakened interest.

"What is it?" he said.

"Can you give me something to do?" said Carrie.

"Now, I really don’t know," he said kindly. "What kind of work is it

you want- you’re not a typewriter, are you?"

"Oh, no," answered Carrie.

"Well, we only employ book-keepers and typewriters here. You might

go around to the side and inquire upstairs. They did want some help

upstairs a few days ago. Ask for Mr. Brown."

She hastened around to the side entrance and was taken up by the

elevator to the fourth floor.

"Call Mr. Brown, Willie," said the elevator man to a boy near by.

Willie went off and presently returned with the information that Mr.

Brown said she should sit down and that he would be around in a little

while.

It was a portion of the stock room which gave no idea of the general

character of the place, and Carrie could form no opinion of the nature

of the work.

"So you want something to do," said Mr. Brown, after he inquired

concerning the nature of her errand. "Have you ever been employed in a

shoe factory before?"

"No, sir," said Carrie.

"What is your name?" he inquired, and being informed, "Well, I don’t

know as I have anything for you. Would you work for four and a half

a week?"

Carrie was too worn by defeat not to feel that it was

considerable. She had not expected that he would offer her less than

six. She acquiesced, however, and he took her name and address.

"Well," he said, finally, "you report here at eight o’clock Monday

morning. I think I can find something for you to do."

He left her revived by the possibilities, sure that she had found

something at last. Instantly the blood crept warmly over her body. Her

nervous tension relaxed. She walked out into the busy street and

discovered a new atmosphere. Behold, the throng was moving with a

lightsome step. She noticed that men and women were smiling. Scraps of

conversation and notes of laughter floated to her. The air was

light. People were already pouring out of the buildings, their

labour ended for the day. She noticed that they were pleased, and

thoughts of her sister’s home and the meal that would be awaiting

her quickened her steps. She hurried on, tired perhaps, but no

longer weary of foot. What would not Minnie say! Ah, the long winter

in Chicago- the lights, the crowd, the amusement! This was a great,

pleasing metropolis after all. Her new firm was a goodly

institution. Its windows were of huge plate glass. She could

probably do well there. Thoughts of Drouet returned- of the things

he had told her. She now felt that life was better, that it was

livelier, sprightlier. She boarded a car in the best of spirits,

feeling her blood still flowing pleasantly. She would live in Chicago,

her mind kept saying to itself. She would have a better time than

she had ever had before- she would be happy.

Chapter IV.

THE SPENDINGS OF FANCY: FACTS ANSWER WITH SNEERS

For the next two days Carrie indulged in the most high-flown

speculations.

Her fancy plunged recklessly into privileges and amusements which

would have been much more becoming had she been cradled a child of

fortune. With ready will and quick mental selection she scattered

her meagre four-fifty per week with a swift and graceful hand. Indeed,

as she sat in her rocking-chair these several evenings before going to

bed and looked out upon the pleasantly lighted street, this money

cleared for its prospective possessor the way to every joy and every

bauble which the heart of woman may desire. "I will have a fine time,"

she thought.

Her sister Minnie knew nothing of these rather wild cerebrations,

though they exhausted the markets of delight. She was too busy

scrubbing the kitchen woodwork and calculating the purchasing power of

eighty cents for Sunday’s dinner. When Carrie had returned home,

flushed with her first success and ready, for all her weariness, to

discuss the now interesting events which led up to her achievement,

the former had merely smiled approvingly and inquired whether she

would have to spend any of it for car fare. This consideration had not

entered in before, and it did not now for long affect the glow of

Carrie’s enthusiasm. Disposed as she then was to calculate upon that

vague basis which allows the subtraction of one sum from another

without any perceptible diminution, she was happy.

When Hanson came home at seven o’clock, he was inclined to be a

little crusty- his usual demeanour before supper. This never showed so

much in anything he said as in a certain solemnity of countenance

and the silent manner in which he slopped about. He had a pair of

yellow carpet slippers which he enjoyed wearing, and these he would

immediately substitute for his solid pair of shoes. This, and

washing his face with the aid of common washing soap until it glowed a

shiny red, constituted his only preparation for his evening meal. He

would then get his evening paper and read in silence.

For a young man, this was rather a morbid turn of character, and

so affected Carrie. Indeed, it affected the entire atmosphere of the

flat, as such things are inclined to do, and gave to his wife’s mind

its subdued and tactful turn, anxious to avoid taciturn replies. Under

the influence of Carrie’s announcement he brightened up somewhat.

"You didn’t lose any time, did you?" he remarked, smiling a little.

"No," returned Carrie with a touch of pride.

He asked her one or two more questions and then turned to play

with the baby, leaving the subject until it was brought up again by

Minnie at the table.

Carrie, however, was not to be reduced to the common level of

observation which prevailed in the flat.

"It seems to be such a large company," she said at one place. "Great

big plate-glass windows and lots of clerks. The man I saw said they

hired ever so many people."

"It’s not very hard to get work now," put in Hanson, "if you look

right."

Minnie, under the warming influence of Carrie’s good spirits and her

husband’s somewhat conversational mood, began to tell Carrie of some

of the well-known things to see- things the enjoyment of which cost

nothing.

"You’d like to see Michigan Avenue. There are such fine houses. It

is such a fine street."

"Where is ‘H. R. Jacob’s’?" interrupted Carrie, mentioning one of

the theatres devoted to melodrama which went by that name at the time.

"Oh, it’s not very far from here," answered Minnie. "It’s in

Halstead Street, right up here."

"How I’d like to go there. I crossed Halstead Street to-day,

didn’t I?"

At this there was a slight halt in the natural reply. Thoughts are a

strangely permeating factor. At her suggestion of going to the

theatre, the unspoken shade of disapproval to the doing of those

things which involved the expenditure of money- shades of feeling

which arose in the mind of Hanson and then in Minnie- slightly

affected the atmosphere of the table. Minnie answered "yes," but

Carrie could feel that going to the theatre was poorly advocated here.

The subject was put off for a little while until Hanson, through

with his meal, took his paper and went into the front room.

When they were alone, the two sisters began a somewhat freer

conversation, Carrie interrupting it to hum a little, as they worked

at the dishes.

"I should like to walk up and see Halstead Street, if it isn’t too

far," said Carrie, after a time. "Why don’t we go to the theatre

to-night?"

"Oh, I don’t think Sven would want to go to-night," returned Minnie.

"He has to get up so early."

"He wouldn’t mind- he’d enjoy it," said Carrie.

"No, he doesn’t go very often," returned Minnie.

"Well, I’d like to go," rejoined Carrie. "Let’s you and me go."

Minnie pondered a while, not upon whether she could or would go- for

that point was al

THE CONSERVATIVE

_A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple,

Boston, December 9, 1841_

The two parties which divide the state, the party of

Conservatism and that od have disputed the possession of the world

ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil

history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies

and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician

and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and

accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in

all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in

national councils, and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every

man’s bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old

world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still

the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and

hot personalities.

Such an irreconcilable antagonism, of course, must have a

correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the

opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the

Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the

appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature.

There is a fragment of old fable which seems somehow to have

been dropped from the current mythologies, which may deserve

attention, as it appears to relate to this subject.

Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or with none but the great

Uranus or Heaven beholding him, and he created an oyster. Then he

would act again, but he made nothing more, but went on creating the

race of oysters. Then Uranus cried, `a new work, O Saturn! the old

is not good again.’

Saturn replied. `I fear. There is not only the alternative of

making and not making, but also of unmaking. Seest thou the great

sea, how it ebbs and flows? so is it with me; my power ebbs; and if I

put forth my hands, I shall not do, but undo. Therefore I do what I

have done; I hold what I have got; and so I resist Night and Chaos.’

`O Saturn,’ replied Uranus, `thou canst not hold thine own, but

by making more. Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the

next flowing of the tide, they will be pebbles and sea-foam.’

`I see,’ rejoins Saturn, `thou art in league with Night, thou

art become an evil eye; thou spakest from love; now thy words smite

me with hatred. I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?’ — `I

appeal to Fate also,’ said Uranus, `must there not be motion?’ — But

Saturn was silent, and went on making oysters for a thousand years.

After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of

the sun, and he made Jupiter; and then he feared again; and nature

froze, the things that were made went backward, and, to save the

world, Jupiter slew his father Saturn.

This may stand for the earliest account of a conversation on

politics between a Conservative and a Radical, which has come down to

us. It is ever thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal and

the centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient energy;

Conservatism the pause on the last movement. `That which is was made

by God,’ saith Conservatism. `He is leaving that, he is entering

this other;’ rejoins Innovation.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of

conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It

affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will

not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle, which

conservatism is set to defend, is the actual state of things, good

and bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of

things. Of course, conservatism always has the worst of the

argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that

to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself with the

mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the

possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet;

whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and

sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man’s confessed

limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on

circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member

of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man

himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual

and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and

winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at

night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism

goes for comfort, reform for truth. Conservatism is more candid to

behold another’s worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase

its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no

invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence,

no husbandry. It makes a great difference to your figure and to your

thought, whether your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism

never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not

establishment, but reform. Conservatism tends to universal seeming

and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes that men’s

temper governs them; that for me, it avails not to trust in

principles; they will fail me; I must bend a little; it distrusts

nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular

application, — law for all that does not include any one. Reform in

its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it

runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless

pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in

hypocrisy and sensual reaction.

And so whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be

safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists, that each is a

good half, but an impossible whole. Each exposes the abuses of the

other, but in a true society, in a true man, both must combine.

Nature does not give the crown of its approbation, namely, beauty, to

any action or emblem or actor, but to one which combines both these

elements; not to the rock which resists the waves from age to age,

nor to the wave which lashes incessantly the rock, but the superior

beauty is with the oak which stands with its hundred arms against the

storms of a century, and grows every year like a sapling; or the

river which ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age to

age; or, greatest of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid

the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so that when you

remember what he was, and see what he is, you say, what strides! what

a disparity is here!

Throughout nature the past combines in every creature with the

present. Each of the convolutions of the sea-shell, each node and

spine marks one year of the fish’s life, what was the mouth of the

shell for one season, with the addition of new matter by the growth

of the animal, becoming an ornamental node. The leaves and a shell

of soft wood are all that the vegetation of this summer has made, but

the solid columnar stem, which lifts that bank of foliage into the

air to draw the eye and to cool us with its shade, is the gift and

legacy of dead and buried years.

In nature, each of these elements being always present, each

theory has a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or

on Ethics, shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If

we read the world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the

present hour and circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the

best throw of the dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet

possible. If we see it from the side of Will, or the Moral

Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and the Present, and require the

impossible of the Future.

But although this bifold fact lies thus united in real nature,

and so united that no man can continue to exist in whom both these

elements do not work, yet men are not philosophers, but are rather

very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see

everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all

times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a

philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is

conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that

is, with every truth a certain falsehood. As this is the invariable

method of our training, we must give it allowance, and suffer men to

learn as they have done for six millenniums, a word at a time, to

pair off into insane parties, and learn the amount of truth each

knows, by the denial of an equal amount of truth. For the present,

then, to come at what sum is attainable to us, we must even hear the

parties plead as parties.

That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it

cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the

Inevitable. There is the question not only, what the conservative

says for himself? but, why must he say it? What insurmountable fact

binds him to that side? Here is the fact which men call Fate, and

fate in dread degrees, fate behind fate, not to be disposed of by the

consideration that the Conscience commands this or that, but

necessitating the question, whether the faculties of man will play

him true in resisting the facts of universal experience? For

although the commands of the Conscience are _essentially_ absolute,

they are _historically_ limitary. Wisdom does not seek a literal

rectitude, but an useful, that is, a conditioned one, such a one as

the faculties of man and the constitution of things will warrant.

The reformer, the partisan loses himself in driving to the utmost

some specialty of right conduct, until his own nature and all nature

resist him; but Wisdom attempts nothing enormous and disproportioned

to its powers, nothing which it cannot perform or nearly perform. We

have all a certain intellection or presentiment of reform existing in

the mind, which does not yet descend into the character, and those

who throw themselves blindly on this lose themselves. Whatever they

attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts suicidally on the actor

himself. This is the penalty of having transcended nature. For the

existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as

a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you

stand, it is the mother of whom you were born. Reform converses with

possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but here is sacred

fact. This also was true, or it could not be: it had life in it, or

it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not

continue. Your schemes may be feasible, or may not be, but this has

the endorsement of nature and a long friendship and cohabitation with

the powers of nature. This will stand until a better cast of the

dice is made. The contest between the Future and the Past is one

between Divinity entering, and Divinity departing. You are welcome

to try your experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual

order by that ideal republic you announce, for nothing but God will

expel God. But plainly the burden of proof must lie with the

projector. We hold to this, until you can demonstrate something

better.

The system of property and law goes back for its origin to

barbarous and sacred times; it is the fruit of the same mysterious

cause as the mineral or animal world. There is a natural sentiment

and prepossession in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and

aboriginal usages, which is a homage to the element of necessity and

divinity which is in them. The respect for the old names of places,

of mountains, and streams, is universal. The Indian and barbarous

name can never be supplanted without loss. The ancients tell us that

the gods loved the Ethiopians for their stable customs; and the

Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not be explored, passed

among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for sacred nations.

Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the existing social

system, that it leaves no one out of it. We may be partial, but Fate

is not. All men have their root in it. You who quarrel with the

arrangements of society, and are willing to embroil all, and risk the

indisputable good that exists, for the chance of better, live, move,

and have your being in this, and your deeds contradict your words

every day. For as you cannot jump from the ground without using the

resistance of the ground, nor put out the boat to sea, without

shoving from the shore, nor attain liberty without rejecting

obligation, so you are under the necessity of using the Actual order

of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it, whilst you wish to

take away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and in the

strength of its bread you would break up the oven. But you are

betrayed by your own nature. You also are conservatives. However

men please to style themselves, I see no other than a conservative

party. You are not only identical with us in your needs, but also in

your methods and aims. You quarrel with my conservatism, but it is

to build up one of your own; it will have a new beginning, but the

same course and end, the same trials, the same passions; among the

lovers of the new I observe that there is a jealousy of the newest,

and that the seceder from the seceder is as damnable as the pope

himself.

On these and the like grounds of general statement,

conservatism plants itself without danger of being displaced.

Especially before this _personal_ appeal, the innovator must confess

his weakness, must confess that no man is to be found good enough to

be entitled to stand champion for the principle. But when this great

tendency comes to practical encounters, and is challenged by young

men, to whom it is no abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress,

and exclusion from opportunities, it must needs seem injurious. The

youth, of course, is an innovator by the fact of his birth. There he

stands, newly born on the planet, a universal beggar, with all the

reason of things, one would say, on his side. In his first

consideration how to feed, clothe, and warm himself, he is met by

warnings on every hand, that this thing and that thing have owners,

and he must go elsewhere. Then he says; If I am born into the earth,

where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show

me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my

corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.

`Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,’ cry

all the gentlemen of this world; `but you may come and work in ours,

for us, and we will give you a piece of bread.’

And what is that peril?

Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; imprisonment, if

we find you afterward.

And by what authority, kind gentlemen?

By our law.

And your law, — is it just?

As just for you as it was for us. We wrought for others under

this law, and got our lands so.

I repeat the question, Is your law just?

Not quite just, but necessary. Moreover, it is juster now than

it was when we were born; we have made it milder and more equal.

I will none of your law, returns the youth; it encumbers me. I

cannot understand, or so much as spare time to read that needless

library of your laws. Nature has sufficiently provided me with

rewards and sharp penalties, to bind me not to transgress. Like the

Persian noble of old, I ask "that I may neither command nor obey." I

do not wish to enter into your complex social system. I shall serve

those whom I can, and they who can will serve me. I shall seek those

whom I love, and shun those whom I love not, and what more can all

your laws render me?

With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this

plaintiff an upholder of the establishment, a man of many virtues:

Your opposition is feather-brained and overfine. Young man, I

have no skill to talk with you, but look at me; I have risen early

and sat late, and toiled honestly, and painfully for very many years.

I never dreamed about methods; I laid my bones to, and drudged for

the good I possess; it was not got by fraud, nor by luck, but by

work, and you must show me a warrant like these stubborn facts in

your own fidelity and labor, before I suffer you, on the faith of a

few fine words, to ride into my estate, and claim to scatter it as

your own.

Now you touch the heart of the matter, replies the reformer.

To that fidelity and labor, I pay homage. I am unworthy to arraign

your manner of living, until I too have been tried. But I should be

more unworthy, if I did not tell you why I cannot walk in your steps.

I find this vast network, which you call property, extended over the

whole planet. I cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Hills

or the Alleghany Range, but some man or corporation steps up to me to

show me that it is his. Now, though I am very peaceable, and on my

private account could well enough die, since it appears there was

some mistake in my creation, and that I have been _mis_sent to this

earth, where all the seats were already taken, — yet I feel called

upon in behalf of rational nature, which I represent, to declare to

you my opinion, that, if the Earth is yours, so also is it mine. All

your aggregate existences are less to me a fact than is my own; as I

am born to the earth, so the Earth is given to me, what I want of it

to till and to plant; nor could I, without pusillanimity, omit to

claim so much. I must not only have a name to live, I must live. My

genius leads me to build a different manner of life from any of

yours. I cannot then spare you the whole world. I love you better.

I must tell you the truth practically; and take that which you call

yours. It is God’s world and mine; yours as much as you want, mine

as much as I want. Besides, I know your ways; I know the symptoms of

the disease. To the end of your power, you will serve this lie which

cheats you. Your want is a gulf which the possession of the broad

earth would not fill. Yonder sun in heaven you would pluck down from

shining on the universe, and make him a property and privacy, if you

could; and the moon and the north star you would quickly have

occasion for in your closet and bed-chamber. What you do not want

for use, you crave for ornament, and what your convenience could

spare, your pride cannot.

On the other hand, precisely the defence which was set up for

the British Constitution, namely, that with all its admitted defects,

rotten boroughs and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial

justice was somehow done; the wisdom and the worth did get into

parliament, and every interest did by right, or might, or sleight,

get represented; — the same defence is set up for the existing

institutions. They are not the best; they are not just; and in

respect to you, personally, O brave young man! they cannot be

justified. They have, it is most true, left you no acre for your

own, and no law but our law, to the ordaining of which, you were no

party. But they do answer the end, they are really friendly to the

good; unfriendly to the bad; they second the industrious, and the

kind; they foster genius. They really have so much flexibility as to

afford your talent and character, on the whole, the same chance of

demonstration and success which they might have, if there was no law

and no property.

It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that nothing is

given you, no outfit, no exhibition; for in this institution of

_credit_, which is as universal as honesty and promise in the human

countenance, always some neighbor stands ready to be bread and land

and tools and stock to the young adventurer. And if in any one

respect they have come short, see what ample retribution of good they

have made. They have lost no time and spared no expense to collect

libraries, museums, galleries, colleges, palaces, hospitals,

observatories, cities. The ages have not been idle, nor kings slack,

nor the rich niggardly. Have we not atoned for this small offence

(which we could not help) of leaving you no right in the soil, by

this splendid indemnity of ancestral and national wealth? Would you

have been born like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred your freedom on

a heath, and the range of a planet which had no shed or boscage to

cover you from sun and wind, — to this towered and citied world? to

this world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, and Vienna, and

Paris, and London, and New York? For thee Naples, Florence, and

Venice, for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adriatic; for thee

both Indies smile; for thee the hospitable North opens its heated

palaces under the polar circle; for thee roads have been cut in every

direction across the land, and fleets of floating palaces with every

security for strength, and provision for luxury, swim by sail and by

steam through all the waters of this world. Every island for thee

has a town; every town a hotel. Though thou wast born landless, yet

to thy industry and thrift and small condescension to the established

usage, — scores of servants are swarming in every strange place with

cap and knee to thy command, scores, nay hundreds and thousands, for

thy wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure; and

every whim is anticipated and served by the best ability of the whole

population of each country. The king on the throne governs for thee,

and the judge judges; the barrister pleads, the farmer tills, the

joiner hammers, the postman rides. Is it not exaggerating a trifle

to insist on a formal acknowledgment of your claims, when these

substantial advantages have been secured to you? Now can your

children be educated, your labor turned to their advantage, and its

fruits secured to them after your death. It is frivolous to say, you

have no acre, because you have not a mathematically measured piece of

land. Providence takes care that you shall have a place, that you

are waited for, and come accredited; and, as soon as you put your

gift to use, you shall have acre or acre’s worth according to your

exhibition of desert, — acre, if you need land; — acre’s worth, if

you prefer to draw, or carve, or make shoes, or wheels, to the

tilling of the soil.

Besides, it might temper your indignation at the supposed wrong

which society has done you, to keep the question before you, how

society got into this predicament? Who put things on this false

basis? No single man, but all men. No man voluntarily and

knowingly; but it is the result of that degree of culture there is in

the planet. The order of things is as good as the character of the

population permits. Consider it as the work of a great and

beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation

of the first animal life, up to the present high culture of the best

nations, has advanced thus far. Thank the rude fostermother though

she has taught you a better wisdom than her own, and has set hopes in

your heart which shall be history in the next ages. You are yourself

the result of this manner of living, this foul compromise, this

vituperated Sodom. It nourished you with care and love on its

breast, as it had nourished many a lover of the right, and many a

poet, and prophet, and teacher of men. Is it so irremediably bad?

Then again, if the mitigations are considered, do not all the

mischiefs virtually vanish? The form is bad, but see you not how

every personal character reacts on the form, and makes it new? A

strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will.

Then the principle of love and truth reappears in the strictest

courts of fashion and property. Under the richest robes, in the

darlings of the selectest circles of European or American

aristocracy, the strong heart will beat with love of mankind, with

impatience of accidental distinctions, with the desire to achieve its

own fate, and make every ornament it wears authentic and real.

Moreover, as we have already shown that there is no pure

reformer, so it is to be considered that there is no pure

conservative, no man who from the beginning to the end of his life

maintains the defective institutions; but he who sets his face like a

flint against every novelty, when approached in the confidence of

conversation, in the presence of friendly and generous persons, has

also his gracious and relenting motions, and espouses for the time

the cause of man; and even if this be a shortlived emotion, yet the

remembrance of it in private hours mitigates his selfishness and

compliance with custom.

The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the

crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of

moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the

spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of

mankind. On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him

courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the

lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his

piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the

rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with

their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore

their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest

they should fail in their duty to them. `What!’ he said, `and this

on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning

sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books

about you?’ — `Look at our pictures and books,’ they said, `and we

will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are

stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices

made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and

last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers

discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.’

Then came in the men, and they said, `What cheer, brother? Does thy

convent want gifts?’ Then the friar Bernard went home swiftly with

other thoughts than he brought, saying, `This way of life is wrong,

yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are

lovers; what can I do?’

The reformer concedes that these mitigations exist, and that,

if he proposed comfort, he should take sides with the establishment.

Your words are excellent, but they do not tell the whole.

Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning

juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everything

they give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am

not so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.

What you say of your planted, builded and decorated world, is true

enough, and I gladly avail myself of its convenience; yet I have

remarked that what holds in particular, holds in general, that the

plant Man does not require for his most glorious flowering this pomp

of preparation and convenience, but the thoughts of some beggarly

Homer who strolled, God knows when, in the infancy and barbarism of

the old world; the gravity and sense of some slave Moses who leads

away his fellow slaves from their masters; the contemplation of some

Scythian Anacharsis; the erect, formidable valor of some Dorian

townsmen in the town of Sparta; the vigor of Clovis the Frank, and

Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric the Goth, and Mahomet, Ali, and Omar the

Arabians, Saladin the Curd, and Othman the Turk, sufficed to build

what you call society, on the spot and in the instant when the sound

mind in a sound body appeared. Rich and fine is your dress, O

conservatism! your horses are of the best blood; your roads are well

cut and well paved; your pantry is full of meats and your cellar of

wines, and a very good state and condition are you for gentlemen and

ladies to live under; but every one of these goods steals away a drop

of my blood. I want the necessity of supplying my own wants. All

this costly culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not

need it. Yonder peasant, who sits neglected there in a corner,

carries a whole revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall

be a sacred history to some future ages. For man is the end of

nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the

universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes

along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of

society and condition _extempore_, as an army encamps in a desert,

and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an

hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation,

and for love.

These considerations, urged by those whose characters and whose

fortunes are yet to be formed, must needs command the sympathy of all

reasonable persons. But beside that charity which should make all

adult persons interested for the youth, and engage them to see that

he has a free field and fair play on his entrance into life, we are

bound to see that the society, of which we compose a part, does not

permit the formation or continuance of views and practices injurious

to the honor and welfare of mankind. The objection to conservatism,

when embodied in a party, is, that in its love of acts, it hates

principles; it lives in the senses, not in truth; it sacrifices to

despair; it goes for availableness in its candidate, not for worth;

and for expediency in its measures, and not for the right. Under

pretence of allowing for friction, it makes so many additions and

supplements to the machine of society, that it will play smoothly and

softly, but will no longer grind any grist.

The conservative party in the universe concedes that the

radical would talk sufficiently to the purpose, if we were still in

the garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his

theory is right, but he makes no allowance for friction; and this

omission makes his whole doctrine false. The idealist retorts, that

the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other

extreme. The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his

social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present

distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon,

swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness gets organized as well as

health, the vice as well as the virtue. Now that a vicious system of

trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped itself in the human

generation, and misers are born. And now that sickness has got such

a foot-hold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box;

the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved itself into a

Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine. If any man

resist, and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good against

the general despair, society frowns on him, shuts him out of her

opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread,

and will serve him a sexton’s turn. Conservatism takes as low a view

of every part of human action and passion. Its religion is just as

bad; a lozenge for the sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the

distemper; mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; always

mitigations, never remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honors, –

never self-help, renovation, and virtue. Its social and political

action has no better aim; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the

day and year about, and make the world last our day; not to sit on

the world and steer it; not to sink the memory of the past in the

glory of a new and more excellent creation; a timid cobbler and

patcher, it degrades whatever it touches. The cause of education is

urged in this country with the utmost earnestness, — on what ground?

why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are not

instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading, trading, and

governing class, inspired with a taste for the same competitions and

prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and perhaps

lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth itself, and new

distribute the land. Religion is taught in the same spirit. The

contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore, some years

ago, found the Irish laborers quarrelsome and refractory, to a degree

that embarrassed the agents, and seriously interrupted the progress

of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the police,

and build a Catholic chapel; which they did; the priest presently

restored order, and the work went on prosperously. Such hints, be

sure, are too valuable to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath,

or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about

maintaining them. They have already acquired a market value as

conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should

fail, the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the Banks, the

very innholders and landlords of the county would muster with fury to

their support.

Of course, religion in such hands loses its essence. Instead

of that reliance, which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth

and duty, men are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the

moment they cease to be the instantaneous creations of the devout

sentiment, are worthless. Religion among the low becomes low. As it

loses its truth, it loses credit with the sagacious. They detect the

falsehood of the preaching, but when they say so, all good citizens

cry, Hush; do not weaken the state, do not take off the strait jacket

from dangerous persons. Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax

the best he can; must patronize providence and piety, and wherever he

sees anything that will keep men amused, schools or churches or

poetry, or picture-galleries or music, or what not, he must cry

"Hist-a-boy," and urge the game on. What a compliment we pay to the

good SPIRIT with our superserviceable zeal!

But not to balance reasons for and against the establishment

any longer, and if it still be asked in this necessity of partial

organization, which party on the whole has the highest claims on our

sympathy? I bring it home to the private heart, where all such

questions must have their final arbitrement. How will every strong

and generous mind choose its ground, — with the defenders of the

old? or with the seekers of the new? Which is that state which

promises to edify a great, brave, and beneficent man; to throw him on

his resources, and tax the strength of his character? On which part

will each of us find himself in the hour of health and of aspiration?

I understand well the respect of mankind for war, because that

breaks up the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the

personal merits of all men. A state of war or anarchy, in which law

has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on

trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury

of faction is respected. In the civil wars of France, Montaigne

alone, among all the French gentry, kept his castle gates unbarred,

and made his personal integrity as good at least as a regiment. The

man of courage and resources is shown, and the effeminate and base

person. Those who rise above war, and those who fall below it, it

easily discriminates, as well as those, who, accepting its rude

conditions, keep their own head by their own sword.

But in peace and a commercial state we depend, not as we ought,

on our knowledge and all men’s knowledge that we are honest men, but

we cowardly lean on the virtue of others. For it is always at last

the virtue of some men in the society, which keeps the law in any

reverence and power. Is there not something shameful that I should

owe my peaceful occupancy of my house and field, not to the knowledge

of my countrymen that I am useful, but to their respect for sundry

other reputable persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtues still

keep the law in good odor?

It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are.

His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether

they second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and

in the narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left

him, he will make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the

past he will take no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself

responsible: he will say, all the meanness of my progenitors shall

not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and

fortunate. Whatsoever streams of power and commodity flow to me,

shall of me acquire healing virtue, and become fountains of safety.

Cannot I too descend a Redeemer into nature? Whosoever hereafter

shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor

in the earth. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and

in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall

glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am primarily engaged

to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to

all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of

things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my

engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do

to men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their

relations to me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted.

Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love. Sooner

or later all men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods

the energy of their regard. I cannot thank your law for my

protection. I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me. It

is my business to make myself revered. I depend on my honor, my

labor, and my dispositions, for my place in the affections of

mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of yours.

But if I allow myself in derelictions, and become idle and

dissolute, I quickly come to love the protection of a strong law,

because I feel no title in myself to my advantages. To the

intemperate and covetous person no love flows; to him mankind would

pay no rent, no dividend, if force were once relaxed; nay, if they

could give their verdict, they would say, that his self-indulgence

and his oppression deserved punishment from society, and not that

rich board and lodging he now enjoys. The law acts then as a screen

of his unworthiness, and makes him worse the longer it protects him.

In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial

views, to the high platform of universal and necessary history, it is

a happiness for mankind that innovation has got on so far, and has so

free a field before it. The boldness of the hope men entertain

transcends all former experience. It calms and cheers them with the

picture of a simple and equal life of truth and piety. And this hope

flowered on what tree? It was not imported from the stock of some

celestial plant, but grew here on the wild crab of conservatism. It

is much that this old and vituperated system of things has borne so

fair a child. It predicts that amidst a planet peopled with

conservatives, one Reformer may yet be born.

.

ENGLISH TRAITS

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chapter I _First Visit to England_

I have been twice in England. In 1833, on my return from a

short tour in Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne, and

landed in London at the Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning;

there were few people in the streets; and I remember the pleasure of

that first walk on English ground, with my companion, an American

artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and the Strand, to a

house in Russell Square, whither we had been recommended to good

chambers. For the first time for many months we were forced to check

the saucy habit of travellers’ criticism, as we could no longer speak

aloud in the streets without being understood. The shop-signs spoke

our language; our country names were on the door-plates; and the

public and private buildings wore a more native and wonted front.

Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the

men of Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Review, — to Jeffrey,

Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott, Playfair, and De Quincey; and my

narrow and desultory reading had inspired the wish to see the faces

of three or four writers, — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De

Quincey, and the latest and strongest contributor to the critical

journals, Carlyle; and I suppose if I had sifted the reasons that led

me to Europe, when I was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly

the attraction of these persons. If Goethe had been still living, I

might have wandered into Germany also. Besides those I have named,

(for Scott was dead,) there was not in Britain the man living whom I

cared to behold, unless it were the Duke of Wellington, whom I

afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce.

The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people who

can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are

prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to

yours. The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of

the best social power, as they do not leave that frolic liberty which

only can encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you

left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right

mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to

play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however, found writers

superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief, that a

strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and give

one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and a

larger horizon.

On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I find nothing

to publish in my memoranda of visits to places. But I have copied

the few notes I made of visits to persons, as they respect parties

quite too good and too transparent to the whole world to make it

needful to affect any prudery of suppression about a few hints of

those bright personalities.

At Florence, chief among artists I found Horatio Greenough, the

American sculptor. His face was so handsome, and his person so well

formed, that he might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of

his Medora, and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay, were

idealizations of his own. Greenough was a superior man, ardent and

eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and magnanimity. He

believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or fraternities, –

the genius of the master imparting his design to his friends, and

inflaming them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new hand,

with equal heat, continued the work; and so by relays, until it was

finished in every part with equal fire. This was necessary in so

refractory a material as stone; and he thought art would never

prosper until we left our shy jealous ways, and worked in society as

they. All his thoughts breathed the same generosity. He was an

accurate and a deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks, and

impatient of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, published in

1843, announced in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the

_morality_ in architecture, notwithstanding the antagonism in their

views of the history of art. I have a private letter from him, –

later, but respecting the same period, — in which he roughly

sketches his own theory. "Here is my theory of structure: A

scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to functions and to site;

an emphasis of features proportioned to their _gradated_ importance

in function; color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied

by strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason for each decision;

the entire and immediate banishment of all make-shift and

make-believe."

Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an invitation

from Mr. Landor, who lived at San Domenica di Fiesole. On the 15th

May I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living

in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house

commanding a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books, or

magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath, –

an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were

just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that

haughty mind, and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He

praised the beautiful cyclamen which grows all about Florence; he

admired Washington; talked of Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont

and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided in his opinions, likes to

surprise, and is well content to impress, if possible, his English

whim upon the immutable past. No great man ever had a great son, if

Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip he calls the

greater man. In art, he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture, them

only. He prefers the Venus to every thing else, and, after that, the

head of Alexander, in the gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna

to Michael Angelo; in painting, Raffaelle; and shares the growing

taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek histories he

thought the only good; and after them, Voltaire’s. I could not make

him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent friends; Montaigne very

cordially, — and Charron also, which seemed undiscriminating. He

thought Degerando indebted to "Lucas on Happiness" and "Lucas on

Holiness"! He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I did not fail

to go, and this time with Greenough. He entertained us at once with

reciting half a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Caesar’s! — from

Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was

necessary, and undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates;

designated as three of the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion, and

Timoleon; much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the three

or the six best pears "for a small orchard;" and did not even omit to

remark the similar termination of their names. "A great man," he

said, "should make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred oxen,

without knowing whether they would be consumed by gods and heroes, or

whether the flies would eat them." I had visited Professor Amici, who

had shown me his microscopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand

diameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they were applied.

Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, "the

sublime was in a grain of dust." I suppose I teased him about recent

writers, but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, _not even

by name._ One room was full of pictures, which he likes to show,

especially one piece, standing before which, he said "he would give

fifty guineas to the man that would swear it was a Domenichino." I

was more curious to see his library, but Mr. H—-, one of the

guests, told me that Mr. Landor gives away his books, and has never

more than a dozen at a time in his house.

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which the

English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding

freedom. He has a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and

inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by what chance converted to

letters, in which there is not a style nor a tint not known to him,

yet with an English appetite for action and heroes. The thing done

avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step

forward, is worth more than all the censures. Landor is strangely

undervalued in England; usually ignored; and sometimes savagely

attacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right, or wrong, and

is quickly forgotten; but year after year the scholar must still go

back to Landor for a multitude of elegant sentences — for wisdom,

wit, and indignation that are unforgetable.

From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and wrote a

note to Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my respects to him.

It was near noon. Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal message, that he was

in bed, but if I would call after one o’clock, he would see me. I

returned at one, and he appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright

blue eyes and fine clear complexion, leaning on his cane. He took

snuff freely, which presently soiled his cravat and neat black suit.

He asked whether I knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and

doings when he knew him in Rome; what a master of the Titianesque he

was, &c., &c. He spoke of Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable

misfortune that he should have turned out a Unitarian after all. On

this, he burst into a declamation on the folly and ignorance of

Unitarianism, — its high unreasonableness; and taking up Bishop

Waterland’s book, which lay on the table, he read with vehemence two

or three pages written by himself in the fly-leaves, — passages,

too, which, I believe, are printed in the "Aids to Reflection." When

he stopped to take breath, I interposed, that, "whilst I highly

valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born

and bred a Unitarian." "Yes," he said, "I supposed so;" and continued

as before. `It was a wonder, that after so many ages of

unquestioning acquiescence in the doctrine of St. Paul, — the

doctrine of the Trinity, which was also, according to Philo Judaeus,

the doctrine of the Jews before Christ, — this handful of

Priestleians should take on themselves to deny it, &c., &c. He was

very sorry that Dr. Channing, — a man to whom he looked up, — no,

to say that he looked _up_ to him would be to speak falsely; but a

man whom he looked _at_ with so much interest, — should embrace such

views. When he saw Dr. Channing, he had hinted to him that he was

afraid he loved Christianity for what was lovely and excellent, — he

loved the good in it, and not the true; and I tell you, sir, that I

have known ten persons who loved the good, for one person who loved

the true; but it is a far greater virtue to lovethe true for itself

alone, than to love the good for itself alone. He (Coleridge) knew

all about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had once been a

Unitarian, and knew what quackery it was. He had been called "the

rising star of Unitarianism."’ He went on defining, or rather

refining: `The Trinitarian doctrine was realism; the idea of God was

not essential, but superessential;’ talked of _trinism_ and

_tetrakism_, and much more, of which I only caught this, `that the

will was that by which a person is a person; because, if one should

push me in the street, and so I should force the man next me into the

kennel, I should at once exclaim, "I did not do it, sir," meaning it

was not my will.’ And this also, `that if you should insist on your

faith here in England, and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side

of the fagot.’

I took advantage of a pause to say, that he had many readers of

all religious opinions in America, and I proceeded to inquire if the

"extract" from the Independent’s pamphlet, in the third volume of the

Friend, were a veritable quotation. He replied, that it was really

taken from a pamphlet in his possession, entitled "A Protest of one

of the Independents," or something to that effect. I told him how

excellent I thought it, and how much I wished to see the entire work.

"Yes," he said, "the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the

knowledge that God was a God of order. Yet the passage would no

doubt strike you more in the quotation than in the original, for I

have filtered it."

When I rose to go, he said, "I do not know whether you care

about poetry, but I will repeat some verses I lately made on my

baptismal anniversary," and he recited with strong emphasis,

standing, ten or twelve lines, beginning,

"Born unto God in Christ —-"

He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning that I

had been in Malta and Sicily, he compared one island with the other,

`repeating what he had said to the Bishop of London when he returned

from that country, that Sicily was an excellent school of political

economy; for, in any town there, it only needed to ask what the

government enacted, and reverse that to know what ought to be done;

it was the most felicitously opposite legislation to any thing good

and wise. There were only three things which the government had

brought into that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox, and famine.

Whereas, in Malta, the force of law and mind was seen, in making that

barren rock of semi-Saracen inhabitants the seat of population and

plenty.’ Going out, he showed me in the next apartment a picture of

Allston’s, and told me `that Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to

see him, and, glancing towards this, said, "Well, you have got a

picture!" thinking it the work of an old master; afterwards,

Montague, still talking with his back to the canvas, put up his hand

and touched it, and exclaimed, "By Heaven! this picture is not ten

years old:" — so delicate and skilful was that man’s touch.’

I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible

to recall the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so

many printed paragraphs in his book, — perhaps the same, — so

readily did he fall into certain commonplaces. As I might have

foreseen, the visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no

use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old and

preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and think with

him.

From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return, I came

from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter

which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a

farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant.

No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the

inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the

lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from

his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and

as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm,

as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall

and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his

extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his

northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and

with a streaming humor, which floated every thing he looked upon.

His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the companion

at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was

very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology.

Few were the objects and lonely the man, "not a person to speak to

within sixteen miles except the minister of Dunscore;" so that books

inevitably made his topics.

He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his

discourse. "Blackwood’s" was the "sand magazine;" "Fraser’s" nearer

approach to possibility of life was the "mud magazine;" a piece of

road near by that marked some failed enterprise was the "grave of the

last sixpence." When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he

professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent

much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one

enclosure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had

found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that,

he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet,

and he liked Nero’s death, _"Qualis artifex pereo!"_ better than most

history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At

one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America.

Landor’s principle was mere rebellion, and _that_ he feared was the

American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that

in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart’s

book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had

been shown across the street and had found Mungo in his own house

dining on roast turkey.

We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged

Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero.

Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new.

His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of

his first books after Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson’s America an

early favorite. Rousseau’s Confessions had discovered to him that he

was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned

German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that

language what he wanted.

He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this

moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great

booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted

now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of

bankruptcy.

He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country,

the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons

should perform. `Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor

Irish folk come wandering over these moors. My dame makes it a rule

to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to

the next house. But here are thousands of acres which might give

them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and

till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the

rich people to attend to them.’

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel then

without his cap, and down into Wordsworth’s country. There we sat

down, and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not

Carlyle’s fault that we talked on that topic, for he had the natural

disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls,

and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken. But he

was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind

ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future.

`Christ died on the tree: that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that

brought you and me together. Time has only a relative existence.’

He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar’s

appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful

only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each

keeps its own round. The baker’s boy brings muffins to the window at

a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes

to know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named

certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the

best mind he knew, whom London had well served.

On the 28th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my respects

to Mr. Wordsworth. His daughters called in their father, a plain,

elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green

goggles. He sat down, and talked with great simplicity. He had just

returned from a journey. His health was good, but he had broken a

tooth by a fall, when walking with two lawyers, and had said, that he

was glad it did not happen forty years ago; whereupon they had

praised his philosophy.

He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion

for his favorite topic, — that society is being enlightened by a

superficial tuition, out of all proportion to its being restrained by

moral culture. Schools do no good. Tuition is not education. He

thinks more of the education of circumstances than of tuition. ‘Tis

not question whether there are offences of which the law takes

cognizance, but whether there are offences of which the law does not

take cognizance. Sin is what he fears, and how society is to escape

without gravest mischiefs from this source — ? He has even said,

what seemed a paradox, that they needed a civil war in America, to

teach the necessity of knitting the social ties stronger. `There may

be,’ he said, `in America some vulgarity in manner, but that’s not

important. That comes of the pioneer state of things. But I fear

they are too much given to the making of money; and secondly, to

politics; that they make political distinction the end, and not the

means. And I fear they lack a class of men of leisure, — in short,

of gentlemen, — to give a tone of honor to the community. I am told

that things are boasted of in the second class of society there,

which, in England, — God knows, are done in England every day, –

but would never be spoken of. In America I wish to know not how many

churches or schools, but what newspapers? My friend, Colonel

Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year in America, assures

me that the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of Congress

of stealing spoons!’ He was against taking off the tax on newspapers

in England, which the reformers represent as a tax upon knowledge,

for this reason, that they would be inundated with base prints. He

said, he talked on political aspects, for he wished to impress on me

and all good Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, &c.,

&c., and never to call into action the physical strength of the

people, as had just now been done in England in the Reform Bill, — a

thing prophesied by Delolme. He alluded once or twice to his

conversation with Dr. Channing, who had recently visited him, (laying

his hand on a particular chair in which the Doctor had sat.)

The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he esteems a far

higher poet than Virgil: not in his system, which is nothing, but in

his power of illustration. Faith is necessary to explain any thing,

and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil. Of

Cousin, (whose lectures we had all been reading in Boston,) he knew

only the name.

I inquired if he had read Carlyle’s critical articles and

translations. He said, he thought him sometimes insane. He

proceeded to abuse Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of

all manner of fornication. It was like the crossing of flies in the

air. He had never gone farther than the first part; so disgusted was

he that he threw the book across the room. I deprecated this wrath,

and said what I could for the better parts of the book; and he

courteously promised to look at it again. Carlyle, he said, wrote

most obscurely. He was clever and deep, but he defied the sympathies

of every body. Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more clearly, though he had

always wished Coleridge would write more to be understood. He led me

out into his garden, and showed me the gravel walk in which thousands

of his lines were composed. His eyes are much inflamed. This is no

loss, except for reading, because he never writes prose, and of

poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his head before writing

them. He had just returned from a visit to Staffa, and within three

days had made three sonnets on Fingal’s Cave, and was composing a

fourth, when he was called in to see me. He said, "If you are

interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear these lines."

I gladly assented; and he recollected himself for a few moments, and

then stood forth and repeated, one after the other, the three entire

sonnets with great animation. I fancied the second and third more

beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third is addressed to

the flowers, which, he said, especially the oxeye daisy, are very

abundant on the top of the rock. The second alludes to the name of

the cave, which is "Cave of Music;" the first to the circumstance of

its being visited by the promiscuous company of the steamboat.

This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising, — he, the

old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk,

like a schoolboy declaiming, — that I at first was near to laugh;

but recollecting myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and

he was chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong,

and gladly gave myself up to hear. I told him how much the few

printed extracts had quickened the desire to possess his unpublished

poems. He replied, he never was in haste to publish; partly, because

he corrected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously

received after printing; but what he had written would be printed,

whether he lived or died. I said, "Tintern Abbey" appeared to be the

favorite poem with the public, but more contemplative readers

preferred the first books of the "Excursion," and the Sonnets. He

said, "Yes, they are better." He preferred such of his poems as

touched the affections, to any others; for whatever is didactic, –

what theories of society, and so on, — might perish quickly; but

whatever combined a truth with an affection was {ktema es aei}, good

to-day and good forever. He cited the sonnet "On the feelings of a

high-minded Spaniard," which he preferred to any other, (I so

understood him,) and the "Two Voices;" and quoted, with evident

pleasure, the verses addressed "To the Skylark." In this connection,

he said of the Newtonian theory, that it might yet be superseded and

forgotten; and Dalton’s atomic theory.

When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show me what a

common person in England could do, and he led me into the enclosure

of his clerk, a young man, to whom he had given this slip of ground,

which was laid out, or its natural capabilities shown, with much

taste. He then said he would show me a better way towards the inn;

and he walked a good part of a mile, talking, and ever and anon

stopping short to impress the word or the verse, and finally parted

from me with great kindness, and returned across the fields.

Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to truth,

and was very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard

limits of his thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made

the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for

his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off his own

beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not very rare to find

persons loving sympathy and ease, who expiate their departure from

the common, in one direction, by their conformity in every other.

Chapter II _Voyage to England_

The occasion of my second visit to England was an invitation

from some Mechanics’ Institutes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, which

separately are organized much in the same way as our New England

Lyceums, but, in 1847, had been linked into a "Union," which embraced

twenty or thirty towns and cities, and presently extended into the

middle counties, and northward into Scotland. I was invited, on

liberal terms, to read a series of lectures in them all. The request

was urged with every kind suggestion, and every assurance of aid and

comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the sequel,

amply redeemed their word. The remuneration was equivalent to the

fees at that time paid in this country for the like services. At all

events, it was sufficient to cover any travelling expenses, and the

proposal offered an excellent opportunity of seeing the interior of

England and Scotland, by means of a home, and a committee of

intelligent friends, awaiting me in every town.

I did not go very willingly. I am not a good traveller, nor

have I found that long journeys yield a fair share of reasonable

hours. But the invitation was repeated and pressed at a moment of

more leisure, and when I was a little spent by some unusual studies.

I wanted a change and a tonic, and England was proposed to me.

Besides, there were, at least, the dread attraction and salutary

influences of the sea. So I took my berth in the packet-ship

Washington Irving, and sailed from Boston on Tuesday, 5th October,

1847.

On Friday at noon, we had only made one hundred and thirty-four

miles. A nimble Indian would have swum as far; but the captain

affirmed that the ship would show us in time all her paces, and we

crept along through the floating drift of boards, logs, and chips,

which the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick pour into the sea after a

freshet.

At last, on Sunday night, after doing one day’s work in four,

the storm came, the winds blew, and we flew before a north-wester,

which strained every rope and sail. The good ship darts through the

water all day, all night, like a fish, quivering with speed, gliding

through liquid leagues, sliding from horizon to horizon. She has

passed Cape Sable; she has reached the Banks; the land-birds are

left; gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and hover around;

no fishermen; she has passed the Banks; left five sail behind her,

far on the edge of the west at sundown, which were far east of us at

morn, — though they say at sea a stern chase is a long race, — and

still we fly for our lives. The shortest sea-line from Boston to

Liverpool is 2850 miles. This a steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles.

A sailing ship can never go in a shorter line than 3000, and usually

it is much longer. Our good master keeps his kites up to the last

moment, studding-sails alow and aloft, and, by incessant straight

steering, never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law of the

ship, — watch on watch, for advantage and for life. Since the ship

was built, it seems, the master never slept but in his day-clothes

whilst on board. "There are many advantages," says Saadi, "in

sea-voyaging, but security is not one of them." Yet in hurrying over

these abysses, whatever dangers we are running into, we are certainly

running out of the risks of hundreds of miles every day, which have

their own chances of squall, collision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, and

thunder. Hour for hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater; but the

speed is safety, or, twelve days of danger, instead of twenty-four.

Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed perhaps, with all

her freight, 1500 tons. The mainmast, from the deck to the

top-button, measured 115 feet; the length of the deck, from stem to

stern, 155. It is impossible not to personify a ship; every body

does, in every thing they say: — she behaves well; she minds her

rudder; she swims like a duck; she runs her nose into the water; she

looks into a port. Then that wonderful _esprit du corps_, by which

we adopt into our self-love every thing we touch, makes us all

champions of her sailing qualities.

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week she has

made 1467 miles, and now, at night, seems to hear the steamer behind

her, which left Boston to-day at two, has mended her speed, and is

flying before the gray south wind eleven and a half knots the hour.

The sea-fire shines in her wake, and far around wherever a wave

breaks. I read the hour, 9h. 45′, on my watch by this light. Near

the equator, you can read small print by it; and the mate describes

the phosphoric insects, when taken up in a pail, as shaped like a

Carolina potato.

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes

and olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise, and odor are not

to be dispensed with. The floor of your room is sloped at an angle

of twenty or thirty degrees, and I waked every morning with the

belief that some one was tipping up my berth. Nobody likes to be

treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of the house,

rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis, and stewing oil. We

get used to these annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea

remains longer. The sea is masculine, the type of active strength.

Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours,

filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney

conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle

an eternal cemetery? In our graveyards we scoop a pit, but this

aggressive water opens mile-wide pits and chasms, and makes a

mouthful of a fleet. To the geologist, the sea is the only

firmament; the land is in perpetual flux and change, now blown up

like a tumor, now sunk in a chasm, and the registered observations of

a few hundred years find it in a perpetual tilt, rising and falling.

The sea keeps its old level; and ’tis no wonder that the history of

our race is so recent, if the roar of the ocean is silencing our

traditions. A rising of the sea, such as has been observed, say an

inch in a century, from east to west on the land, will bury all the

towns, monuments, bones, and knowledge of mankind, steadily and

insensibly. If it is capable of these great and secular mischiefs,

it is quite as ready at private and local damage; and of this no

landsman seems so fearful as the seaman. Such discomfort and such

danger as the narratives of the captain and mate disclose are bad

enough as the costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe; but the

wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. And here, on

the second day of our voyage, stepped out a little boy in his

shirt-sleeves, who had hid himself, whilst the ship was in port, in

the bread-closet, having no money, and wishing to go to England. The

sailors have dressed him in Guernsey frock, with a knife in his belt,

and he is climbing nimbly about after them, "likes the work

first-rate, and, if the captain will take him, means now to come back

again in the ship." The mate avers that this is the history of all

sailors; nine out of ten are runaway boys; and adds, that all of them

are sick of the sea, but stay in it out of pride. Jack has a life of

risks, incessant abuse, and the worst pay. It is a little better

with the mate, and not very much better with the captain. A hundred

dollars a month is reckoned high pay. If sailors were contented, if

they had not resolved again and again not to go to sea any more, I

should respect them.

Of course, the inconveniences and terrors of the sea are not of

any account to those whose minds are preoccupied. The water-laws,

arctic frost, the mountain, the mine, only shatter cockneyism; every

noble activity makes room for itself. A great mind is a good sailor,

as a great heart is. And the sea is not slow in disclosing

inestimable secrets to a good naturalist.

‘Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of

liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and

taverns steal from the best economist. Classics which at home are

drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the

transom of a merchant brig. I remember that some of the happiest and

most valuable hours I have owed to books, passed, many years ago, on

shipboard. The worst impediment I have found at sea is the want of

light in the cabin.

We found on board the usual cabin library; Basil Hall, Dumas,

Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were our sea-gods. Among the

passengers, there was some variety of talent and profession; we

exchanged our experiences, and all learned something. The busiest

talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and sometimes a memorable

fact turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche for, and seize

with the joy of a collector. But, under the best conditions, a

voyage is one of the severest tests to try a man. A college

examination is nothing to it. Sea-days are long, — these

lack-lustre, joyless days which whistled over us; but they were few,

– only fifteen, as the captain counted, sixteen according to me.

Reckoned from the time when we left soundings, our speed was such

that the captain drew the line of his course in red ink on his chart,

for the encouragement or envy of future navigators.

It has been said that the King of England would consult his

dignity by giving audience to foreign ambassadors in the cabin of a

man-of-war. And I think the white path of an Atlantic ship the right

avenue to the palace front of this sea-faring people, who for

hundreds of years claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea, and

exacted toll and the striking sail from the ships of all other

peoples. When their privilege was disputed by the Dutch and other

junior marines, on the plea that you could never anchor on the same

wave, or hold property in what was always flowing, the English did

not stick to claim the channel, or bottom of all the main. "As if,"

said they, "we contended for the drops of the sea, and not for its

situation, or the bed of those waters. The sea is bounded by his

majesty’s empire."

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was

inevitably the British side. In every man’s thought arises now a new

system, English sentiments, English loves and fears, English history

and social modes. Yesterday, every passenger had measured the speed

of the ship by watching the bubbles over the ship’s bulwarks.

To-day, instead of bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork, Waterford,

and Ardmore. There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast

of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the

curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.

Chapter III _Land_

Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries worth

living in; the former, because there nature vindicates her rights,

and triumphs over the evils inflicted by the governments; the latter,

because art conquers nature, and transforms a rude, ungenial land

into a paradise of comfort and plenty. England is a garden. Under

an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they

appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough. The

solidity of the structures that compose the towns speaks the industry

of ages. Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys,

the sea itself feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of a

powerful and ingenious race has turned every rood of land to its best

use, has found all the capabilities, the arable soil, the quarriable

rock, the highways, the byways, the fords, the navigable waters; and

the new arts of intercourse meet you every where; so that England is

a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is provided within the

precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every manner, the traveller

rides as on a cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers and towns,

through mountains, in tunnels of three or four miles, at near twice

the speed of our trains; and reads quietly the Times newspaper,

which, by its immense correspondence and reporting, seems to have

machinized the rest of the world for his occasion.

The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why

England is England? What are the elements of that power which the

English hold over other nations? If there be one test of national

genius universally accepted, it is success; and if there be one

successful country in the universe for the last millennium, that

country is England.

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of

actual nations; and an American has more reasons than another to draw

him to Britain. In all that is done or begun by the Americans

towards right thinking or practice, we are met by a civilization

already settled and overpowering. The culture of the day, the

thoughts and aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation

considerable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in the last

centuries, obtained the ascendant, and stamped the knowledge,

activity, and power of mankind with its impress. Those who resist it

do not feel it or obey it less. The Russian in his snows is aiming

to be English. The Turk and Chinese also are making awkward efforts

to be English. The practical common-sense of modern society, the

utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion take, is

the natural genius of the British mind. The influence of France is a

constituent of modern civility, but not enough opposed to the English

for the most wholesome effect. The American is only the continuation

of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious.

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, every

biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history

and manners. So that a sensible Englishman once said to me, "As long

as you do not grant us copyright, we shall have the teaching of you."

But we have the same difficulty in making a social or moral

estimate of England, as the sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try

some cause which has agitated the whole community, and on which every

body finds himself an interested party. Officers, jurors, judges

have all taken sides. England has inoculated all nations with her

civilization, intelligence, and tastes; and, to resist the tyranny

and prepossession of the British element, a serious man must aid

himself, by comparing with it the civilizations of the farthest east

and west, the old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal

standard, if only by means of the very impatience which English forms

are sure to awaken in independent minds.

Besides, if we will visit London, the present time is the best

time, as some signs portend that it has reached its highest point.

It is observed that the English interest us a little less within a

few years; and hence the impression that the British power has

culminated, is in solstice, or already declining.

As soon as you enter England, which, with Wales, is no larger

than the State of Georgia, (*) this little land stretches by an

illusion to the dimensions of an empire. The innumerable details,

the crowded succession of towns, cities, cathedrals, castles, and

great and decorated estates, the number and power of the trades and

guilds, the military strength and splendor, the multitudes of rich

and of remarkable people, the servants and equipages, — all these

catching the eye, and never allowing it to pause, hide all

boundaries, by the impression of magnificence and endless wealth.

(*) Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent

for the area of Scotland.

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and that

object indispensably to be seen, — Yes, to see England well needs a

hundred years; for, what they told me was the merit of Sir John

Soane’s Museum, in London, — that it was well packed and well saved,

– is the merit of England; — it is stuffed full, in all corners and

crevices, with towns, towers, churches, villas, palaces, hospitals,

and charity-houses. In the history of art, it is a long way from a

cromlech to York minster; yet all the intermediate steps may still be

traced in this all-preserving island.

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is warmer

by many degrees than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither hot nor

cold, there is no hour in the whole year when one cannot work. Here

is no winter, but such days as we have in Massachusetts in November,

a temperature which makes no exhausting demand on human strength, but

allows the attainment of the largest stature. Charles the Second

said, "it invited men abroad more days in the year and more hours in

the day than another country." Then England has all the materials of

a working country except wood. The constant rain, — a rain with

every tide, in some parts of the island, — keeps its multitude of

rivers full, and brings agricultural production up to the highest

point. It has plenty of water, of stone, of potter’s clay, of coal,

of salt, and of iron. The land naturally abounds with game, immense

heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse, and woodcock, and the

shores are animated by water birds. The rivers and the surrounding

sea spawn with fish; there are salmon for the rich, and sprats and

herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs, the herring are in

innumerable shoals; at one season, the country people say, the lakes

contain one part water and two parts fish.

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency, is the

darkness of its sky. The night and day are too nearly of a color.

It strains the eyes to read and to write. Add the coal smoke. In

the manufacturing towns, the fine soot or _blacks_ darken the day,

give white sheep the color of black sheep, discolor the human saliva,

contaminate the air, poison many plants, and corrode the monuments

and buildings.

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and

sometimes justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit, "in

a fine day, looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one." A

gentleman in Liverpool told me that he found he could do without a

fire in his parlor about one day in the year. It is however

pretended, that the enormous consumption of coal in the island is

also felt in modifying the general climate.

Factitious climate, factitious position. England resembles a ship in

its shape, and, if it were one, its best admiral could not have worked it, or

anchored it in a more judicious or effective position. Sir John Herschel

said, "London was the centre of the terrene globe." The shopkeeping nation,

to use a shop word, has a _good stand._ The old Venetians pleased themselves

with the flattery, that Venice was in 45 degrees, midway between the poles

and the line; as if that were an imperial centrality. Long of old, the

Greeks fancied Delphi the navel of the earth, in their favorite mode of

fabling the earth to be an animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the

centre. I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of

Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same

belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a

patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing,

by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to

New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious

scholars of all those capitals.

But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right in the

heart of the modern world. The sea, which, according to Virgil’s

famous line, divided the poor Britons utterly from the world, proved

to be the ring of marriage with all nations. It is not down in the

books, — it is written only in the geologic strata, — that

fortunate day when a wave of the German Ocean burst the old isthmus

which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and gave to this fragment

of Europe its impregnable sea wall, cutting off an island of eight

hundred miles in length, with an irregular breadth reaching to three

hundred miles; a territory large enough for independence enriched

with every seed of national power, so near, that it can see the

harvests of the continent; and so far, that who would cross the

strait must be an expert mariner, ready for tempests. As America,

Europe, and Asia lie, these Britons have precisely the best

commercial position in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for

all the goods they can manufacture. And to make these advantages

avail, the River Thames must dig its spacious outlet to the sea from

the heart of the kingdom, giving road and landing to innumerable

ships, and all the conveniency to trade, that a people so skilful and

sufficient in economizing water-front by docks, warehouses, and

lighters required. When James the First declared his purpose of

punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord Mayor replied,

"that, in removing his royal presence from his lieges, they hoped he

would leave them the Thames."

In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of Europe,

having plain, forest, marsh, river, sea-shore; mines in Cornwall;

caves in Matlock and Derbyshire; delicious landscape in Dovedale,

delicious sea-view at Tor Bay, Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in

Wales; and, in Westmoreland and Cumberland, a pocket Switzerland, in

which the lakes and mountains are on a sufficient scale to fill the

eye and touch the imagination. It is a nation conveniently small.

Fontenelle thought, that nature had sometimes a little affectation;

and there is such an artificial completeness in this nation of

artificers, as if there were a design from the beginning to elaborate

a bigger Birmingham. Nature held counsel with herself, and said, `My

Romans are gone. To build my new empire, I will choose a rude race,

all masculine, with brutish strength. I will not grudge a

competition of the roughest males. Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the

pasture to the strongest! For I have work that requires the best

will and sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow, to

keep that will alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin the people

from others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give

them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their

feet, by poverty, border-wars, seafaring, sea-risks, and the stimulus

of gain. An island, — but not so large, the people not so many as

to glut the great markets and depress one another, but proportioned

to the size of Europe and the continents.’

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil influence

radiate. It is a singular coincidence to this geographic centrality,

the spiritual centrality, which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the

people. "For the English nation, the best of them are in the centre

of all Christians, because they have interior intellectual light.

This appears conspicuously in the spiritual world. This light they

derive from the liberty of speaking and writing, and thereby of

thinking."

Chapter IV _Race_

An ingenious anatomist has written a book (*) to prove that

races are imperishable, but nations are pliant political

constructions, easily changed or destroyed. But this writer did not

found his assumed races on any necessary law, disclosing their ideal

or metaphysical necessity; nor did he, on the other hand, count with

precision the existing races, and settle the true bounds; a point of

nicety, and the popular test of the theory. The individuals at the

extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf

to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the

next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends.

Hence every writer makes a different count. Blumenbach reckons five

races; Humboldt three; and Mr. Pickering, who lately, in our

Exploring Expedition, thinks he saw all the kinds of men that can be

on the planet, makes eleven.

(*) The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Knox. London: 1850.

The British Empire is reckoned to contain 222,000,000 souls, –

perhaps a fifth of the population of the globe; and to comprise a

territory of 5,000,000 square miles. So far have British people

predominated. Perhaps forty of these millions are of British stock.

Add the United States of America, which reckon, exclusive of slaves,

20,000,000 of people, on a territory of 3,000,000 square miles, and

in which the foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly

assimilated, and you have a population of English descent and

language, of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 245,000,000

souls.

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a half

millions in the home countries. What makes this census important is

the quality of the units that compose it. They are free forcible

men, in a country where life is safe, and has reached the greatest

value. They give the bias to the current age; and that, not by

chance or by mass, but by their character, and by the number of

individuals among them of personal ability. It has been denied that

the English have genius. Be it as it may, men of vast intellect have

been born on their soil, and they have made or applied the principal

inventions. They have sound bodies, and supreme endurance in war and

in labor. The spawning force of the race has sufficed to the

colonization of great parts of the world; yet it remains to be seen

whether they can make good the exodus of millions from Great Britain,

amounting, in 1852, to more than a thousand a day. They have

assimilating force, since they are imitated by their foreign

subjects; and they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging

the dominion of their arts and liberty. Their laws are hospitable,

and slavery does not exist under them. What oppression exists is

incidental and temporary; their success is not sudden or fortunate,

but they have maintained constancy and self-equality for many ages.

Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause? Men

hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Every body likes to know

that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to

local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor

to fortune, but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more

personal to him.

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that law

of physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential organ is

found in one healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found

in or near the same place in its congener; and we look to find in the

son every mental and moral property that existed in the ancestor. In

race, it is not the broad shoulders, or litheness, or stature that

give advantage, but a symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit.

Then the miracle and renown begin. Then first we care to examine the

pedigree, and copy heedfully the training, — what food they ate,

what nursing, school, and exercises they had, which resulted in this

mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust wisdom. How came such

men as King Alfred, and Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter

Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton, William Shakspeare, George

Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, to exist here?

What made these delicate natures? was it the air? was it the sea? was

it the parentage? For it is certain that these men are samples of

their contemporaries. The hearing ear is always found close to the

speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter any thing

which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India

under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race

avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are

Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of

power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a

controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under

every climate, has preserved the same character and employments.

Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada,

cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their

national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus "on the Manners of the

Germans," not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and

I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the

Hercynian forest, and our _Hoosiers_, _Suckers_, and _Badgers_ of the

American woods.

But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is

resisted by other forces. Civilization is a re-agent, and eats away

the old traits. The Arabs of to-day are the Arabs of Pharaoh; but

the Briton of to-day is a very different person from Cassibelaunus or

Ossian. Each religious sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists

have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An

Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners. Trades and

professions carve their own lines on face and form. Certain

circumstances of English life are not less effective; as, personal

liberty; plenty of food; good ale and mutton; open market, or good

wages for every kind of labor; high bribes to talent and skill; the

island life, or the million opportunities and outlets for expanding

and misplaced talent; readiness of combination among themselves for

politics or for business; strikes; and sense of superiority founded

on habit of victory in labor and in war; and the appetite for

superiority grows by feeding.

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race.

Credence is a main element. ‘Tis said, that the views of nature held

by any people determine all their institutions. Whatever influences

add to mental or moral faculty, take men out of nationality, as out

of other conditions, and make the national life a culpable

compromise.

These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race suggest

others which threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently based.

The fixity or inconvertibleness of races as we see them, is a weak

argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our

historical period is a point to the duration in which nature has

wrought. Any the least and solitariest fact in our natural history,

such as the melioration of fruits and of animal stocks, has the worth

of a _power_ in the opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover,

though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of

pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of

races, and strange resemblances meet us every where. It need not

puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar

should mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our

human form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but

that some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas.

The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, a jelly, or a

straight worm. As the scale mounts, the organizations become

complex. We are piqued with pure descent, but nature loves

inoculation. A child blends in his face the faces of both parents,

and some feature from every ancestor whose face hangs on the wall.

The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as

effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer of

nations.

The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Every

thing English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The

language is mixed; the names of men are of different nations, –

three languages, three or four nations; — the currents of thought

are counter: contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and

dead conservatism; world-wide enterprise, and devoted use and wont;

aggressive freedom and hospitable law, with bitter class-legislation;

a people scattered

ESSAYS

_First Series_

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

HISTORY

—–

There is no great and no small

To the Soul that maketh all:

And where it cometh, all things are;

And it cometh everywhere.

I am owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year,

Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,

Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

ESSAY I _History_

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is

an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once

admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole

estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt,

he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can

understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all

that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is

illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by

nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the

human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,

every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate

events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts

of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by

circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but

one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The

creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece,

Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are

merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The

Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one

man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is

a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.

As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature,

as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of

miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of

centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed

by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal

mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties

consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a

light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his

life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought

in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man,

it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion,

and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the

problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something

in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become

Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must

fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we

shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia

is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers and depravations as

what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has

meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, `Under

this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies the

defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our

actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the

balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in

the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant

persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men

and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and

inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws

derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less

distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence.

Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and

instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide

and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is

the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for

education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and

love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of

self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as

superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not

in their stateliest pictures — in the sacerdotal, the imperial

palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius — anywhere lose our

ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better

men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel

most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a

boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We

sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries,

the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; — because

there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or

the blow was struck _for us_, as we ourselves in that place would

have done or applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor

the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace

which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said

of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes

to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable

self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books,

monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds

the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him

and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal

allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for

allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the

commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he

seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea, further,

in every fact and circumstance, — in the running river and the

rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from

mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us

use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not

passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to

those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any

man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a

remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper

sense than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no

age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there

is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a

wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to

him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person.

He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by

kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography

and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of

view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and

London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court,

and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will try the

case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and

maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and

poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose

of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations

of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of

facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact.

Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing

already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in

Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the

fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven

an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same

way. "What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?"

This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England,

War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so many

flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more

account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia,

Italy, Spain, and the Islands, — the genius and creative principle

of each and of all eras in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in

our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes

subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only

biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must

go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not

live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a

formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good

of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.

Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that

loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in

astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the

state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must

in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it

could and must be. So stand before every public and private work;

before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a

martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson,

before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches,

before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in

Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike

affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master

intellectually the steps, and reach the same height or the same

degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, — all curiosity respecting the

Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico,

Memphis, — is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and

preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and

the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of

Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the

monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in

general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so

armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also

have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole

line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all

with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are _now_.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done

by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we

apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves

into the place and state of the builder. We remember the

forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type,

and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the

value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the

whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through

this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its

music, its processions, its Saints’ days and image-worship, we have,

as it were, been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it

could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of

association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other

accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the

relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to

the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To

the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly

and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.

Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth,

teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature,

soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard

pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of

time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and

genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child

plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal

thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting

from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters.

Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the

metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through

the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant

individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through

many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type;

through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She

casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty

fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of

matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The

adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I

look at it, its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so

fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we

still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of

servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness

and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the

imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets

Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis

left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity

equally obvious. There is at the surface infinite variety of things;

at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of

one man in which we recognize the same character! Observe the

sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have

the _civil history_ of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides,

Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of

what manner of persons they were, and what they did. We have the

same national mind expressed for us again in their _literature_, in

epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form.

Then we have it once more in their _architecture_, a beauty as of

temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square, — a

builded geometry. Then we have it once again in _sculpture_, the

"tongue on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the

utmost freedom of action, and never transgressing the ideal serenity;

like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and,

though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the

figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one

remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation: and to the

senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the

peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any

resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A

particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same

train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild

mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the

senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws.

She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her

works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most

unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the

forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and

the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are

men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and

awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of

the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same

strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is Guido’s

Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are

only a morning cloud. If any one will but take pains to observe the

variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods

of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the

chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some

sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its

form merely, — but, by watching for a time his motions and plays,

the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw him at will in

every attitude. So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a sheep."

I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey, who found that he

could not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first

explained to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin

of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is

identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful

acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of

awakening other souls to a given activity.

It has been said, that "common souls pay with what they do;

nobler souls with that which they are." And why? Because a profound

nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and

manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of

pictures, addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of

literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain

words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not

interest us, — kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the

roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St.

Peter’s are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is

a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true

poem is the poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the

man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last

flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the

sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of

heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall

pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility

could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some

old prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs

which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady, with whom I was

riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her

_to wait_, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds

until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has

celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the

approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break

out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at

the creation of light and of the world. I remember one summer day,

in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which

might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite

accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, — a

round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and

mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings.

What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was

undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in

the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that

the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the

hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone

wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll

to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, we

invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see

how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric

temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the

Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The

Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean

houses of their forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs

in the living rock," says Heeren, in his Researches on the

Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal character of the

Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed.

In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed

to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that, when art came to the

assistance of nature, it could not move on a small scale without

degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat

porches and wings, have been, associated with those gigantic halls

before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on the

pillars of the interior?"

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of

the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade,

as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes

that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods,

without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,

especially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the

low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will

see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the

Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen

through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any

lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English

cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of

the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still reproduced

its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir,

and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the

insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms

into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as

well as the aerial proportions and perspective, of vegetable beauty.

In like manner, all public facts are to be individualized, all

private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes

fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian

imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the

stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its

magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes,

but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in

summer, and to Babylon for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and

Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and

of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the

terror of all those whom the soil, or the advantages of a market, had

induced to build towns. Agriculture, therefore, was a religious

injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in

these late and civil countries of England and America, these

propensities still fight out the old battle in the nation and in the

individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the

attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels

the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, and to drive off the

cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow the

pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe, the nomadism

is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of

Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities,

to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent

laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, were the

check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long residence

are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The

antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals,

as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to

predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the

faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon, and roams through

all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in

the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and

associates as happily, as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his

facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his faculties of

observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh

objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to

desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts

the mind, through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of

objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence

or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and

which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not

stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his

states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as

his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or

series belongs.

The primeval world, — the Fore-World, as the Germans say, — I

can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching

fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of

ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek

history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the

Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and

Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every

man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is

the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses, — of the

spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it

existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models

of Hercules, Ph;oebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the

streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of

features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, and symmetrical

features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible

for such eyes to squint, and take furtive glances on this side and on

that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period

are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal

qualities, courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,

swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not

known. A sparse population and want make every man his own valet,

cook, butcher, and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs

educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon

and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon

gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten

Thousand. "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia,

there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground

covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began

to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like." Throughout

his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for

plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and

Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any, and sharper-tongued than most,

and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a

gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax discipline

as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the

old literature, is, that the persons speak simply, — speak as

persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before yet the

reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our

admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the

natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses

and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the

world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They

made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses

should,—- that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be

made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique exists;

but, as a class, from their superior organization, they have

surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engaging

unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these manners is

that they belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his

being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who

retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius and

inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of

Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In reading

those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and

waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the

eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, it

seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and

fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted

distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic

schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato

becomes a thought to me, — when a truth that fired the soul of

Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in

a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and

do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of

latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of

chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by

quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred

history of the world, he has the same key. When the voice of a

prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a

sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to

the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature

of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose

to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to

time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart

and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, the tripod, the

priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot

unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come

to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety

explains every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu,

of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any

antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing seas

or centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with

such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty

beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made good to the

nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first

Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin,

Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual’s private life. The

cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing

his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that

without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even

much sympathy with the tyranny, — is a familiar fact explained to

the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of

his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words

and forms, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the Pyramids

were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of

all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the

Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes

against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the

part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them

new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to

supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads

on the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the

world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in

his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one

day, "how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often

and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and

very seldom?"

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in

literature, — in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that

the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible

situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true

for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines

wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One

after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable

of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and

verifies them with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of

the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a

range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of

Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the

history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the

invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,) it

gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of

later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the

friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice" of the Eternal

Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on

their account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic

Christianity, and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a

state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism

is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the

self-defence of man against this untruth, namely, a discontent with

the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the

obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal, if it could, the

fire of the Creator, and live apart from him, and independent of him.

The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true

to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept

the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men,

they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.

Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he

touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the

broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body and his mind

are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. The power of

music, the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to

solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophical

perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him

know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who

slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And

what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can

symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact,

because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a

name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking

the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within

sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would

it were; but men and women are only half human. Every animal of the

barn-yard, the field, and the forest, of the earth and of the waters

that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave

the print of its features and form in some one or other of these

upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy

soul, — ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast

now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old

fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put

riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she

swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was

slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or

events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting

questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a

superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts

encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the

men of _sense_, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished

every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man

is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the

dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast

by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and

supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of

them glorifies him.

See in Goethe’s Helena the same desire that every word should

be a thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins,

Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific

influence on the mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as

real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them, he writes

out freely his humor, and gives them body tohis own imagination. And

although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it

much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the

same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to

the mind from the routine of customary images, — awakens the

reader’s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and

by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the

bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he

seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact

allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things

which they do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the

Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of

that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to

achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep

presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the

sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the

secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are

the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The

preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and

the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the

shows of things to the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and a rose bloom

on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the

inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, even a mature

reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the

triumph of the gentle Genelas; and, indeed, all the postulates of

elfin annals, — that the fairies do not like to be named; that their

gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure

must not speak; and the like, — I find true in Concord, however they

might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of

Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation,

Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign

mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may

all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by

fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name

for fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity

in this world.

———–

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man,

another history goes daily forward, — that of the external world, –

in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of

time; he is also the correlative of nature. His power consists in

the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is

intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. In

old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north,

south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire,

making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the

soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were,

highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under

the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of

roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer

to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the

fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle

in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put

Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act

on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air

and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense

population, complex interests, and antagonist power, and you shall

see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a profile and

outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot’s shadow;

"His substance is not here:

For what you see is but the smallest part

And least proportion of humanity;

But were the whole frame here,

It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,

Your roof were not sufficient to contain it."

_Henry VI._

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and

Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-strewn celestial areas. One

may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the

nature of Newton’s mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of

Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of

particles, anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of

the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the

witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of

Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and

temperable texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and

wood? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the

refinements and decorations of civil society? Here also we are

reminded of the action of man on man. A mind might ponder its

thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion

of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has

been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an

eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national

exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience, or guess

what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he

can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for

the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the

reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of

these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its

correlative, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its

treasures for each pupil. He, too, shall pass through the whole

cycle of experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of

nature. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk

incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by

languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You

shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the

Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that

goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and

experiences; — his own form and features by their exalted

intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the

Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold; the Apples of Knowledge;

the Argonautic Expedition; the calling of Abraham; the building of

the Temple; the Advent of Christ; Dark Ages; the Revival of Letters;

the Reformation; the discovery of new lands; the opening of new

sciences, and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and

bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars

and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all

I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we

know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot

strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold

our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the

lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log.

What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of

life? As old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps older, — these

creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record

of any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What

connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical

elements, and the historical eras? Nay, what does history yet record

of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on those

mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet

every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range

of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to

see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many

times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does

Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to

these neighbouring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or

succour have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in

his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — from an ethical

reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative

conscience, — if we would trulier express our central and

wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness

and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day

exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science

and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian,

the child, and unschooled farmer’s boy, stand nearer to the light by

which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

SELF-RELIANCE

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

_Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s_

_Honest Man’s Fortune_

Cast the bantling on the rocks,

Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;

Wintered with the hawk and fox,

Power and speed be hands and feet.

ESSAY II _Self-Reliance_

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter

which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an

admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The

sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may

contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true

for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense;

for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—- and our first

thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we

ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books

and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man

should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes

across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of

bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought,

because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own

rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated

majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us

than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with

good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is

on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly

good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and

we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the

conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he

must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though

the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can

come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground

which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new

in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor

does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one

character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.

This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify

of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are

ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be

safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be

faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by

cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into

his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise,

shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver.

In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no

invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society

of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have

always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of

their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy

was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating

in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the

highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and

invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a

revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the

Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face

and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and

rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has

computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have

not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and

when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms

to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or

five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed

youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and

charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put

by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force,

because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his

voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to

speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how

to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would

disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is

the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what

the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out

from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and

sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as

good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers

himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an

independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court

you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his

consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he

is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of

hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is

no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!

Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again

from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted

innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all

passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary,

would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow

faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere

is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the

better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the

liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is

conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities

and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would

gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness,

but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but

the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you

shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which

when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was

wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On

my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I

live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — "But these impulses

may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to

me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from

the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good

and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the

only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is

against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all

opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I

am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to

large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken

individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go

upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice

and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an

angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to

me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him,

`Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and

modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable

ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand

miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless

would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation

of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is

none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction

of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father

and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would

write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_. I hope it is somewhat

better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my

obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they _my_

poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the

dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me

and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by

all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to

prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the

education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the

vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold

Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb

and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall

have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than

the rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called

a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they

would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade.

Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in

the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their

virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My

life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it

should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it

should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet,

and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you

are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I

know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear

those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay

for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my

gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or

the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people

think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual

life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and

meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who

think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is

easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in

solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the

midst of the crowd keeps

ESSAYS

_Second Series_

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

THE POET

A moody child and wildly wise

Pursued the game with joyful eyes,

Which chose, like meteors, their way,

And rived the dark with private ray:

They overleapt the horizon’s edge,

Searched with Apollo’s privilege;

Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,

Saw the dance of nature forward far;

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,

Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

Olympian bards who sung

Divine ideas below,

Which always find us young,

And always keep us so.

ESSAY I _The Poet_

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons

knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination

for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are

beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures,

you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is

local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce

fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts

is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of

color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a

proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the

minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of

the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of

forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put

into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment

between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the

germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the

intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the

material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a

pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a

cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the

solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented

with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from

the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the

highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double

meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much

more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles,

Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of

sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor

even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire,

made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or

three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth,

that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures,

floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the

consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of

Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect

of the art in the present time.

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is

representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man,

and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth. The

young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are

more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also

receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of

loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at

the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and

by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will

draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand

in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in

labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is

only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate

expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an

interpreter; but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who

have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot

report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man

who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars,

earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar

service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in

our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect.

Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists.

Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist,

that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in

our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive

at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the

reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom

these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and

handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of

experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the

largest power to receive and to impart.

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which

reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether

they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically,

Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and

the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the

Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love

of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is

that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or

analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent

in him, and his own patent.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is

a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted,

or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made

some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.

Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in

his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism,

which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of

all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact,

that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world

to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose

province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But

Homer’s words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon’s

victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or

the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes

primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though

primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as

sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who

bring building materials to an architect.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are

so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the

air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write

them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and

substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men

of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and

these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is

reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known.

Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces

that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows

and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and

privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of

ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not

speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in

metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other

day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind,

whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms,

and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently

praise. But when the question arose, whether he was not only a

lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a

contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low

limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the

torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the

herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this

genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with

fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and

sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied

music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of

talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is

secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a

poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of

a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns

nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the

order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to

the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience

to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be

the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age

requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its

poet. I remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning

by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at

table. He had left his work, and gone rambling none knew whither,

and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that

which was in him was therein told: he could tell nothing but that all

was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly we

listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat

in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars.

Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or

was much farther than that. Rome, — what was Rome? Plutarch and

Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard

of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day,

under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has

not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I

had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent

her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras

have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of

the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that

the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our

interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a

new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the value of

genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and

juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have

availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the

foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest

word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical,

and the unerring voice of the world for that time.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a

poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often

deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him

steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I

begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now

my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and

opaque airs in which I live, — opaque, though they seem transparent,

– and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my

relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to

see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing.

Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know

the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This

day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I

am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the

fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who

will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps

and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he

is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in

perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is

merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a

flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the

all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall

never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead

the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the

possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope,

observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet’s

fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the

beauty of things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when

expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a

picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value

appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the

carpenter’s stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is

musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every image,"

says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things admit of

being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and

in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression;

and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an

effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all

harmony, of health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty

should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful

rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body,

as the wise Spenser teaches: –

"So every spirit, as it is most pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

So it the fairer body doth procure

To habit in, and it more fairly dight,

With cheerful grace and amiable sight.

For, of the soul, the body form doth take,

For soul is form, and doth the body make."

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical

speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and

reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where

Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

The Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the

life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is

sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly

bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were

self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The

mighty heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations,

clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved

in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures."

Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the

man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of

science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in

nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and

dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet

active.

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over

them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the

importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you

please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these

enchantments of nature: for all men have the thoughts whereof the

universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in

the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and

men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also

hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their

affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words.

The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding,

in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk

with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is

sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by

the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation,

or playing of these things, would content him; he loves the earnest

of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty

not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end

of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural,

body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere

rites.

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of

every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and

philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the

populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of

badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from

Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes

in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the

cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all

the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some

stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other

figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of

bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth,

shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most

conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they

are all poets and mystics!

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are

apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby

the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems,

pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no

fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and

the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and

high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol.

Thought makes every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an

omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite

conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene,

becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety

of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is

an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.

Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the

type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the

more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest

box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare

lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited

mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to

read in Bailey’s Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in

Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the

purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts?

Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us

as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from

having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can

come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need

that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new

relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a

sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world

are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists

observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to

Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God,

that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature

and the Whole, — re-attaching even artificial things, and violations

of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes very easily of

the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the

factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the

landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet

consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the

great Order not less than the beehive, or the spider’s geometrical

web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the

gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred

mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you

exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact

of mechanics has not gained a grain’s weight. The spiritual fact

remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is

of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd

country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent

citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he

does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such

before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for

the railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the

great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every

circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of

America, are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the

poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and

fascinates, and absorbs, — and though all men are intelligent of the

symbols through which it is named, — yet they cannot originally use

them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools,

words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize

with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of

things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an

ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes

their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb

and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought

on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and

fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see

through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us

all things in their right series and procession. For, through that

better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the

flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that

within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend

into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the

forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the

flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex,

nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of

the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and

reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life,

and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone

knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does

not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the

plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call

suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with

animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on

them as the horses of thought.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or

Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance,

sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name

and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in

detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore

language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort

of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is

forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained

currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first

speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to

have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As

the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the

shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes,

which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of

their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees

it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression,

or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first,

as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain

self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her

own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises

herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a

certain poet described it to me thus:

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things,

whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature,

through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting

the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric

countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new

billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this

hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is

thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed

its parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him to

ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a

blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe

from accidents to which the individual is exposed. So when the soul

of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends

away from it its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, deathless

progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom

of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was

the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast

and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These

wings are the beauty of the poet’s soul. The songs, thus flying

immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights

of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to

devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very

short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the

souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of

the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite

time.

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature

has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than

security, namely, _ascension_, or, the passage of the soul into

higher forms. I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor who made the

statue of the youth which stands in the public garden. He was, as I

remember, unable to tell directly, what made him happy, or unhappy,

but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day,

according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break,

grand as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after,

he strove to express this tranquillity, and, lo! his chisel had

fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus,

whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it

become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that

thought which agitated him is expressed, but _alter idem_, in a

manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type

which things themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects

paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the

aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate

copy of their essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things

into higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. Over

everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing

is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a

melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed,

pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors

in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine,

he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, without

diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of

criticism, in the mind’s faith, that the poems are a corrupt version

of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A

rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the

iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a

group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious

as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or

rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic

song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should

not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our

spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called

Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by

study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing

the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them

translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they

suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a

lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, — him they

will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is

his resigning himself to the divine _aura_ which breathes through

forms, and accompanying that.

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns,

that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he

is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by

abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of

power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which

he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and

suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then

he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder,

his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the

plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then,

only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the

mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the

intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its

direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to

express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect

inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws

his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the

animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who

carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate

this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind

flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the

metamorphosis is possible.

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics,

coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever

other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of

such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their

normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music,

pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires,

gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which

are several coarser or finer _quasi_-mechanical substitutes for the

true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming

nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal

tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help

him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of

that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed.

Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of

Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more

than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but

the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode

of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens,

but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that

advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never

can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the

world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the

sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure

and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an

inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit

excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine

and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the

gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden

bowl. For poetry is not `Devil’s wine,’ but God’s wine. It is with

this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our

children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing

their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the

sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be

their toys. So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so

low and plain, that the common influences should delight him. His

cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should

suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That

spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such

from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and

half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth

to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou

fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and

covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and

French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely

waste of the pinewoods.

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in

other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of

joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and

exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which

makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like

persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is

the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms.

Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and

found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the

metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not

now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the

mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every

definition; as, when Aristotle defines _space_ to be an immovable

vessel, in which things are contained; — or, when Plato defines a

_line_ to be a flowing point; or, _figure_ to be a bound of solid;

and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when

Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can

build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy. When

Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its

maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are

beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when

Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants

also are animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing

with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman,

following him, writes, –

"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root

Springs in his top;"

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which

marks extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of

the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of `Gentilesse,’ compares

good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the

darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold

its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did

it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world

through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth

her untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common

daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; — we

take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, and its

versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say, "it is in vain

to hang them, they cannot die."

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards

had for the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the

world." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book

renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its

tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the

author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the

transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried

away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and

the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an

insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments

and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to

Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler,

Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable

facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology,

palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of

departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is

the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts

the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty

then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the

intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the

perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like

threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers

us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed,

our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.

There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The

fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm,

perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an

emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and

truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought

but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, –

you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest.

Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison.

Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in

an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a

new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart

it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a

measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure,

all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath

him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence,

possessing this virtue, will take care of its own immortality. The

religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to

freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read

their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the

same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference

betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one

sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and

false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and

transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance,

not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in

the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal

one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the

eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith;

and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader.

But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and

child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem.

Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person

to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be

very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use.

And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is just as

true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have

a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs,

instead of these village symbols, — and we shall both be gainers.

The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error

consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last,

nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for

the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in

history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the

metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests,

obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he

eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig

which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at a

distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was

found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in one of his visions,

seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in

darkness: but, to each other, they appeared as men, and, when the

light from heaven shone into their cabin, they complained of the

darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might see.

There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer,

an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society of

men, may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a

different aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he

describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the

children, who were at some distance, like dead horses: and many the

like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires, whether these

fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in

the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to

me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I

appear as a man to all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded

the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the transformation,

he doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences. We have

all seen changes as considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is

the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees, through

the flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare it.

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with

sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves

to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance.

If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from

celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the

timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.

Dante’s praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in

colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in

America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable

materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times,

another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in

Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs,

the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and

dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as

the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly

passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our

fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our

repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest

men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing,

Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our

eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not

wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination

of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to

fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers’s

collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, more

than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we

adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with

Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and

historical.

But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use

the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the

muse to the poet concerning his art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or

methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the

artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the

conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic

rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express

themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and

fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions,

as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures;

the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such

scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each

presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a

beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons

hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, "By

God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half

seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every

solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but

by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That

charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way

of talking, we say, `That is yours, this is mine;’ but the poet knows

well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him

as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once

having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and,

as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is

of the last importance that these things get spoken. What a little

of all we know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are

baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so

many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and

song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the

door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be

ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, `It is in me, and shall

out.’ Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering,

hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of

thee that _dream_-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a

power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a

man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing

walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise

and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that

power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by

pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come

forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for

our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a

measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And

therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael,

have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their

lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to

render an image of every created thing.

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and

not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions

are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse

only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces,

politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For

the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in

nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of

animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that

thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content

that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall

represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the

great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with

nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange.

The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is

thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This

is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved

flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall

console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to

rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame

before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall

be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall

like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable

essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the

sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the

woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that

wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord!

sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds

fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue

heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with

transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space,

wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as

rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over,

thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

EXPERIENCE

The lords of life, the lords of life,—

I saw them pass,

In their own guise,

Like and unlike,

Portly and grim,

Use and Surprise,

Surface and Dream,

Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,

Temperament without a tongue,

And the inventor of the game

Omnipresent without name; –

Some to see, some to be guessed,

They marched from east to west:

Little man, least of all,

Among the legs of his guardians tall,

Walked about with puzzled look: –

Him by the hand dear nature took;

Dearest nature, strong and kind,

Whispered, `Darling, never mind!

Tomorrow they will wear another face,

The founder thou! these are thy race!’

ESSAY II _Experience_

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not

know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find

ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to

have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward

and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief,

stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to

drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we

cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our

lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the

fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much

threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and

should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of

indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her

fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack

the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet

we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to

live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to

invest. Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! We are

like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories

above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper

people must have raised their dams.

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going,

then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are

busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have

afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun

in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ’tis

wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call

wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day.

Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those

that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It

is said, all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every

ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the

romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the

horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem

to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and

reference. `Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has

fertile meadow, but my field,’ says the querulous farmer, `only holds

the world together.’ I quote another man’s saying; unluckily, that

other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. ‘Tis the

trick of nature thus to degrade today; a good deal of buzz, and

somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to

the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women,

and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe, and the men ask,

`What’s the news?’ as if the old were so bad. How many individuals

can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So

much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much

retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a

very few hours. The history of literature — take the net result of

Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel, — is a sum of very few ideas, and

of very few original tales, — all the rest being variation of these.

So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis

would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and

gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in

the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.

What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable

as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,

but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.

_Ate Dea_ is gentle,

"Over men’s heads walking aloft,

With tender feet treading so soft."

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad

with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering,

in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks

and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and

counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how

shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and

never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we

would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich

who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never

touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves

between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too

will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two

years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I

cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the

bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be

a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would

leave me as it found me, — neither better nor worse. So is it with

this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a

part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor

enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar.

It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry

me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse,

that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire

burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain,

and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now

but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there

at least is reality that will not dodge us.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which

lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be

the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to

be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We

may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our

philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our

blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each

other are oblique and casual.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass

through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the

world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.

From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and

we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes

that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall

see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there

is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish

nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or

temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are

strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective

nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at

some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh and

giggle? or if he apologize? or is affected with egotism? or thinks of

his dollar? or cannot go by food? or has gotten a child in his

boyhood? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too

concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon

of human life? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and

the man does not care enough for results, to stimulate him to<

2001 GÜÇLENDÄ°RÄ°LMÄ°Åž EKONOMÄ°K PROGRAMI’NIN HAZIRLANIÅž GEREKÇELERÄ° ve HEDEFLERÄ°

Türkiye ekonomisinin GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program hazırlandığı dönemde görünürdeki en büyük sıkıntısı kamu kesiminin olaÄŸanüstü büyük borç stoku ve 90’lı yılların ortalarından itibaren hızlanan olumsuz borç dinamiÄŸidir. 1990’lı yıllarda Türkiye’nin kamu borcunun milli gelire oranı yüzde 30’un altındayken, 2000 yılının sonunda bu oran yüzde 60’lara ulaÅŸmıştır. 2000 Kasım’ında ve 2001 Åžubat’ında ard arda yaÅŸanan ekonomik krizlerin devamında ise yüzde 70’in de üzerine çıkmıştır. Yıllardır ancak çok yüksek reel faiz oranlarında borçlanabilen devlet için bu süreç ileriki dönemler dikkate alındığında sürdürülemez boyutlara varmıştır.

Ekonomi yönetimine göre olumsuz borç dinamiÄŸinin temel nedeni Türkiye’de devlet-toplum ve siyaset-ekonomi arasındaki iliÅŸkiler olarak ifade edilmektedir. GeçmiÅŸ dönemlerde gündeme alınan birçok reform denemesine raÄŸmen ekonomide ve toplumsal yaÅŸamda 1990’lı yıllarda rant çekiÅŸmesi devam etmiÅŸtir. Siyaset , yasal çerçeveleri oluÅŸturmak, denetim görevini yapmak, dış politikayı ve ulusal savunma politikasını belirlemek, dar gelirliyi korumak gibi gerekli ve meÅŸru iÅŸlevlerinin ötesinde piyasanın iÅŸlemesine ve ekonomik kararların verilmesine müdahale alışkanlığını sürdürmüştür. Özellikle seçim dönemlerinde devlet kesesinden iktidarda bulunan siyasi parti ve yandaÅŸları kim olursa olsun farketmeksizin gerçekleÅŸtirilen savurganlığın bir örneÄŸinin daha dünya yüzünde bulunduÄŸu zannedilmemektedir. Program’ın uygullama sürecinde dahi eski düzene baÄŸlı , siyasi kimliÄŸi taşıyan çeÅŸitli kimselerin tarım ürünleri ve özelleÅŸtirmeler konularında sürdürmeye çalıştıkları populist olarak nitelendirilebilecek politikalar GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program dahilinde ortadan kaldırılması hedeflenen uygulamalardır.

Birçok reform denemesine raÄŸmen ekonomide ve toplumsal yaÅŸamda 1990’lı yıllarda rant çekiÅŸmesi devam etmiÅŸtir. Özel sektör de daha verimli ve karlı üretim gerçekleÅŸtirme çabalarının yerine siyasi destekle rant oluÅŸturma tercih etmiÅŸtir. Bankacılık sektöründe , enerji sektöründe ve birçok baÅŸka sektörde yaÅŸanan olumsuzlukların kaynağı rant elde etme çabasına odaklanmış düzendir. Türkiye ekonomisinin kronikleÅŸmiÅŸ olarak kabul edilen uzun yıllardır toplumun katlanmak zorunda olduÄŸu yüksek enflasyon oranının da kaynağında bahsi geçen toplum-devlet , siyaset-ekonomi iliÅŸkilerinin ve rant çekiÅŸmelerinin bulunduÄŸu da ekonomi yönetimince ifade edilmektedir.

Özellikle 2001 Åžubat’ı içerisinde yaÅŸanan ve 2000 Kasım krizinin ardından bardağı taşıran damla olarak deÄŸerlendirilebilecek siyasi krizin ekonomik krize dönüşmesi Türkiye’nin uzun yıllardır gündeminde olan ancak sürekli ertelenen yapısal ve ruhsal deÄŸiÅŸimleri mecburi kılmıştır. Türkiye’de ciddi bir ekonomik ajan olarak dikkate alınması gereken enflasyon lobisi bir kenara bırakılırsa ülkenin özellikle ücretli kesimi uzun yıllardır rant düzeninden ÅŸikayet etmekte ve GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program’ın baÅŸarıya ulaÅŸacağı süreçte deÄŸiÅŸimin sancılarını çekmektedir.

Herhangi bir sanayiciyi düşünelim. Eğer kendi dalında çalışan rakipleri bir bankadan piyasa şartlarından daha ucuz, özel ve avantajlı bir kredi alıyorsa o zaman çok doğal olarak bu sanayici de mutlak surette ya bir bankaya sahip olarak, ya da siyasi destek bulup bir kamu bankasını etkileyerek kendisine de aynı avantajı sağlamaya çalışacaktır. Bu tür davranışlar da ekonomi genelinde yaygınlaşınca, kamu bankalarında zararlar birikmekte , iyi bankacılık kıstaslarına uymayan nitelikte kredi veren özel bankalar da doğal olarak iflaslarını açıklamaktadırlar . Bunun da bedelini Türk ekonomisi ve özellikle dar gelirli vatandaş ödemek zorunda kalmaktadır. Halbuki hiç kimseye özel imtiyaz sağlanmadığı bir düzende aynı sanayici haksız rekabetten korkmayacak, bütün gücünü üretime , verimliliğe ve istihdam yaratmaya verebilecektir.

Tamamen ÅŸeffaf , adil ve dürüstçe iÅŸleyen bir ekonomi iyi niyetle hareket eden tüm iktisadi ajanların pek tabii ki birincil isteÄŸidir ancak pratikte küçük bir yüzde ile de olsa eksik rekabet kaçınılmazdır. Bir çok geliÅŸmekte olan ülkenin yaÅŸadığı sıkıntıları paylaÅŸan Türkiye’de ise ekonominin bütün alanlarında eksik rekabetin hakim olması serbest piyasa çarklarının dönüşünü engellemekte ve GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program gibi Bretton-Woods KuruluÅŸları destekli radikal kararları mecburi kılmaktadır.

Devlet kadroları ise ekonomiden gelen bunaltıcı rant taleplerini karşılamaya çalışmak yerine bütün güçlerini daha iyi eÄŸitim, daha iyi saÄŸlık ve daha iyi adalet hizmeti için seferber etmelidir. Devlet ve özel sektör birbirlerinin hareket alanlarına bu anlayış çerçevesinde yaklaÅŸtıklarında , Türkiye’de hem siyaset yapma hem de ekonomide baÅŸarılı olma düzeni deÄŸiÅŸmiÅŸ olacaktır.

GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program’ın nihai hedeflerine ulaÅŸabilmesi için belirlenen teknik ara hedefler aÅŸağıda sıralanmıştır ;

·Dalgalı kur sistemi dahilinde enflasyonla mücadele kesintisiz bir biçimde kararlılıkla sürdürülecektir.

·Bankacılık sektörünün kamu ve TMSF bünyesindeki bankalar başta olmak üzere rehabilite edilmesine devam edilecek ve bu sayede reel sektör ile bankacılık kesimi arasında sağlıklı ilişkiler kurulacaktır.

·Kamu finansman dengesi sağlıklı biçimde sağlanacaktır.

·Gelir dağılımının adilane biçimde gerçekleştirilmesi için çaba sarfedilecektir.

·GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program’ın içerdiÄŸi ekonomik uygulamaların gerçekleÅŸtirilebilmesi için gerekli ortam yapısal reformlarla saÄŸlanacaktır.

2001 yılı Mayıs ayında yürülüğe konulan GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program’ın temel hedef ve yürürlüğe konma gerekçeleri yukarıda özetlenmiÅŸtir.

* Kaynak: Ekonomi’den Sorumlu Devlet Bakanı Sn. Dr. Kemal DerviÅŸ’in GüçlendirilmiÅŸ Ekonomik Program Sunumu.

ELEKTRİK ENERJİSİNİN ÖZELLİKLERİ, ÜRETİLMESİ, TAŞINMASI VE DAĞITIMI

KAYNAKLAR:

TEMEL BRITANNICA

PRATÄ°K ELEKTRÄ°K VE UYGULAMALARIYLA MODERN ELEKTROTEKNÄ°K

(HALUK ERNA)

THEMA LAROUSSE (TEMATÄ°K ANSÄ°KLOPEDÄ°)

http://abone.superonline.com/~manadolulisesi

http://members.home.net/maydin/TurkElektrik

http://www.enerji.gov.tr/Enerji.html

BÄ°LÄ°M TEKNÄ°K DERGÄ°SÄ°

ALFABETÄ°K OKUL ANSÄ°KLOPEDÄ°SÄ°

FÄ°ZÄ°K –1 MADDE ÖZELLÄ°KLERÄ° & ELEKTRÄ°K (Nihat Bilgin, Kemal Çağıcı)

ELEKTRİK ENERJİSİNİN ÖZELLİKLERİ

- Elektrik enerjisinin diğer enerji türlerine dönüştürülmesi kolaydır.

- Diğer enerji türlerine göre çok uzaklara taşınması ve kullanılması son derece rahattır.

- Verimi yüksektir. Bir enerji, istenen başka bir enerji türüne dönüştürülürken, ekseriya istenmeyen başka enerji türleri de ortaya çıkar. Bunların arasında özellikle ısı enerjisinin büyük olması dikkati çeker. İstenmeyen bu ısı enerjisi, yararlanılamadığı için yitirilir ve verimi düşürür. İşte elektrik enerjisinin ısıdan başka bir enerjiye dönüştürülmesinde oluşan ısı enerjisi az olduğu için verimi yüksektir.

- Elektrik enerjisi sayısız bir çok parçaya ayrılarak kullanılabilir. Örneğin: Bir elektrik santralında kazanılan elektrik enerjisi, enerji taşıma hatlarıyla büyük kentlere götürülmekte ve orada sayısız konut ve iş yerlerine dağıtılarak kullanılmaktadır.

- Elektrik enerjisi bulunduğu yerin ekonomik, sosyal ve kültürel düzeylerini hızla yükseltir ve kendisine karşı duyulan gereksinmenin artmasına gene kendisi neden olur.

- Elektrik enerjisi toplumların ekonomik, sosyal ve kültürel yönlerden kalkınmasını sağlayan ve çağdaş uygarlığın en önemli araçlarından biri durumundadır.

- Son 50 yıl içinde baş döndürücü bir hızla ilerleyen teknolojideki gelişimler ve hatta bir ev kadınının eli altına bir makinanın verilmesi (örneğin çamaşır makinesi) elektrik enerjisi sayesinde olanaklı olmuştur.

Elektrik enerjisinin belirtilen bu ve bunlara benzer avantajları ve iyi yönleri yanısıra sakıncalı yönleri de vardır. Bunların başında elektrik enerjisinin depo edilemeyen bir enerji türü olması gelir. Nitekim elektrik enerjisi üretildiÄŸi anda kullanılmak zorunluluÄŸundadır. Bundan dolayı üretim ile tüketim arasında devamlı bir dengenin bulunması gerekir. Ayrıca üretim sisteminde bir arıza ortaya çıktığında, bu sisteme baÄŸlı sayısız abonede hizmetlerin durmasına ya da aksamasına neden olur. Bu nedenle, elektrik enerjisinin üretiminde sürekli bir devamlılığın saÄŸlanması ve elde büyük ölçüde yedek sistemlerin bulundurulması zorunludur. Elektrik enerjisinin bir baÅŸka sakıncası da üretimine paralel olarak taşıma ve dağıtımı için özel düzenlere kesinlikle gereksinme duymasıdır. Oysaki, örneÄŸin: bir dokuma fabrikası ürünlerini tüketiciye götürmek için özel yollara ve taşıtlara gereksinme duymaz. Bu görevi herkesin yararlandığı bir yoldan ve bir kamyon ile yapabilir. Buna karşın elektrik enerjisinin taşıma ve dağıtılması için projeye ayrıca yatırımların (örneÄŸin: direkler, teller, izolatörler…) katılması zorunlu olmaktadır.

ELEKTRÄ°K ENERJÄ°SÄ°NÄ°N Ä°LETÄ°MÄ° (TAÅžINMASI) VE DAÄžITILMASI

Genellikle birbirinden uzak olan elektrik üretim santrallarıyla tüketim merkezleri arasındaki baÄŸlantı, iletiÅŸim ÅŸebekesi ve enterkonnekte sistemlerle saÄŸlanır. Elektrik depolanamadığından, üretildiÄŸinde hemen kullanıcıya ulaÅŸtırılması gerekir. Bu da üretim ve tüketimin her an dengede tutulması demektir. Öte yandan tüketim miktarı bölgelere, mevsimlere ve hatta günün saatlerine göre büyük deÄŸiÅŸiklikler gösterebilir. Enterkonnekte sistemler, üretimi tüketim düzeyindeki deÄŸiÅŸimlere uyarlamayı saÄŸlar. ElektriÄŸin iletimiyse, gerilimin gücüne baÄŸlı olarak taşıma iletim sığası deÄŸiÅŸen elektrik hatları aracılığıyla gerçekleÅŸtirilir. Gerilim arttığında iletim iÅŸleminde ciddi tasarruflar saÄŸlanır: enerji kaybı gerilim düzeyiyle ters orantılı olduÄŸu için enerjiden, hat miktarı azaldığı için yerden, ÅŸebekedeki bakım masrafları azaldığı için de harcamalardan tasarruf edilir. Mesela, 1000 MW’lık bir nükleer santralın ürettiÄŸi elektriÄŸi boÅŸaltmak için, 380000V’luk bir hat kullanılır; oysa aynı iÅŸi görmek için 154000V’luk altı hat veya 66000V’luk 30 hat gerekir.

Enterkonnekte sistemler çok dağınık bölgelerin üretim imkanlarını birleştirerek, aynı malzeme güvenliği bakımından gerekli olan güç miktarının azalmasını sağlar. Arızalar meydana geldiğinde, yerinde değiştirilmesi gereken parçalar o an için elde bulunmayabilir. Bu durumda enterkonnekte sistem yardıma koşar; elektrik dağıtım istasyonlarında gerilimin akış yönü ayarlanarak anında ve en az harcamayla üretim ile tüketim arasındaki denge sağlanır. Şebekenin yönetimi için gerekli emirler ve bilgiler özel iletişim hatları, özel telsizler kullanılarak sağlanır.

Åžebeke ve gerilimler

Gerilim ne kadar yüksek olursa, bir hattın iletebileceÄŸi elektrik miktarı da o kadar yüksek olur. Ãœretim santrallarından çıkan çok büyük miktarlardaki akımı iletebilen hatlar Türkiye’ de 380000V veya 154000V düzeyindedir. Uzak mesafeler arasına kurulan büyük iletiÅŸim ÅŸebekeleri ve enterkonnekte sistemler bu tip hatlardan oluÅŸur. Bu ÅŸebekeler, bütün üretim santrallarını birbirine baÄŸlar. Elektrik, gerilimi düşürüldükten sonra bölgesel ÅŸebekelere iletilir ve bu ÅŸebekeler yardımıyla ayrılarak dağıtım merkezlerine gönderilir. Ä°letim ÅŸebekesi bölgesel, ulusal veya uluslar arası ölçekte de olsa, yönetim ve organizasyon nedenleriyle iletim iÅŸlemi Türkiye’ de 34500V veya bunun üzerindeki bir gerilim düzeyinde gerçekleÅŸtirilir. En çok kullanılan 380000V, 154000V, 66000V veya 24500V’tur. 34500V’un altındaki gerilimlere ortalama gerilimler olan 20000V ve 15000V veya alçak gerilim olan 380 veya 220V’luk “dağıtım gerilimleri” denir. Petrokimya, metalürji (özellikle alüminyum), demir-çelik fabrikaları ve elektrikli ulaşım hatları (tren, tramvay) çok büyük tüketicidir. Orta gerilim ÅŸebekeleri orta ve küçük sanayi iÅŸletmeleri ile büyük maÄŸazalar veya yöresel yönetimler, hastaneler, okullar gibi merkezleri besler. Son olarak, milyonlarca yerel kullanıcı, alçak gerilimli elektrik akımıyla beslenir.

Elektrik Dağıtım Merkezleri ve Dağıtım Bağlantıları

Elektrik üretim merkezleriyle tüketicileri arasındaki bağlantı, elektrik iletim şebekesiyle anında sağlanır. Elektriğin dağıtımı, üretim ve iletim merkezlerindeki karmaşık bir programlama sistemiyle gerçekleştirilir. Dağıtım Türkiye Elektrik Kurumu (TEK) tarafından hazırlanarak uygulanmakta olan bir plana göre Türkiye çapında yapılır. Bu amaçla haberleşme ve telekomünikasyon araçlarından, otomasyondan ve önceden hazırlanan istatistik verilerine dayalı öngörülerden yararlanılır. Bu öngörülerde, ele alınan günün birkaç yıl öncesine kadar şebeke ve tüketim durumu dikkate alınır. Eskiden yılda bir kere yapılan tahminler, zamanla haftalık, günlük hale gelmiş ve tüketimin daha da yakından izlenmesi imkanı sağlanmıştır. Dağıtım ve iletimde meteorolojik koşullar da çok önemlidir; kapalı bir hava veya güneşli bir hava büyük sıcaklık farklılıklarına yol açar ve bu da milyonlarca konutun ısıtma ve aydınlatılmasında rol oynar. Elektrik akımının iletimi ve dağıtımı şebekeye bağlı dağıtım merkezlerince (transformatör istasyonları) sırayla yapılır.

Şebeke dağıtım merkezlerinin iki ayrı işlevi vardır: hem hatların birbirine bağlanmasını sağlar (enterkoneksiyon), hem de dönüştürme işlevi üstlenir (transformatör). Transformatör istasyonları transformatörler (dönüştürücü), disjonktörler ve ayırıcılarla donanmıştır. Transformatörler, duruma göre elektrik akımının gerilimini yükseltir veya alçaltır; dolayısıyla, iletim ve dağıtıma en uygun gerilimi seçerek elektriğin taşınmasında büyük önem taşır. Disjonktörler gerilim hattında herhangi bir aksaklık olduğunda akımı otomatik olarak kesmeye yarar. Hattın şebekeden ayrılması gerektiğinde devreye sokulabilir. Ayırıcılar da aynı rolü üstlenir, ama hatta akım olmadığı zaman çalışır ve hattı şebekeden tamamen ayırmakta kullanılır. Bir dağıtım merkezinin birçok farklı öğesi çoğunlukla açıktadır; bazı kentlerde bir dizi öğe yeraltında veya bina içlerinde olabilir. Bunlar basınçlı gaz zarfı içinde tutulur. Atmosferle pek temas etmediğinden, bundan kaynaklanan kirlenmelere uğramaz. Merkezler biraz uzaktaki bir kumanda istasyonundan yönetilir.

Elektriğin Ülke Çapında Dağıtımı

Türkiye’de elektrik dağıtımından genelde Türkiye Elektrik Kurumu (TEK) sorumludur; bazı bölgelerde bu iÅŸi özel ÅŸirketler üstlenmiÅŸtir. Dağıtım kuruluÅŸu tüketim ihtiyacına göre ÅŸebekeler kurmak, bunları yönetmek ve yenilemek, tüketicileri ÅŸebekeye baÄŸlayan baÄŸlantıları yapmak, dağıtılan elektriÄŸin sürekliliÄŸini saÄŸlamak ve miktarını sabit kılmakla yükümlüdür. Ä°letim sistemi aracılığıyla yüksek gerilimde taşınan elektrik, alçak gerilime düşürülerek bir dağıtım merkezine, yani transformatör istasyonuna ulaÅŸtırılır. Kırsal bölgelerde bu ÅŸebekeler açıktadır; yerleÅŸim bölgelerindeyse çoÄŸunlukla yeraltına döşenmiÅŸtir.

Orta gerilim/alçak gerilim merkezlerinin baÄŸlayıcı elemanı, farklı gerilimdeki iki ÅŸebekeyi birbirine baÄŸlayan ve kısaca trafo denen transformatördür. Alçak gerilimli dağıtım sistemi tüketicilere üç fazlı ve bir topraklı (nötr) elektrik saÄŸlar; elektrik iki gerilim düzeyinden oluÅŸur. Bunlardan giderek yaygınlaÅŸanı fazlar arası 380V ve faz-toprak arası 220V gerilimidir. Fazlar arası 200V ve faz-nötr arası 127V olanı giderek azalmaktadır. En çok kullanılan sistemler üç fazlı 380V ve tek fazlı 220V’tur. Bu seçeneÄŸe göre, bir alet 4 tele veya 2 tele baÄŸlanır. Elektrik akımının frekansı bütün Avrupa’da ve Türkiye’de 50Hz, Amerika kıtasındaysa 60Hz’dir. Bir motor veya bir bilgisayar, aygıtın içinde kullanılan frekansa eÅŸit frekanslı bir ÅŸebekeye baÄŸlanmadıkça düzgün çalışmaz.

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image001.jpg[/IMG]ELEKTRÄ°K ENERJÄ°SÄ°NÄ°N ÃœRETÄ°LMESÄ°

TERMÄ°K SANTRALLAR

Termik santrallar, kömür, akaryakıt veya gaz gibi fosil yakıtların yakılması yoluyla elektrik üretir. Su santrallarda, ocağın kazan bölümünde dolanan su, çok sıcak buhar haline dönüşür ve bu buhar, elektrik akımı üreten alternatörlere bağlı türbinleri çalıştırır. İlk büyük petrol krizi sanayileşmiş Batılı ülkelerde bu tip termik santralların yapımını yavaşlattı. Ancak gene de bu tip santrallar, birçok ülkede enerji açığını kapatmakta görev üstlenmeye devam etmektedir.

Termik santralların ürettiği ısının bir bölümü çevreye atılır. Soğutma suyunun sağlandığı kıyı ve ırmak suları birkaç derece ısınır. Kömürün yanmasıyla oluşan küllerin bir bölümü bacaların elektrostatik filtrelerinden dışarı sızar. Ve nihayet, bütün fosil yakıtlar azot ve kükürt içerir ve bu maddeler yanma sonrasında oksitler halinde atmosfere karışır. Çevre uzmanlarına göre gaz atıklar, ormanlar için son derece zararlı olan asit yağmurlarının en önemli nedenidir.

Termik Santralın Çalışma Yöntemi

Elektrik enerjisine dönüştürülecek olan termik enerjiyi üretmek için, yakıt bir buhar kazanında yakılır. Buhar kazanı, bir ocak ile bir boru demetinden oluşur; boruların içinde dolanan su, burada ısıtılır ve buhar haline geldikten sonra türbinlere gönderilir. Eğer yakıt olarak kömür kullanılıyorsa, bu kömür önce öğütülüp toz haline getirilir; sonra sıcak havayla karıştırılır ve brülörle buhar kazanının yanma odasına püskürtülür. Eğer sıvı yakıt kullanılıyorsa, bu sıvı yakıt önce akışkanlığının artması için ısıtılır, sonra kullanılır.

600MW’lik bir santralda buhar 565 derecelik bir sıcaklığa ve 174 bar düzeyinde bir basınca çıkarılır. Yüksek basınçlı türbinlere yollanan buhar kısmen genleÅŸerek türbin çarklarını döndürür. Bu ilk aÅŸamadan geçen buhar, enerjisinin bir bölümünü korur. Aynı buhar, ayrı bir devre aracılığıyla yeniden kazana gönderilir ve tekrar ısıtılır; sonra 34 bar düzeyinde bir basınçla, orta basınçta çalışan türbine basılır. Düşük basınç bölümündeyse buhar tam olarak genleÅŸir. Bu çevrimin sonunda basıncı 300 milibara düşen buhar kondansöre gönderilir.

Kondansör, buharın yeniden suya dönüştürüldüğü soğuk bir kaynaktır. Buhar burada, içinde soğutma suyunun dolandığı binlerce küçük çaplı boruya temas ederek tekrar suya dönüşür. Sonra pompalarla toplanır ve yeniden ısıtma çevrimine sokulur; bu amaç için türbinin farklı noktalarında ısıtılan buhardan yararlanılır. Böylece yeni çevrim başlamış olur: su tekrar buhar kazanına girer, burada ısıtılarak buharlaştırılır ve türbinlere doğru yollanır. Türbinlerin mekanik enerjiyse alternatör vasıtasıyla elektrik enerjisine dönüştürülür. Ve son olarak da bir transformatörde gerilimi yükseltilen elektik, genel iletim hatlarına verilir.

NÜKLEER GÜÇ SANTRALLARININ GENEL TANITIMI

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image002.gif[/IMG]

Nük. Müh. Fatoş Arzu ALPAN [IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image002.gif[/IMG]

Nükleer Güç Santralları ile Termik Santraller birbirleri ile benzer özellikler taşırlar. Her iki santral tipinde de elde edilen buharın ısıl enerjisi türbinde mekanik enerjiye ve mekanik enerji de dejeneratörlerde elektrik enerjisine dönüştürülerek elektrik üretilir. Bu santraller arasındaki temel fark buharın elde ediliÅŸ yöntemidir. Bütün nükleer reaktör tiplerinde bölünmeden açığa çıkan enerji buhar üretiminde kullanır ve bu buhar üretimi doÄŸrudan reaktörün korunda ya da buhar üreteçlerinde yapılır. Bu nedenle nükleer reaktörlerdeki bölünme reaksiyonu termik santrallarda fosil yakıt yakmakla aynı iÅŸleve sahiptir. Ä°lk olarak nükleer güç santrallerini tanıtmadan önce bölünme (fisyon) reaksiyonu mekanizmasını anlatmakta yarar vardır. Nükleer reaksiyonda açığa çıkan enerji, temelde U235 izotopunun ya da herhangi bir bölünmeye yatkın (fisil) izotopun (Pu239, U233) nötronla etkileÅŸmesinden ötürü parçalanması olayı sonucunda açığa çıkan fazlalık baÄŸlanma enerjisidir. Nötronla etkileÅŸen U235 çekirdeÄŸi kararsız hale geçerek, kendisinden daha hafif iki çekirdeÄŸe ayrılır ve bu esnada da ortalama olarak iki nötron açığa çıkarır. Bu reaksiyon sonucu açığa çıkan bölünme enerjisi yaklaşık 200 MV’dir. Bu enerji buhar üretimi için soÄŸutucuya aktarılır ve açığa çıkan nötronlardan biri bölünmeye yatkın baÅŸka bir izotopu parçalayarak zincirleme reaksiyonuna sebep olur. DiÄŸer nötron ise reaktör içindeki diÄŸer malzemeler tarafından yutulur ya da sistemden kaçar. Nükleer reaktörler bu zincirleme bölünme reaksiyonunun kontrollü olarak yapıldığı sistemlerdir. Bölünme reaksiyonunun önemini anlamak için 1 kg U235 izotopunun yanması sonucu açığa çıkan enerjinin yaklaşık 1.3 milyon kg kömürünkine eÅŸdeÄŸer olduÄŸunu belirtmek yeterli olacaktır.

Bölünme reaksiyonu sonucu açığa çıkan nötronların etkili bir şekilde kullanılabilmesi için bölünmeye yatkın izotoplarla etkileşme olasılıklarını arttırmak gerekir. Bu nedenle bölünme reaksiyonlarından açığa çıkan hızlı nötronlar moderatör adı verilen yavaşlatıcı malzemeler yardımı ile yavaşlatılarak bölünmeye yatkın malzemelerle etkileşim olasılıkları arttırılır. Diğer bir malzeme de yansıtıcı (reflector) dır. Bu malzeme korun etrafına yerleştirilerek nötronların sistemden dışarı kaçma olasılıklarını azaltmak için kullanılır. Moderatör malzemesi aynı zamanda yansıtıcılık işlevini de görebilir.

İlk kontrollü bölünme reaksiyonu 1942 yılında Amerika Birleşik Devletlerinde inşa edilen CPI Reaktöründe gerçekleştirilmiştir. Bu reaktörde yakıt malzemesi olarak doğal uranyum ve moderator olarak grafit kullanılmıştır. İlk nükleer reaktörde olduğu gibi nükleer reaktör tasarımcılarının reaktör yakıtı için seçimleri doğal uranyum (%0.71 U235, %99.27 U238) ya da %3, %4 oranında zenginleştirilmiş uranyumdur. Eğer yakıt doğal uranyum seçilirse moderator olarak grafit ya da ağır su kullanılmalıdır.

Günümüzde, elektrik üretimi için kullanılan santralların büyük bir bölümü Basınçlı Su Reaktörü (PWR), Kaynar Su Reaktörü (BWR), ve Basınçlı Ağır Su Reaktörüdür (PHWR). Bunlardan ilk ikisi, hafif su soÄŸutmalı termal reaktör sınıfına girer, moderator ve reflektör malzemesi olarak da hafif su kullanılır. Üçüncü reaktör tipi ise dünyada ilk olarak Kanada’da elektrik üretimi için kurulan ve soÄŸutucu olarak ağır su kullanan Basınçlı Ağır Su Reaktörüdür.

BASINÇLI SU REAKTÖRÜ (PWR)

Basınçlı su reaktörleri ticari olarak elektrik üretimi için ABD’de kullanılan ilk reaktör tipidir. Bu tür reaktörlerde korda üretilen enerji birincil devre soÄŸutucu vasıtasıyla kordan çekilir. Ä°kincil devrede buhar üreteçlerinden alınan buhar türbinlerinde geniÅŸletilerek jeneratörde elektrik üretilir. Birincil devre basıncı, soÄŸutucu suyun kaynamasını engellemek için, 15-16 MPa civarındadır. SoÄŸutucunun kora giriÅŸ sıcaklığı 290-300 C, çıkış sıcaklığı ise 320-330 C civarındadır. Reaktör korundan çıkan soÄŸutucu türbinlerde kullanılan buharın üretimi için buhar üreteçlerine gönderilir. Reaktörlerin birincil soÄŸutucu devreleri iki, üç ya da dört tane benzer döngüden oluÅŸur. Her bir döngüde bir buhar üretici, bir reaktör soÄŸutucu pompası ve baÄŸlantı boruları bulunur. Ayrıca reaktör basıncını kontrol edebilmek için bir basınçlayıcı bu döngülerden biri üzerinde bulunur.

Yakıt içinde fisyondan açığa çıkan nötronlar soğutucuda yavaşlatılarak zincirleme fisyon reaksiyonunu sağlarlar. Aynı anda açığa çıkan kinetik enerjinin büyük bir kısmı yakıt içinde ısıl enerjiye dönüşür ve bu enerji ısı iletimi ile soğutucuya aktarılır, bir kısmı ise hızlı nötronlar tarafından moderasyon anında moderator vazifesi de gören soğutucuya aktarılmıştır.

Reaktör koru dayanıklı bir çelikten yapılmış silindirik bir basınç kabı içerisinde yerleştirilmiştir. Basınç kabı bu tip reaktörlerin ömrünü kısıtlayan en önemli bileşendir.

Hemen hemen bütün reaktör tiplerinde reaktör basınç kabı ve soğutucu sistemleri koruma kabı adı verilen çelik bir kabuğun içindedir. Bu çelik kabuk betondan yapılmış ikinci bir koruyucu yapının içerisinde yer alır. Bu sistem dış etkilerden reaktör sistemini korumak ya da reaktörden bir kazadan dolayı açığa çıkabilecek radyasyonun çevreye sızmasını önlemek için tasarlanmıştır.

