Essays, First Series

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The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish
to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he
loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It
seems not worth his while to be solemn and denounce with
bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man
scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without
railing or precision his living is natural and poetic.
John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of
wine,--"It is a noble, generous liquor and we should be
humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was
made before it." Better still is the temperance of King
David, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water
which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at
the peril of their lives.

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword
after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of
Euripides,--"O Virtue! I have followed thee through
life, and I find thee at last but a shade." I doubt
not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic
soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It
does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The
essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is
enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need
plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class,
is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a
height to which common duty can very well attain, to
suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls
set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a rate that
they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the
show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness.
Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do himself
so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though
he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears
it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates's condemnation
of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum,
during his life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the
scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's
"Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his
company,--

Jul. Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.
Master. Very likely,
'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom
and glow of a perfect health. The great will not
condescend to take any thing seriously; all must be as
gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building
of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands
of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs
of this world behind them, and play their own game in
innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such
would appear, could we see the human race assembled in
vision, like little children frolicking together, though
to the eyes of mankind at large they wear a stately and
solemn garb of works and influences.

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power
of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book
under his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is
the main fact to our purpose. All these great and
transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that
we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us
find room for this great guest in our small houses. The
first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our
superstitious associations with places and times, with
number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman,
Asia and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart
is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in
any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River
and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves
names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are;
and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that
here is best. See to it only that thyself is here, and art
and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the Supreme
Being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou
sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does not
seem to us to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian
sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys were
handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and London
streets for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his
climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the
beloved element of all delicate spirits. That country is
the fairest which is inhabited by the noblest minds. The
pictures which fill the imagination in reading the actions
of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden,
teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the
depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal
or national splendor, and act on principles that should
interest man and nature in the length of our days.

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men
who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life
was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien,
when we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion,
we admire their superiority; they seem to throw contempt
on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone
of a youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But
they enter an active profession and the forming Colossus
shrinks to the common size of man. The magic they used
was the ideal tendencies, which always make the Actual
ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the
moment they put their horses of the sun to plough in its
furrow. They found no example and no companion, and their
heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in their
first aspirations is yet true; and a better valor and a
purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why
should a woman liken herself to any historical woman,
and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or
the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation
do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,
none can,--certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and
unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the
happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with
erect soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of
each new experience, search in turn all the objects that
solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
charm of her new-born being, which is the kindling of a
new dawn in the recesses of space. The fair girl who
repels interference by a decided and proud choice of
influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and lofty,
inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness.
The silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike
sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God
the seas. Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is
cheered and refined by the vision.

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All
men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of
generosity. But when you have chosen your part, abide
by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself
with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor
the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to
expect the sympathy of people in those actions whose
excellence is that they outrun sympathy and appeal to
a tardy justice. If you would serve your brother,
because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take
back your words when you find that prudent people do
not commend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate
yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant
and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high
counsel that I once heard given to a young person,--"Always
do what you are afraid to do." A simple manly character
need never make an apology, but should regard its past
action with the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted that
the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his
dissuasion from the battle.

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot
find consolation in the thought--this is a part of my
constitution, part of my relation and office to my
fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that I
should never appear to disadvantage, never make a
ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity
as well as of our money. Greatness once and for ever
has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not
because we wish to be praised for them, not because we
think they have great merit, but for our justification.
It is a capital blunder; as you discover when another
man recites his charities.

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live
with some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of
generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common
good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and
in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with
the great multitude of suffering men. And not only need
we breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the penalties
of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, of unpopularity,--but
it behooves the wise man to look with a bold eye into
those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to
familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with
sounds of execration, and the vision of violent death.

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the
day never shines in which this element may not work. The
circumstances of man, we say, are historically somewhat
better in this country and at this hour than perhaps ever
before. More freedom exists for culture. It will not now
run against an axe at the first step out of the beaten
track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find
crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions
and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds.
It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his
breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free
speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to
live.

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk,
but after the counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too
much association, let him go home much, and stablish
himself in those courses he approves. The unremitting
retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties
is hardening the character to that temper which will work
with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold.
Whatever outrages have happened to men may befall a man
again; and very easily in a republic, if there appear any
signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar
and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring
home to his mind and with what sweetness of temper he can,
and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving
such penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper
and a sufficient number of his neighbors to pronounce his
opinions incendiary.

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most
susceptible heart to see how quick a bound Nature has
set to the utmost infliction of malice. We rapidly
approach a brink over which no enemy can follow us:--

"Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave."

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the
hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does
not envy those who have seen safely to an end their
manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our
politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is
long already wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe;
that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity
not yet subjugated in him? Who does not sometimes envy
the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the
tumults of the natural world, and await with curious
complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with
finite nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated
sooner than treacherous has already made death impossible,
and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the deeps of
absolute and inextinguishable being.

THE OVER-SOUL.

"BUT souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity."
Henry More.

Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day 've been tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.

IX.
THE OVER-SOUL.

THERE is a difference between one and another hour of
life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith
comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a
depth in those brief moments which constrains us to
ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
For this reason the argument which is always forthcoming
to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man,
namely the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and
vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope.
He must explain this hope. We grant that human life is mean,
but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground
of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is
the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine
innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why
do men feel that the natural history of man has never been
written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said
of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics
worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not
searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its
experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis,
a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose
source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from
we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no
prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very
next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a
higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch
that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not,
pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I
am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator
of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and
put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some
alien energy the visions come.

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the
present, and the only prophet of that which must be,
is that great nature in which we rest as the earth
lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity,
that Over-soul, within which every man's particular
being is contained and made one with all other; that
common heart of which all sincere conversation is the
worship, to which all right action is submission; that
overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and
talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he
is, and to speak from his character and not from his
tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our
thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power
and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts,
in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the
whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which
every part and particle is equally related; the eternal
ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-
sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of
seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle,
the subject and the object, are one. We see the world
piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the
tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts,
is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the
horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our
better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy
which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith.
Every man's words who speaks from that life must sound
vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on
their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not
carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only
itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech
shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising
of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I
may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity
and to report what hints I have collected of the
transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries,
in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the
instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves
in masquerade,--the droll disguises only magnifying and
enhancing a real element and forcing it on our distinct
notice,--we shall catch many hints that will broaden and
lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes
to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates
and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the
power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses
these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light;
is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the
intellect and the will; is the background of our being,
in which they lie,--an immensity not possessed and that
cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light
shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we
are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of
a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we
commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting
man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but
misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul,
whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his
action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through
his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his
will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it
is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it
would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins
when the individual would be something of himself. All reform
aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way
through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible.
Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too
subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable; but we know
that it pervades and contains us. We know that all
spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, "God
comes to see us without bell;" that is, as there is no
screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite
heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where
man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The
walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps
of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we
see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man
ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the
moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made
known by its independency of those limitations which
circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes
all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience.
In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence
of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that
degree that the walls of time and space have come to look
real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these
limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and
space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.
The spirit sports with time,--

"Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity."

We are often made to feel that there is another youth
and age than that which is measured from the year of
our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young,
and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the
universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that
contemplation with the feeling that it rather belongs
to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of the
intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the
conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a
strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are
refreshed; or produce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare,
or remind us of their names, and instantly we come into
a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine thought
reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself
present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ
less effective now than it was when first his mouth
was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my
thought has nothing to do with time. And so always the
soul's scale is one, the scale of the senses and the
understanding is another. Before the revelations of the
soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In common
speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually
refer the immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere.
And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near, that
the Millennium approaches, that a day of certain political,
moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when we
mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we
contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is
permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now
esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves like
ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind shall
blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures,
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution
past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society,
and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards,
creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her.
She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties
nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events
is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of
its progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not
made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion
in a straight line, but rather by ascension of state,
such as can be represented by metamorphosis,--from the
egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths
of genius are of a certain total character, that does
not advance the elect individual first over John, then
Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of
discovered inferiority,--but by every throe of growth
the man expands there where he works, passing, at each
pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each divine
impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and
finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and
expires its air. It converses with truths that have always
been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer
sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with persons in the house.

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple
rise as by specific levity not into a particular virtue,
but into the region of all the virtues. They are in the
spirit which contains them all. The soul requires purity,
but purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is
not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better;
so that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt
when we leave speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue
which it enjoins. To the well-born child all the virtues
are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his
heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual
growth, which obeys the same law. Those who are capable
of humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand
already on a platform that commands the sciences and
arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso
dwells in this moral beatitude already anticipates those
special powers which men prize so highly. The lover has
no talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing with
his enamoured maiden, however little she may possess of
related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to
the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works,
and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and
powers. In ascending to this primary and aboriginal
sentiment we have come from our remote station on the
circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world,
where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and
anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect.

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of
the spirit in a form,--in forms, like my own. I live
in society, with persons who answer to thoughts in my
own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great
instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them.
I am certified of a common nature; and these other souls,
these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can.
They stir in me the new emotions we call passion; of love,
hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come conversation,
competition, persuasion, cities and war. Persons are
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In
youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see
all the world in them. But the larger experience of man
discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.
Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all
conversation between two persons tacit reference is made,
as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party
or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.
And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially
on high questions, the company become aware that the
thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all
have a spiritual property in what was said, as well as
the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches
over them like a temple, this unity of thought in which
every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and
thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious
of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for
all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common
to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary
education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is
one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake,
think much less of property in truth. They accept it
thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with
any man's name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from
eternity. The learned and the studious of thought have no
monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some
degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many
valuable observations to people who are not very acute or
profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want
and have long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul
is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in
that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every
society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other.
We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves,
and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel
the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my
neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this
by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

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