Essays, First Series

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Of the like nature is that expectation of change which
instantly follows the suspension of our voluntary activity.
The terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,
the awe of prosperity, the instinct which leads every
generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble
asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of
the balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is
best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a
man often pays dear for a small frugality. The borrower
runs in his own debt. Has a man gained any thing who has
received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he gained
by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's
wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the
instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and of
debt on the other; that is, of superiority and inferiority.
The transaction remains in the memory of himself and his
neighbor; and every new transaction alters according to
its nature their relation to each other. He may soon come
to see that he had better have broken his own bones than
to have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the
highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it."

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life,
and know that it is the part of prudence to face every
claimant and pay every just demand on your time, your
talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first or last
you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may
stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only
a postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If
you are wise you will dread a prosperity which only loads
you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every
benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great
who confers the most benefits. He is base,--and that is
the one base thing in the universe,--to receive favors
and render none. In the order of nature we cannot render
benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom.
But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for
line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of
too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and
worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest,
say the prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a
broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some application of
good sense to a common want. It is best to pay in your
land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to
gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to navigation;
in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving;
in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.
So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout
your estate. But because of the dual constitution of things,
in labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals
from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price
of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are
signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or
stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and
virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor
cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in
obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the
gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral
nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative.
The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the
Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening
of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is
one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of
the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the
doctrine that every thing has its price,--and if that
price is not paid, not that thing but something else is
obtained, and that it is impossible to get any thing
without its price,--is not less sublime in the columns
of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of
light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of
nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man
sees implicated in those processes with which he is
conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel-
edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule,
which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill
as in the history of a state,--do recommend to him his
trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his
imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things
to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and
substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor.
He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit,
but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a
crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground,
such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge
and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken
word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw
up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some
damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
substances of nature,--water, snow, wind, gravitation,--
become penalties to the thief.

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for
all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love
is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an
algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which
like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you
cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors and from
enemies became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as
sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors:--

"Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing."

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no
man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him,
so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made
useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and
blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved
him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns
destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his
faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he
has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance
with the hindrances or talents of men until he has suffered
from the one and seen the triumph of the other over his own
want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him
to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself
alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the
wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation
which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken
until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A
great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits
on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he
is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn
something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood;
he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of
the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real
skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of his
assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs
to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls
off from him like a dead skin and when they would triumph,
lo! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame is safer than
praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as
all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain
assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of
praise are spoken for me I feel as one that lies
unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil
to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich
Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy
he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the
temptation we resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect,
and enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness and
fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best of our institutions,
nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer
all their life long under the foolish superstition that
they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man
to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to
be and not to be at the same time. There is a third silent
party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of things
takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every
contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If
you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put
God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer
The payment is withholden, the better for you; for compound
interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this
exchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to
cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope
of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many
or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies
voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing
its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the
nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night.
Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It
persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would
tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage
upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It
resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to
put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The
inviolate spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers.
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a
tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious abode;
every burned book or house enlightens the world; every
suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth
from side to side. Hours of sanity and consideration are
always arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the
truth is seen and the martyrs are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances.
The man is all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an
evil. Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content.
But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of
indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these
representations,--What boots it to do well? there is one
event to good and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for
it; if I lose any good I gain some other; all actions are
indifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to
wit, its own nature. The soul is not a compensation, but
a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of
circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect
balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence,
or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being
is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced,
and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within
itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence.
Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing,
Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on
which as a background the living universe paints itself
forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for
it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm.
It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts,
because the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy
and does not come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in
visible nature. There is no stunning confutation of his
nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted
the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
with him he so far deceases from nature. In some manner
there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the
understanding also; but, should we not see it, this deadly
deduction makes square the eternal account.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain
of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no
penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper
additions of being. In a virtuous action I properly am;
in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into deserts
conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness
receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no
excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when
these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The
soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never
a Pessimism.