KAYNAR SU REAKTÖRÜ (BWR)

Kaynar su reaktörü dünyada basınçlı su reaktöründen sonra en yaygın olarak kullanılan reaktör tipidir. Kaynar su reaktörleri (BWR) birçok yönden PWR reaktörüne benzemekle birlikte, temel fark reaktör koru içinde kaynama olayına izin verilmesidir. BWR tipi reaktörlerin diğer hafif sulu reaktörlere göre üstünlüğü reaktör koru içinde doğrudan elde edilen buharın türbinlere gönderilmesidir. Bu nedenden dolayı BWR reaktörleri doğrudan çevrim ile çalışır. Basıncın PWR tipi reaktörlere göre daha düşük olması nedeniyle (7 MPa) basınç kabı et kalınlığı daha düşüktür.

BASINÇLI AĞIR SU REAKTÖRÜ (PHWR)

Basınçlı Ağır Su Reaktörleri, Basınçlı Su Reaktörleri ile benzer özellikler taşırlar. Ağır su reaktörü olarak adlandırılmalarının nedeni moderator ve soÄŸutucu için ağır su (D20) kullanmalarıdır. Bu tür reaktörlerin en yaygın olarak kullanıldığı ülke Kanada’dır. Kanadalılar son 40 yılda CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) adını verdikleri Kanada reaktörünü tasarlayıp geliÅŸtirerek Basınçlı Ağır Su Reaktörü teknolojisinde lider olmuÅŸtur.

CANDU reaktörlerinde yakıt olarak doğal uranyum kullanıldığı için zenginleştirme tesislerine ihtiyaç yoktur. Düşük basınçta moderator, ağır su (D20) ve yatay silindir şeklinde bir reaktör kabı vardır. Reaktör kabının içinde yatay şekilde geçen 380 adet yakıt kanalı bulunur. Yakıt kanalları doğal uranyum yakıt ve ağır su soğutucusundan oluşur. Yakıt kanalındaki yakıt elemanları basınç tüpü içindedir.

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image002.gif[/IMG]

Düzenleyen: Nurettin SAVRUK

Bilim Teknik Dergisi

HÄ°DROELEKTRÄ°K ENERJÄ°

M.Ö. 3000-2000 yıllarından itibaren Mezopotamya ve Çin ‘de, Mısır ve Anadolu ‘da suyun potansiyel ve kinetik enerjisinden faydalanılmıştır. Buhar makinasının icadına kadar bir cismi hareket ettirmek için kuvvet kaynağı olarak sadece su ve rüzgardan yararlanılıyordu. Rüzgarın süreksiz olması nedeniyle daha çok su kullanılmıştır.

Suyun Potansiyel ve kinetik enerjisinden faydalanılarak çeşitli tipte hidroelektrik tesisler yapılabilir. Çöllerde ve sıcak ülkelerde suyun buharlaşmasından faydalanmak suretiyle yapılan depresyon tesisleri, gel-git olayından ve dalga enerjisinden faydalanılarak yapılanlarla akarsular üzerinde kurulan sistemler buna örnek verilebilir.

Depresyon Tesisleri:

Denizden alçakta olan çöllerde veya denize kıyısı olan çok sıcak bölgelerde, yüzeyden suyun fazla buharlaşmasından yararlanmak amacıyla hidroelektrik tesisler yapılmaktadır. Çok sıcak bölgelerdeki uygun bir koy bir duvar aracılığıyla denizden ayrılır. Denizden ayrılan kısımda serbest su yüzeyinden buharlaşma sonucunda, buranın su seviyesi alçalır. İşte buharlaşan bu su miktarına eşit debi denizden alınarak hidroelektrik tesisi kurulur. Çöllerde yapılan tesislerde ise çölün denizden alçak olan kesimlerinde bir tünel veya bir kanal ile deniz suyu taşınır. Çukur bölgede yapılan tesiste ise enerji üretilir. Çukur bölgede oluşan göl kesimden bir yıl içinde buharlaşan su miktarına eşit olan debi, denizden alındığı takdirde zaman içinde gölde kararlı bir seviye oluşur. Çukur bölgede oluşan bu gölün hacminin deniz suyundaki tuzu depolayacak kadar büyük olması gerekir.

Kattara Hidroelektrik projesi. Kattara Çölü Kahire’nin 300 km batısında ve Akdeniz seviyesinden 135 m alçaktadır. 80 km uzunluÄŸundaki bir tünel vasıtasıyla 600 m³/sn lik deniz suyu bu çukura aktarılacaktır. OluÅŸacak göl ham biriken tuzları hem de 60 m yüksekliÄŸindeki 12000 m² ‘lik bir alana sahip gölün su yüzeyinde büyük miktarda buharlaÅŸma gerçekleÅŸecektir. Yılda yaklaşık 2 m kalınlığında su buharlaşırsa, yılda toplam 24 milyar m³ su buharlaÅŸacaktır. Bu da ~761 m³/s debiye karşılık gelir. Fırat nehrinin debisi ise 600 m³/s ‘dır. Tesisin kur gücü 1200MW’dır.

Gel-Git Hidroelektrik Tesisleri:

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image003.gif[/IMG] Açık denizlerde meydana gelen gel-git olaylarından yararlanılarak elektrik enerjisi elde edilmesi için kurulan tesislerdir. Yükselen deniz suyu bir nehrin aÄŸzında yapılan hazneye veya bir koya doldurulur. BoÅŸalırken, dolarken veya her iki yönde çalışan tek ve çift hazneli gelgit tesisleri yapılmıştır.24 saat içinde, 20 dk süre ile deniz iki defa kabarır ve alçalır. Dolarken ve boÅŸalırken aynı türbin çalışabilir. Ä°ki taraf arası seviye farkı 3 m olunca türbinler durur. Daha sonra tekrar kapaklar açılarak deniz suyu doldurulur ve boÅŸaltılır. Bu tesislerin en büyüğü Fransa’da Atlantik sahilindeki Rance Tesisidir. Bu santralde her biri 10 MW gücünde 24 türbin-jeneratör grubu vardır. Tesisi çalıştırmakta sadece bir kiÅŸi görevli çünkü tesis tam otomatik olarak çalışmaktadır. Tesis 240 MW gücündedir.

Dalga Enerjisinden faydalanılarak Enerji Üreten Tesisler:

Bu tesisler henüz uygulama safhasına girmemiştir. Dalga enerjisinin de süreksiz olması bu tür tesislerin faaliyet sürelerini kısıtlamaktadır. İstanbul Boğazındaki akıntıdan enerji elde edilmesi ise mümkün değildir. Çünkü tesisin masrafları üretimle elde edilecek gelirin çok çok üstündedir. Ayrıca tesisin kurulabilmesi için Boğaz deniz trafiğinekapatılacaktır ve üretilecek enerji ise yalnızca 5 MW gücündedir. Yani konvansiyonel olmayan tesisler ancak belirli yerlerde ve belirli koşullar altında yapılabilmektedir.

Akarsular üzerinde kurulan Hidroelektrik Tesisleri:

Bu tür santraller iki ana bölüme ayrılır. Barajsız hidroelektrik santralleri, nehir santralleri veya çevirmeli hidroelektrik tesisleri.

Barajsız Hidroelektrik Tesisleri:

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image004.gif[/IMG] Akarsu, bağlama adı verilen bir sistem aracılığıyla kabartılarak su alınır. Alınan su bir tünel veya kanal yardımıyla az bir eğim oluşturacak şekilde, aynı veya başka bir akarsu yatağına bırakılır. Böylece seviye farkından yararlanılarak elektrik enerjisi üretimi sağlanır. Akarsu üzerine yapılan bağlama yardımı ile kabartılan suyun, seviye farkından yararlanarak kanalsız veya tünelsiz tesisler yapılmaktadır.

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image005.jpg[/IMG]Barajlı Hidroelektrik Tesisler:

Akarsu üzerinde bir baraj yardımı ile mevsimlik, yıllık veya çok yıllık hazneler. Elektrik enerjisi üretimi ihtiyaca göre ayarlanarak, pik saatlerindeki ihtiyaç kolayca karşılanır. Yedek türbinler yardımı ile yağışlı yıllarda güvenilir enerjinin üstünde ikincil enerji üretilebilir ve haznenin büyüklüğüne göre kurak mevsimlerde enerji ihtiyacı karşılanabilir. Bunlara karşın barajların önemli olumsuzlukları da göz ardı edilmemelidir.

JEOTERMAL ENERJÄ°

Enerji Kaynakları:

Jeotermal enerji, Dünya’nın ısısından elde edilen enerjidir. Jeotermal sözcüğü “yer” ve “ısı” anlamındaki Yunanca iki sözcükten üretilmiÅŸtir. Bilim adamları, jeotermal ısının nereden kaynaklandığı, yeryüzüne çıkan buharın nasıl oluÅŸtuÄŸu konusunda henüz tam bir görüş birliÄŸine varamamışlardır. Büyük bir olasılıkla bu ısının kaynağı , Dünya’nın derinliklerindeki “magma” denilen erimiÅŸ kayaç kütlesidir. Yüzeye püsküren buharın da, yüzeyden derinlere sızan yaÄŸmur sularının, bu kızgın magma bölgesinde ısınıp buharlaÅŸması sonucunda oluÅŸtuÄŸu sanılmaktadır. Bu ısıdan, Ä°zlanda ve Japonya’da olduÄŸu gibi, evlerin, hamamların ve seraların ısıtılmasında yararlanılabilir. Elektrik enerjisi üretiminde de, üreteçlere baÄŸlı buhar türbinlerinin çalıştırılmasıyla jeotermal enerji kullanılabilir. Ä°lk jeotermal enerji santralı 1931’de Ä°talya’daki Larderello’da kuruldu. Bugün Larderello’da toplam gücü 351 megawatt olan ve yaklaşık 600 bin nüfuslu bir kenti beslemeye yeterli elektrik üreten bir grup jeotermal enerji santralı bulunmaktadır. Ucuz enerji çağından pahalı enerji çağına girilirken ömrü son derece kısıtlı olan konvansiyonel enerji kaynaklarının, bir gün tükenebileceÄŸi düşünülmeye baÅŸlanmıştır. Bu nedenle, hızla artan nüfusun ve teknolojik yeniliklere baÄŸlı olarak geliÅŸen endüstrinin enerji gereksinimi karşısında, konvansiyonel enerji kaynaklarının yerine geçebilecek, yeni ve yenilenebilir doÄŸal kaynakların araÅŸtırılması bulunması ve bunlardan yararlanılması konusunda büyük bir arayış içine girilmiÅŸtir.

Dünyadaki enerji kaynakları fosil kaynaklar (kömür, petrol, doğal gaz, turba, petrollü, kaynaklar, vb.) yenilenebilir kaynaklar (hidrolik, biyomas, jeotermal, jeotermal gradyan, rüzgar, gelgit, dalga, vb.) olmak üzere iki bölüme ayrılabilir. Bunlardan yenilenebilir kaynaklar grubuna giren Jeotermal Enerji, önemli bir

yer tutmaktadır.

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image006.gif[/IMG] YerkabuÄŸu içerisinde hazne kayalarda bulunan, basınç altında aşırı derecede ısınmış suların enerjisidir. Ekonomik önemdeki jeotermal enerji birikimi, 40°C-380°C arasında olup, 3000 m ‘ye kadar olan derinliklerde geçirimsiz kayalar altında yer alan, geçirimli hazne kayalar içinde bulunmaktadır. Åžimdiye kadar üç çeÅŸit jeotermal sistemin varlığı saptanmıştır. Sıcak kuru kaya sistemi, sıcak su sistemi, kuru bahar sistemi.

Sıcak Su Sistemi:

Yeryüzünde sıcak su esaslı sistemler Buhar esaslı sistemlerden yirmi kat daha fazla bulunmaktadır. Sıcak su sisteminde, derindeki hazne kaya içerisinde, basınç altında, yüksek sıcaklıkta, erimiş kimyasal madde bakımından çok zengin, farklı kimyasal özelliklerde sular bulunmaktadır. Bu tür sistemlerden sondajlarla yeryüzüne çıkarılan sıcak su+buhar karışımından elde edilen buhardan, elektrik enerjisi üretilmekte, buharı alınmış sıcak su ise atılmaktadır.

Kuru Bahar Sistemi:

Buhar esaslı sistemler , sıcak su esaslı sistemlerden farklı olarak, çok fazla ısınmış, nem miktarı az, sıcaklığı yüksek buhar üretirler. Bu tür buhar, bir enerji kaynağı olarak doğrudan jeotermal santrallere gönderilerek elektrik enerjisine dönüştürülmektedir. Bir bakıma bunlar yerkabuğu üzerinde oluşmuş, birer doğal nükleer reaktör olarak kabul edilir.

Sıcak kuru kaya sistemleri:

Yerküremizde özellikle genç, aktif volkanik kuşaklarda, jeotermal gradyanın çok yüksek olduğu bölgelerde, sıcak su içermeyen yüksek sıcaklığa sahip kızgın, kuru kayalar bulunmaktadır. Bu tür sistemlere soğuk su basılarak sıcak su+ buhar karışımı alınmakta ve bu, bir enerji kaynağı olarak kullanılmaktadır.

RÃœZGAR ENERJÄ°SÄ°

İnsanlar binlerce yıldır rüzgardan bir enerji kaynağı olarak yararlanmaktadır. Buna ilişkin olarak ilk akla gelen yelkenli teknedir. Rüzgar enerjisini kullanabilmenin üç yolu vardır: Yelkenli teknelerde olduğu gibi doğrudan hareketi sağlamak; yel değirmenlerinde olduğu gibi herhangi bir makinenin kanatlarını döndürmek; elektrik üreteçlerine bağlı türbinleri çalıştırmak. Rüzgar enerjisi, dönüşüme uğramış güneş enerjisidir. Güneş enerjisinin kayaları, denizleri ve atmosferi her yerde özdeş ısıtmaması nedeniyle oluşan sıcaklık ve basınç farkları rüzgarı oluşturmaktadır. Rüzgar bit merkez çevresinde dolandıklarında, santrifüj kuvveti etkisinde kaldıkları gibi, yeryüzü ve hava arasındaki sürtünme kuvvetinden de etkilenirler. Kutuplar ve ekvator arasındaki sürekli hava akımlarına göre, enerji üretimi açısından denizler, karalar, dağlar ve vadiler arasındaki yerel rüzgarlar daha önemlidir.

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image007.jpg[/IMG] Rüzgar enerjisi bol ve serbest halde bulunan güvenilir ve sürekli bir enerji kaynağıdır. Havanın öz kütlesi az olduğundan, rüzgardan sağlanacak enerjinin miktarı hızına bağlıdır. Rüzgarın hızı yükseklikle, gücü ise, hızının küpü ile orantılı olarak artar. Sağlayacağı enerji, gücüne ve estiği süreye bağlıdır.

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Yasin/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image008.gif[/IMG]

1982-92 döneminde Kaliforniya’ da yaklaşık 150.000 rüzgar türbini kurulmuÅŸtur. Buralardan yaklaşık 3.000.000.000 kWh elektrik üretilmiÅŸ ve Kaliforniya’ nın elektrik tüketiminin %1,2 buralardan saÄŸlanmıştır. Dünyanın en büyük rüzgar çiftliÄŸi ABD’ de kurulan Altamount Pass rüzgar tesisidir. 8160 Hektar alan kaplayan bu çiftlik 3500 adet 100 kW’lık ve 40 adet 300-450 kW’lık türbin bulunmaktadır.

Rüzgar Teknolojisi:

Rüzgar enerjisi Betz teoremine göre max. %59,3 etkinlikle mekanik enerjiye

çevrilebilir. Bu çevirim, rüzgar türbini tarafından yapılır. Böyle bir türbin; çevredeki engellerin rüzgarı kesemeyecek kadar yükseklikte bir kule üzerinde bulunması gerekir. ayrıca yüksek verim için geniş düzlükler bu enerji kaynakları için daha elverişlidir. Türbinin rüzgara göre yönlendirilmesi, rotor ekseni ile rüzgar doğrultusu arasındaki yav açısını kontrol eden mekanizmayla sağlanır. Elektrik üretimini sağlayan bu makineye rüzgar jeneratörü adı verilir.

2000 yılı için kurulu kapasite hedefi ABD’ de 2800 MW, Avrupa’da 6340 MW, Asya’da 3817 MW civarında olması tahmin edilmektedir. Avrupa’da en büyük kapasite Almanya’da 2000 MW olacak ve onu 1000 MW’la Danimarka takip edecektir. Gelecek 10 yıl sonunda ABD elektrik üretiminin %20 sini rüzgar enerjisinden saÄŸlamayı hedeflemiÅŸtir. Avrupa BirliÄŸi ise 2005 yılında elektrik enerjisinin %20 sini yenilenebilir. kaynaklardan saÄŸlamayı hedeflemektedir. Bu projede ise rüzgar enerjisine %2′ lik bir pay ayrılmıştır.

Elektrik; çağdaş yaşamın en yaygın enerji kaynaklarından birisidir. Kullanıldığı alanlar neredeyse sayılamayacak kadar çoktur. Evlerimizi aydınlatmak, elektrikli süpürge, çamaşır makinesi gibi ev aletlerini çalıştırmak, hatta yemek pişirmek ve odalarımızı ısıtmak için elektrik enerjisinden yararlanırız. Fabrika ve işyerlerindeki makineler ile bilgisayarlar ve telefon, radyo, televizyon yayınları gibi iletişim sistemleri için gerekli olan enerji gene elektrikten sağlanır. Motorlu taşıtlardaki ateşleme sistemini ve marş motorunu besleyen enerji kaynağı da akümülatörlerde depolanmış olan elektriktir. Öte yandan elektrikli trenler ve otomobiller gibi bazı taşıtlar tümüyle elektrik enerjisiyle yol alır. Kısacası elektrik insanların en vazgeçilmez ihtiyacı haline gelmiştir ve yaşantımızda son derece önemli bir rol oynar.

HAZIRLAYAN: Aysun AKBAY

AN ADDRESS

_Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College,

Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838_

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the

breath of life. The grassurst, the meadow is spotted with fire and

gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet

with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.

Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through

the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays.

Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The

cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes

again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never

displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt

to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old

bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation.

One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which

our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every

property it gives to every faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in

its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its

forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in

the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well

worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The

planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders

of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse

the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great

world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What

am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity

new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws,

which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but

not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so

unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire

forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the

human spirit in all ages.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man

when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is

instructed in what is above him. He learns that his being is without

bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now

lies in evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his own,

though he has not realized it yet. _He ought_. He knows the sense

of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render

account of it. When in innocency, or when by intellectual

perception, he attains to say, — `I love the Right; Truth is

beautiful within and without, forevermore. Virtue, I am thine: save

me: use me: thee will I serve, day and night, in great, in small,

that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;’ — then is the end of the

creation answered, and God is well pleased.

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the

presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game

of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles

that astonish. The child amidst his baubles, is learning the action

of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human

life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These

laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on

paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought;

yet we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s

actions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which are all globed

into every virtuous act and thought, — in speech, we must sever, and

describe or suggest by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet,

as this sentiment is the essence of all religion, let me guide your

eye to the precise objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of

some of those classes of facts in which this element is conspicuous.

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the

perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.

They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.

Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are

instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled.

He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who

puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart

just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of

God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a

man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of

acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute

goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a

step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere,

righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a

harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the

senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made

the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil

to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms

never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least

admixture of a lie, — for example, the taint of vanity, the least

attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance, — will

instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature

and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the

truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots

of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you

witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to

the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we

associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by

affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into

heaven, into hell.

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed,

that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will,

of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of

the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that

will, is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so,

and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not

absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil

is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So

much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things

proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love,

justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean

receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All

things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with

it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength

of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves

himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote

channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute

badness is absolute death.

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a

sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our

highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command.

It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh

and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the

hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the

universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought

may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity;

but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is

the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds,

time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of

man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows

itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks

to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages

_from another_, — by showing the fountain of all good to be in

himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the

deeps of Reason. When he says, "I ought;" when love warms him; when

he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep

melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can

worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind

this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is

never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and

successively creates all forms of worship. The principle of

veneration never dies out. Man fallen into superstition, into

sensuality, is never quite without the visions of the moral

sentiment. In like manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are

sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. The expressions

of this sentiment affect us more than all other compositions. The

sentences of the oldest time, which ejaculate this piety, are still

fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds

of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine,

where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in

India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius, its

divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found

agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind,

whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of

this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and

day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it

is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition.

It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not

instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.

What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on

his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is the presence of

degradation. As is the flood so is the ebb. Let this faith depart,

and the very words it spake, and the things it made, become false and

hurtful. Then falls the church, the state, art, letters, life. The

doctrine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and

dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a

nuisance. And because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be

got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the

divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all

the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost;

the base doctrine of the majority of voices, usurps the place of the

doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the ideal life,

the holy life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the

belief, nor in the aspiration of society; but, when suggested, seem

ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful, as soon as the high ends of

being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only

attend to what addresses the senses.

