No More Learning

Conversation is an evanescent relation,
A
man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all
that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his
silence with as much reason as they would blame the insig-
nificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the
hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his
tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and un-
likeness that piques each with the presence of power and of con-
sent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the
world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or
a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism
and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself.
The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is
mine. \I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance or at least
a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. “Better be a
nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition
which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That
high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very
two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two
no more.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5437
son.
iarge, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, be-
fore yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these
disparities unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure
that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift
to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with
this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accel-
erate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious
treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-
elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a
spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that
you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close to your per-
Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and
expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his
thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thou-
sand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground.
Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to
such a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of the noblest
benefit.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation.
Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding
on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your
friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother
and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own ? Are these
things material to our covenant ? Leave this touching and claw-
ing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sin-
cerity, a glance from him, I want; but not news, nor pottage. I
can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from
cheaper. companions. Should not the society of my friend be to
me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself ? Ought I
to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of
cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass
that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that
standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his
mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather
fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not
less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Let him be to
thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly
revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and
cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are
not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a


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5438
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
letter and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a
little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to
give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody.
It profanes nobody. In these warm
lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and
pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals
of heroism have yet made good.
The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the
less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in
the world. ( Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.
But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere,
in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting,
enduring, and daring, which can love us and which we can love. )
We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of
follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when
we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands.
Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues
of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our
impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no
god attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the
little you gain the great.
NATURE
T"
HERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any sea-
son of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection;
when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a
harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these
bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we
have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining
hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives
sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem
to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be
looked for with a little more assurance in that
weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian Sum-
mer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills
and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny
hours seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem
quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of
the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and
small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his
back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is
pure October


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5439
sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits
our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which
dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men
that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded
houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic
beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would
escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent,
escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature
to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a per-
petual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently
reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines,
hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye.
The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with
them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or
church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the
immortal year.
How easily we might walk onward into the
opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts
fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of
home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by
the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by
nature.
These enchantments are medicinal; they sober and heal us.
These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to
our own, and make friends with matter which the ambitious
chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never
can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our
thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet.
It is firm water; it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!
Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we
chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and
takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense.
Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily
and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much
scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees
of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up
to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and
the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the
wood fire to which the chilled traveler rushes for safety, -and
there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle
in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and
grains; and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which


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5440
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue
zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think
if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and
should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be
all that would remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we
have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes
in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the
blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the
waving rye field; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose
innummerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the re-
flections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steam-
ing odorous south wind, which converts all trees to wind-harps;
the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine
logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-
room, — these are the music and pictures of the most ancient
religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and
on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the
shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I
leave the village politics and personalities,- yes, and the world of
villages and personalities, — behind, and pass into a delicate realm
of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to
enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this
incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our
eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggi-
atura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival
that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed,
establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these deli-
cately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances,
signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our inven-
tion, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have
early learned that they must work as enchantment and sequel to
this original beauty. I am over-instructed for my return. Hence-
forth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am
grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without
elegance; but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He
who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are
in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to
come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only
as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their
aid, can they reach the height of magnificence.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5441
COMPENSATION
A
MAN cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or
against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his
companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him
who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the
other end remains in the thrower's bag Or rather, it is a har-
poon thrown at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in
the boat; and if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it
will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or to sink the boat.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. “No man had
ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.
The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes
himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. The
exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of
heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat men as
pawns and ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. If you
leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would
make things of all persons; of women, of children, of the poor.
The vulgar proverb “I will get it from his purse or get it from
his skin,” is sound philosophy.
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are
speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand
in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in
meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two currents
of air mix, — with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature.
But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and at-
tempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my
neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have
shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war be-
tween us; there is hate in him and fear in me.
All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all un-
just accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the
same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the
herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, - that there is
rottenness where he appears.
He is a carrion crow; and though
you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere.
Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes
are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered
IX-341


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
over government and property. That obscene bird is not there
for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be revised.
Of the like nature is that expectation of change which in-
stantly 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 anything who has received a hundred favors
and rendered none ? Has he gained by borrowing, through indo-
lence 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 him-
self 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.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5443
LOVE
H*
ERE let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence
which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty,
whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the
sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with
it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover can-
not paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree
in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society
for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with
Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the
world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his
attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carry-
ing out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large mun-
dane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of
all select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never
sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to
others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her
sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resem-
blance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to
rainbows and the song of birds.
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can
analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another
face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness
and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emo-
tion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the
imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor
does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and
described in society; but as it seems to me, to a quite other
and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and
sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We
cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline dove's-neck
lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most
excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying
all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul
Richter signify when he said to music, «Away! away! thou
speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not
found and shall not find. ” The same fluency may be observed
in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful
when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measur-
ing wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and
to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the
sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is
representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it
ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And
of poetry the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies,
but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the
unattainable. Concerning it Landor inquires whether it is not
to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence. ”
In like manner personal beauty is then first charming and
itself when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a
story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions and
not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his
unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he
were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firma-
ment and the splendors of a sunset.
Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you? ”
We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will,
but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which
you know not in yourself and can never know.
This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which
the ancient writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of
man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in
quest of that other world of its own out of which it came into
this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and
unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which
are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity sends the
glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beau-
tiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and
fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex
runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form,
movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to
him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and
the cause of the beauty.
If however, from too much conversing with material objects,
the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it
reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfill the prom-
ise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these
visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul
passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character,