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is
trust. Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application
to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence,
the brave man is greater than the coward; the true, the
benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less, than the
fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue, for
that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence,
without any comparative. Material good has its tax, and if
it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the
next wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is
the soul's, and may be had if paid for in nature's lawful
coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow.
I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example
to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it
new burdens. I do not wish more external goods,--neither
possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain
is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the
knowledge that the compensation exists and that it is not
desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene
eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief.
I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard,--"Nothing can work me
damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about
with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the
inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature
seems to be the distinction of More and Less. How can
Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation or
malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less
faculty, and one feels sad and knows not well what to
make of it. He almost shuns their eye; he fears they will
upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a great injustice.
But see the facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities
vanish. Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in
the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this
bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my
brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and
outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still
receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur
he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is
my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs,
and the estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is
the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus
and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I
conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain.
His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be
made mine, it is not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes
which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men
are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every
soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole
system of things, its friends and home and laws and faith,
as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony
case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly
forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the
individual these revolutions are frequent, until in some
happier mind they are incessant and all worldly relations
hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a
transparent fluid membrane through which the living form
is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous
fabric of many dates and of no settled character, in which
the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and
the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday.
And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a
putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews
his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate,
resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the
divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels
go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels
may come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe
in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and
omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in
to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We
linger in the ruins of the old tent where once we had bread
and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can
feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught
so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain.
The voice of the Almighty saith, 'Up and onward for evermore!'
We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the
new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those
monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent
to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.
A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of
wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid
loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep
remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a
dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing
but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a
guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in
our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of
youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted
occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows
the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of
character. It permits or constrains the formation of new
acquaintances and the reception of new influences that
prove of the first importance to the next years; and the
man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower,
with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its
head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the
gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade
and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,
Quarrying man's rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers;
Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil;
Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence.

IV
SPIRITUAL LAWS.

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind,
when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we
discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind
us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as
clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale,
but even the tragic and terrible are comely as they
take their place in the pictures of memory. The river-
bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, the
foolish person, however neglected in the passing, have
a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in
the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house.
The soul will not know either deformity or pain. If in
the hours of clear reason we should speak the severest
truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice.
In these hours the mind seems so great that nothing can
be taken from us that seems much. All loss, all pain, is
particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.
Neither vexations nor calamities abate our trust. No man
ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for
exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack
that ever was driven. For it is only the finite that has
wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in
smiling repose.

The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if
man will live the life of nature and not import into his
mind difficulties which are none of his. No man need be
perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say what
strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of
books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual
obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseased
with the theological problems of original sin, origin of
evil, predestination and the like. These never presented
a practical difficulty to any man,--never darkened across
any man's road who did not go out of his way to seek them.
These are the soul's mumps and measles and whooping-coughs,
and those who have not caught them cannot describe their
health or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not know
these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be
able to give account of his faith and expound to another
the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires
rare gifts. Yet without this self-knowledge there may be
a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. "A
few strong instincts and a few plain rules" suffice us.

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they
now take. The regular course of studies, the years of
academical and professional education have not yielded
me better facts than some idle books under the bench at
the Latin School. What we do not call education is more
precious than that which we call so. We form no guess,
at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative
value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts
to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure
to select what belongs to it.

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any
interference of our will. People represent virtue as a
struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their
attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed when
a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not
better who strives with temptation. But there is no
merit in the matter. Either God is there or he is not
there. We love characters in proportion as they are
impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or
knows about his virtues the better we like him.
Timoleon's victories are the best victories, which ran
and flowed like Homer's verses, Plutarch said. When we
see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and pleasant
as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and
are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say 'Crump is
a better man with his grunting resistance to all his
native devils.'

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over
will in all practical life. There is less intention in
history than we ascribe to it. We impute deep-laid far-
sighted plans to Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of
their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an
extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have
always sung, 'Not unto us, not unto us.' According to
the faith of their times they have built altars to
Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success
lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which
found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders
of which they were the visible conductors seemed to the
eye their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism? It
is even true that there was less in them on which they
could reflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe
is to be smooth and hollow. That which externally seemed
will and immovableness was willingness and self-annihilation.
Could Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare? Could ever a
man of prodigious mathematical genius convey to others any
insight into his methods? If he could communicate that
secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated value,
blending with the daylight and the vital energy the
power to stand and to go.

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that
our life might be much easier and simpler than we make
it; that the world might be a happier place than it is;
that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and
despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing
of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere
with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get this
vantage-ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the
present, we are able to discern that we are begirt with
laws which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same lesson.
Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not
like our benevolence or our learning much better than
she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the
caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or
the Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club into
the fields and woods, she says to us, 'So hot? my little
Sir.'

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs
intermeddle and have things in our own way, until the
sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love
should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our
Sunday-schools and churches and pauper-societies are
yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at
which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all
virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give
dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and
we do not think any good will come of it. We have not
dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will
give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will
lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag
this dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole
Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that childhood
should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time
enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not
shut up the young people against their will in a pew and
force the children to ask them questions for an hour
against their will.

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