These general views, which, whilst they are general, none will

contest, find abundant illustration in the history of religion, and

especially in the history of the Christian church. In that, all of

us have had our birth and nurture. The truth contained in that, you,

my young friends, are now setting forth to teach. As the Cultus, or

established worship of the civilized world, it has great historical

interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have been the

consolation of humanity, you need not that I should speak. I shall

endeavor to discharge my duty to you, on this occasion, by pointing

out two errors in its administration, which daily appear more gross

from the point of view we have just now taken.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw

with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,

ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.

Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was

true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in

man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world.

He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through

me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see

thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what a distortion

did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the

following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear

to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this

high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, `This was

Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was

a man.’ The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric,

have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on

his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as

the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of

miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man

doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character

ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches,

gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the

blowing clover and the falling rain.

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit

tenderness at postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and

the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus

was he a true man. Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he

would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart,

and life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I think, the only

soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man.

1. In this point of view we become very sensible of the first

defect of historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has

fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate

religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it

is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal,

the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious

exaggeration about the _person_ of Jesus. The soul knows no persons.

It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe,

and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by

this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear

have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner

in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which were once

sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official

titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All who hear me,

feel, that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America,

is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble

heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demigod, as the

Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the

injurious impositions of our early catachetical instruction, and even

honesty and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear

the Christian name. One would rather be

`A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,’

than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature,

and finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even

virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man

even. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live

after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the

infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely

forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ’s nature; you

must accept our interpretations; and take his portrait as the vulgar

draw it.

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is

excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That

which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me,

makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for

my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over

me, and I shall decease forever.

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect

of my strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which flash across

my mind, are not mine, but God’s; that they had the like, and were

not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble

provocations go out from them, inviting me to resist evil; to subdue

the world; and to Be. And thus by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves

us, and thus only. To aim to convert a man by miracles, is a

profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now,

as always, to be made, by the reception of beautiful sentiments. It

is true that a great and rich soul, like his, falling among the

simple, does so preponderate, that, as his did, it names the world.

The world seems to them to exist for him, and they have not yet drunk

so deeply of his sense, as to see that only by coming again to

themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow forevermore. It

is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to enable

me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when all men will

see, that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting,

overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a

goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to

be and to grow.

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less

flagrant to Jesus, than to the souls which it profanes. The

preachers do not see that they make his gospel not glad, and shear

him of the locks of beauty and the attributes of heaven. When I see

a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington; when I see among my

contemporaries, a true orator, an upright judge, a dear friend; when

I vibrate to the melody and fancy of a poem; I see beauty that is to

be desired. And so lovely, and with yet more entire consent of my

human being, sounds in my ear the severe music of the bards that have

sung of the true God in all ages. Now do not degrade the life and

dialogues of Christ out of the circle of this charm, by insulation

and peculiarity. Let them lie as they befel, alive and warm, part of

human life, and of the landscape, and of the cheerful day.

2. The second defect of the traditionary and limited way of

using the mind of Christ is a consequence of the first; this, namely;

that the Moral Nature, that Law of laws, whose revelations introduce

greatness, — yea, God himself, into the open soul, is not explored

as the fountain of the established teaching in society. Men have

come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done,

as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and

the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate

voice.

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with

the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to

others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the

thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer.

Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy:

sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone;

sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s worship is

builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and

most permanent, in words.

The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or

poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the

condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only

can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not

any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can

create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the

soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can

teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they

shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak

as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as

interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.

To this holy office, you propose to devote yourselves. I wish

you may feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. The office is

the first in the world. It is of that reality, that it cannot suffer

the deduction of any falsehood. And it is my duty to say to you,

that the need was never greater of new revelation than now. From the

views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad conviction,

which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and

now almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached. The

Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this

occasion, any complaisance would be criminal, which told you, whose

hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the

faith of Christ is preached.

It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful

men against the famine of our churches; this moaning of the heart

because it is bereaved of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur,

that come alone out of the culture of the moral nature; should be

heard through the sleep of indolence, and over the din of routine.

This great and perpetual office of the preacher is not discharged.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to

the duties of life. In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell

me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth

and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever

the soul of God? Where now sounds the persuasion, that by its very

melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven?

Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to leave all

and follow, — father and mother, house and land, wife and child?

Where shall I hear these august laws of moral being so pronounced, as

to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost

action and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should be

its power to charm and command the soul, as the laws of nature

control the activity of the hands, — so commanding that we find

pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light

of rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing

bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath has

lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is

done; we can make, we do make, even sitting in our pews, a far

better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves.

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the

worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the

prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are

fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a

solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted

me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where

they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the

afternoon. A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was

real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast

in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the

beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one

word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love,

had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived

and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his

profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned.

Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his

doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and

bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his

head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there

not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived

at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true

preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his

life, — life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad

preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world

he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a

freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or

any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that the people

should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very

unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor. It

shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment,

that can lend a faint tint of light to dulness and ignorance, coming

in its name and place. The good hearer is sure he has been touched

sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word

that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he comforts

himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours, and so

they clatter and echo unchallenged.

I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not

always quite in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that draws

supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment. There is

poetic truth concealed in all the common-places of prayer and of

sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they may be wisely heard; for,

each is some select expression that broke out in a moment of piety

from some stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency made it

remembered. The prayers and even the dogmas of our church, are like

the zodiac of Denderah, and the astronomical monuments of the

Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and

business of the people. They mark the height to which the waters

once rose. But this docility is a check upon the mischief from the

good and devout. In a large portion of the community, the religious

service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. We need not

chide the negligent servant. We are struck with pity, rather, at the

swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man that is

called to stand in the pulpit, and _not_ give bread of life.

Everything that befalls, accuses him. Would he ask contributions for

the missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly his face is suffused

with shame, to propose to his parish, that they should send money a

hundred or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as they have

at home, and would do well to go the hundred or the thousand miles to

escape. Would he urge people to a godly way of living; — and can he

ask a fellow-creature to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they

all know what is the poor uttermost they can hope for therein? Will

he invite them privately to the Lord’s Supper? He dares not. If no

heart warm this rite, the hollow, dry, creaking formality is too

plain, than that he can face a man of wit and energy, and put the

invitation without terror. In the street, what has he to say to the

bold village blasphemer? The village blasphemer sees fear in the

face, form, and gait of the minister.

Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of

the claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict

conscience of numbers of the clergy. What life the public worship

retains, it owes to the scattered company of pious men, who minister

here and there in the churches, and who, sometimes accepting with too

great tenderness the tenet of the elders, have not accepted from

others, but from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and

so still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of character.

Moreover, the exceptions are not so much to be found in a few eminent

preachers, as in the better hours, the truer inspirations of all, –

nay, in the sincere moments of every man. But with whatever

exception, it is still true, that tradition characterizes the

preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory, and not

out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is

necessary and eternal; that thus, historical Christianity destroys

the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the

moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the resources of

astonishment and power. What a cruel injustice it is to that Law,

the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make thought dear and

rich; that Law whose fatal sureness the astronomical orbits poorly

emulate, that it is travestied and depreciated, that it is behooted

and behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The

pulpit in losing sight of this Law, loses its reason, and gropes

after it knows not what. And for want of this culture, the soul of

the community is sick and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a

stern, high, stoical, Christian discipline, to make it know itself

and the divinity that speaks through it. Now man is ashamed of

himself; he skulks and sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, to

be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to be

wise and good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his

kind.

Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of

the intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in

names and persons. The Puritans in England and America, found in the

Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome,

scope for their austere piety, and their longings for civil freedom.

But their creed is passing away, and none arises in its room. I

think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our

churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on

men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the

good, and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half

parishes are _signing off_, — to use the local term. It is already

beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the

religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the

Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, "On Sundays, it seems wicked to

go to church." And the motive, that holds the best there, is now only

a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere circumstance, that the

best and the worst men in the parish, the poor and the rich, the

learned and the ignorant, young and old, should meet one day as

fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul, — has

come to be a paramount motive for going thither.

My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the causes of

a decaying church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater calamity

can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go

to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the

market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of

youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without

honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention

them.

And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding

days can be done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground

of our complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the Church with

the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever

a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a

man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all

religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He

is seen amid miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and

nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the

age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of

degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man;

indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It

is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that

He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity, — a faith like

Christ’s in the infinitude of man, — is lost. None believeth in the

soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me!

no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet,

avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret;

they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their

soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the

whole world. See how nations and races flit by on the sea of time,

and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk, and one good

soul shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster,

reverend forever. None assayeth the stern ambition to be the Self of

the nation, and of nature, but each would be an easy secondary to

some Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man.

Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take

secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s,

and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts,

and if, as now, for centuries, — the chasm yawns to that breadth,

that men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the

good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men,

and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you

shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins,

Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also

am a man.’ Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms

himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was

natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator,

something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty,

to come short of another man’s.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you

all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to

it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and

money, are nothing to you, — are not bandages over your eyes, that

you cannot see, — but live with the privilege of the immeasurable

mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each

family in your parish connection, — when you meet one of these men

or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let

their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled

instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their

doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you

have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more

confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our

soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all

men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of

life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the

vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few

interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin,

with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought;

that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly

were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent,

you shall be followed with their love as by an angel.

And, to this end, let us not aim at common degrees of merit.

Can we not leave, to such as love it, the virtue that glitters for

the commendation of society, and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes

of absolute ability and worth? We easily come up to the standard of

goodness in society. Society’s praise can be cheaply secured, and

almost all men are content with those easy merits; but the instant

effect of conversing with God, will be, to put them away. There are

persons who are not actors, not speakers, but influences; persons too

great for fame, for display; who disdain eloquence; to whom all we

call art and artist, seems too nearly allied to show and by-ends, to

the exaggeration of the finite and selfish, and loss of the

universal. The orators, the poets, the commanders encroach on us

only as fair women do, by our allowance and homage. Slight them by

preoccupation of mind, slight them, as you can well afford to do, by

high and universal aims, and they instantly feel that you have right,

and that it is in lower places that they must shine. They also feel

your right; for they with you are open to the influx of the

all-knowing Spirit, which annihilates before its broad noon the

little shades and gradations of intelligence in the compositions we

call wiser and wisest.

In such high communion, let us study the grand strokes of

rectitude: a bold benevolence, an independence of friends, so that

not the unjust wishes of those who love us, shall impair our freedom,

but we shall resist for truth’s sake the freest flow of kindness, and

appeal to sympathies far in advance; and, — what is the highest form

in which we know this beautiful element, — a certain solidity of

merit, that has nothing to do with opinion, and which is so

essentially and manifestly virtue, that it is taken for granted, that

the right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and

nobody thinks of commending it. You would compliment a coxcomb doing

a good act, but you would not praise an angel. The silence that

accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest

applause. Such souls, when they appear, are the Imperial Guard of

Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One needs

not praise their courage, — they are the heart and soul of nature.

O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn.

There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to whom a

crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority, — demanding not

the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension,

immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice, — comes graceful and

beloved as a bride. Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not

himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead

began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination,

and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged

crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out

of question, that the angel is shown. But these are heights that we

can scarce remember and look up to, without contrition and shame.

Let us thank God that such things exist.

And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh

quenched fire on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are

manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all

attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms,

seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its

own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new

worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day,

pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder.

Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the

forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find

they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is,

first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul. A whole popedom

of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify. Two

inestimable advantages Christianity has given us; first; the Sabbath,

the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns welcome alike into

the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into

prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity

of spiritual being. Let it stand forevermore, a temple, which new

love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its first

splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of preaching, –

the speech of man to men, — essentially the most flexible of all

organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits,

in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of

men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your

life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts

of men with new hope and new revelation?

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished

the souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and

through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West

also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences,

that have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical

integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the

intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far

those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall

see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the

mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation

with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is

one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

_An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at

Cambridge, August 31, 1837_

Mr. President and Gentlemen,

I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our

anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do

not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of

histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for

parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the

advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British and

European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly

sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy

to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of

an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when

it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard

intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and

fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better

than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our

long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.

The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be

fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise,

that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that

poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the

constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers

announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the

nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, — the

AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year, we come up hither to read one more

chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and

events have thrown on his character, and his hopes.

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity,

convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning,

divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just

as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that

there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or

through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find

the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer,

but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and

producer, and soldier. In the _divided_ or social state, these

functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do

his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The

fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must

sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other

laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of

power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely

subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot

be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have

suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking

monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a

man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The

planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom

cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his

bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer,

instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an

ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft,

and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the

attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope

of a ship.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated

intellect. In the right state, he is, _Man Thinking_. In the

degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a

mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office

is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her

monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites.

Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for

the student’s behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only

true master? But the old oracle said, `All things have two handles:

beware of the wrong one.’ In life, too often, the scholar errs with

mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school,

and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the

influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and,

after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the

grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and

beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most

engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to

him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the

inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power

returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose

beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so

boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system

shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without

circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to

render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To

the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and

by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then

three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own

unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing

anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary

and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently

learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant

accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification

but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not

foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The

astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human

mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds

proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is

nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote

parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one

after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to

their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last

fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day,

is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and

one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what

is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? — A thought too

bold, — a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have

revealed the law of more earthly natures, — when he has learned to

worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is,

is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look

forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He

shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it

part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the

beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.

Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much

of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not

yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and

the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar,

is, the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature,

of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best

type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the

truth, — learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, — by

considering their value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age

received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new

arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him,

life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived

actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him,

business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is

quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now

flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind

from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of

transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of

the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the

product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any

means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely

exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or

write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all

respects, to a remote posterity, as to cotemporaries, or rather to

the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or

rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an

older period will not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which

attaches to the act of creation, — the act of thought, — is

transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a

divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a

just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is

perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue.

Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The

sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the

incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received

this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged.

Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not

by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set

out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to

accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given,

forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in

libraries, when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence,

the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to

nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third

Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of

readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the

worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means

go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better

never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my

own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing

in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is

entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost

all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees

absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is

genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound

estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book,

the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop

with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let

us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not

forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his

forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever

talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity

is not his; — cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.

There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative

words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or

authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of

good and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it

receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of

light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a

fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of

genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me

witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two

hundred years.

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly

subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.

Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God

directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s

transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness

come, as come they must, — when the sun is hid, and the stars

withdraw their shining, — we repair to the lamps which were kindled

by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn

is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig

tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from

the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature

wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great

English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most

modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused

by the abstraction of all _time_ from their verses. There is some

awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in

some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies

close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and

said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical

doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some

preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and

some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact

observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub

they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any

exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that,

as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled

grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any

knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no

other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that

it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to

read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth

of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is

then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is

braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read

becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly

significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision

is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record,

perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read,

in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, — only the

authentic utterances of the oracle; — all the rest he rejects, were

it never so many times Plato’s and Shakspeare’s.

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to

a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious

reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,

– to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they

aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray

of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated

fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge

are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns,

and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never

countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and

our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst

they grow richer every year.

III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should

be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or

public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical

men’ sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or

_see_, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy,

– who are always, more universally than any other class, the

scholars of their day, — are addressed as women; that the rough,

spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing

and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and,

indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is

true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is

with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is

not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst

the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even

see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar

without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition

through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is

action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know

whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

The world, — this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide

around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and

make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding

tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the

ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the

dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its

fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So

much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness

have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my

dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his

nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It

is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity,

exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom. The

true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss

of power.

It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her

splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience

is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into

satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.

The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now

matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the

air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which we

now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our

affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it,

than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The

new deed is yet a part of life, — remains for a time immersed in our

unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself

from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind.

Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on

incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its

origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of

antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot

shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the

selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom.

So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall

not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us

by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy,

school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the

love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once

filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative,

profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also

soar and sing.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit

actions, has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself

out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot,

there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single

faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,

who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses,

and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the

mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the

last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have

written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence,

sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or

ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous

of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country

labors; in town, — in the insight into trades and manufactures; in

frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the

one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to

illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any

speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the

splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from

whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This

is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the

language which the field and the work-yard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better

than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of

Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring

of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea;

in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained

in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of

Polarity, — these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as

Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of

spirit.

The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the

other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy

no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books

are a weariness, — he has always the resource _to live_. Character

is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the

functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will

be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or

medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this

elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a

partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let

the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those `far from fame,’

who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution

in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured

by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that the

scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the

sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost

in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom

systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful

giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled

savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last

Alfred and Shakspeare.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of

the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue

yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned

hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to

work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the

sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments

and modes of action.

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by

books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be

comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to

raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He

plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed

and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars

with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and

useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory,

cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as

yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months,

sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must

relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his

preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in

popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him

aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living

for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, — how often! poverty and

solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road,

accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he

takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the

self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss

of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the

self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in

which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated

society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find

consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He

is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes

and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye.

He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that

retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic

sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions

of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies,

in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of

actions, — these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new

verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men

and events of to-day, — this he shall hear and promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all

confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and

he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest

appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some

ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and

cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular

up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the

poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the

controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun,

though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the

crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let

him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of

neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, — happy enough,

if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something

truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is

sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then

learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has

descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has

mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of

all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his

own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his

spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded

that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The

orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, –

his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, — until he finds

that he is the complement of his hearers; — that they drink his

words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he

dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he

finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally

true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels,

This is my music; this is myself.

In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should

the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of

freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own

constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his

very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance.

It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise

from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a

protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of

his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like

an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and

turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the

danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn

and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature,

inspect its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, — which lies

no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect

comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands

meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on

superior. The world is his, who can see through its pretension.

What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you

behold, is there only by sufferance, — by your sufferance. See it

to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It is a

mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world

was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in

the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we

bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt

themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any

thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his

signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who

can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give

the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and

persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter,

that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have

desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the

harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald

sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany the most

alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman;

Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who

works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of

men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped

waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,

– darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the

feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have already

shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is

one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has

almost lost the light, that can lead him back to his prerogatives.

Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of

to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called `the mass’ and `the herd.’

In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, — one

or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest

behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, –

ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its

full stature. What a testimony, — full of grandeur, full of pity,

is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the

poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and

the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their

acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content

to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that

justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the

dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun

themselves in the great man’s light, and feel it to be their own

element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves

upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of

blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and

conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and

power because it is as good as money, — the "spoils," so called, "of

office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in

their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they

shall quit the false good, and leap to the true, and leave

governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by

the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main

enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding

of a man. Here are the materials strown along the ground. The

private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, — more

formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to

its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed,

comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher,

each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what

one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more

than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but

saying, that we have come up with the point of view which the

universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that

man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another; we drain all

cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a

better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed

us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall

set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire.

It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna,

lightens the capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius,

illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light

which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates

all men.

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the

Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say, of

nearer reference to the time and to this country.

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas

which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for

marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the

Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of

the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do

not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each

individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth,

romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a

revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that

needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with

second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know

whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with

our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness, –

"Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought."

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied.

Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God,

and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary

class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves

not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming

state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned

that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born

in, — is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new

stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of

all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories

of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new

era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know

what to do with it.

I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming

days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through

philosophy and science, through church and state.

One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which

effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the

state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.

Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common,

was explored and poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden

under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves

for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer

than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of

the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household

life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a

sign, — is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made

active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.

I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in

Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I

embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar,

the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique

and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The

meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street;

the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of

the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me

the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as

always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let

me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it

instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger,

referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;

– and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room,

but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but

one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest

trench.

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper,

and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea

they have differently followed and with various success. In contrast

with their writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks

cold and pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to

find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things

remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A

man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the

vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the

most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the

genius of the ancients.

There is one man of genius, who has done much for this

philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly

estimated; — I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of

men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored

to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity

of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have difficulty, which

no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection

between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the

emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible

world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret

the lower parts of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies

moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical

parables a theory of isanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful

things.

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous

political movement, is, the new importance given to the single

person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, — to

surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall

feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign

state with a sovereign state; — tends to true union as well as

greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man

in God’s wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man."

Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who

must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the

contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be

an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than

another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing,

the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know

not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole

of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr.

President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of

man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to

the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses

of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected

to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the

air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent,

complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this

country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no

work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the

fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the

mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth

below not in unison with these, — but are hindered from action by

the disgust which the principles on which business is managed

inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, — some of them

suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands

of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career,

do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on

his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to

him. Patience, — patience; — with the shades of all the good and

great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own

infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of

principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of

the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an

unit; — not to be reckoned one character; — not to yield that

peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned

in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the

section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted

geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and

friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our

own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own

minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for

doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of

man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A

nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes

himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

.