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5445
and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and
their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more
and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguish-
ing the base affection, as the sun puts out fire by shining on
the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation
with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and
just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities and a
quicker apprehension of them.
Then he passes from loving them
in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul
only the door through which he enters to the society of all true
and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains
a clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has con-
tracted from this world, and is able to point it out; and this
with mutual joy that they are now able without offense to indi-
cate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each
all help and omfort in curing the same. And beholding in
many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in
each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has con-
tracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to
the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder
of created souls.
CIRCLES
THE eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the
T"second; and throughout nature this primary figure is re-
peated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher
of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a
circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference no-
where. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this
first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in consider-
ing the circular or compensatory character of every human
action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action
admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the
truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there
is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is
always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep
a lower deep opens.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and
volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe, seen


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5 +46
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
by God, is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dis-
solves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predomi-
nance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and
institutions. Let us rise into another idea; they will disappear.
The Greek sculpture is all melted away as if it had been statues
of ice; here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining,
as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mount-
ain clefts in June and July. For the genius that created it
creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little
longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and
tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new
thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built
out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the
decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See
the investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydrau-
lics; fortifications by gunpowder; roads and canals by railways;
sails by steam; steam by electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so
many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and
that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand
that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand
and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it;
and thus ever behind the coarse effect is a fine cause, which,
being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every-
thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate
appears to women and children a firm and lasting fact; to a
merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and easily lost.
An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture like a
gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not
much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks pro-
vokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest;
and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so
immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable ?
Permanence is a word of degrees. Everything is medial. Moons
are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying
though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea
after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed
by showing him a new idea which commands his own. The life
of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly
small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5447
that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles,
wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the
individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, har-
ing formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,-as for
instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious
rite,- to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the
life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that bound-
ary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep,
which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop
and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first
and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force
and to immense and innumerable expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series, - every
general law only a particular fact of some more general law pres-
ently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall,
no circumference to us. The man finishes his story,- how good!
how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the
sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle
around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the
sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a
first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle out-
side of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves.
The re-
sult of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will
presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed
to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a
bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a
power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures
of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream
has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the
world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as
prophecies of the next age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are
actions, the new prospect is power. Every several result is threat-
ened and judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be
contradicted by the new; it is only limited by the new.
The new
statement is always hated by the old, and to those dwelling in
the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism. But the eye soon gets
wonted to it, for the eye and it are effects of one cause; then
its innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent,
it pales and dwindles before the revelation of the new hour.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
SELF-RELIANCE
Ty
are
RUST 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 child-
like 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
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, re-
deemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advanc-
ing on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face
and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided
and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arith-
metic has computed the strength and means opposed to our pur-
pose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as
yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are discon-
certed. 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 the 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 parlor
what the pit is in the play-house: 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


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5449
were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
once acted
or spoken with éclat he is a committed person,
watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affec-
tions 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 cus-
toms.
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.
member 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 everything were titular and
ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitu-
late 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
I re-


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5450
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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 in-
fant; 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 some-
what 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 situa-
tions. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthro-
pist, 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 so-
cieties; — 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.
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 with perfect sweetness the
independence of solitude.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5151
HISTORY
C""
vil 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. Strassburg
Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Stein-
bach. 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 pre-exists in the secreting organs
of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in cour-
tesy. 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 inhabited
them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed on-
ward; 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 ex-
tend 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
snowdrift 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
a


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5452
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
on
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 Tar-
tar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the
mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. «The cus-
tom of making houses and tombs in the living rock," says Heeren
in his Researches on the Ethiopians, "determined very nat-
urally 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 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 appear-
ance of the grove, especially in winter, when the barrenness 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 deli-
cate 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 be-
comes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5453
EACH AND ALL
L
ITTLE thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore:
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;
The gay enchantment was undone -
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, “I covet truth:
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:)
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,


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5454
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird :-
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
THE RHODORA
ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?
I
N MAY, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, () rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5455
THE HUMBLE-BEE
B
URLY, dozing humble-bee,
Where thou art is clime for me.
Let them sail for Porto Rique,
Far-off heats through seas to seek;
I will follow thee alone,
Thou animated torrid zone!
Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,
Let me chase hy waving lines;
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.
Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion!
Sailor of the atmosphere:
Swimmer through the waves of air;
Voyager of light and noon;
Epicurean of June;
Wait, I prithee, till I come
Within earshot of thy hum,-
All without is martyrdom.
When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze
Silvers the horizon wall,
And with softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And infusing subtle heats,
Turns the sod to violets,
Thou in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace,
With thy mellow, breezy bass.
Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me, thy drowsy tone
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days, and solid banks of flowers:
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound,
In Indian wildernesses found;
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.


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5456
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Aught unsavory or unclean
Hath my insect never seen;
But violets and bilberry bells,
Maple-sap and daffodels,
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern, and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue
And brier-roses, dwelt among;
All beside was unknown waste,
All was picture as he passed.
Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher!
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care,
Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.
When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous.
THE PROBLEM
1
LIKE a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles:
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Why should the vest on him allure,
Which I could not on me endure ?
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON
5457
Up from the burning core below,-
The canticles of love and woe:
The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity:
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;-
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Know'st thou what wove yon wood-bird's nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast ?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell ?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads ?