All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. -THE POET There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class live to the utility of the symbol; esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark, to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet, and artist, and the naturalist, and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol, to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. + -PRUDENCE Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, "Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour, that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. -EXPERIENCE The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. -THE POET Deeper and older seemed his eye; He spoke, and words more soft than rain His action won such reverence sweet -CHARACTER Every word was once a poem. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. -THE POET A public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man. -SPIRITUAL LAWS The man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate himself, he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place: he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit. -SPIRITUAL LAWS The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men. -THE POET Only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison. -NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because he must; he used no election; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger, or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an institution. -SPIRITUAL LAWS Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no scepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. -NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. -NATURE W e see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd. -EXPERIENCE Scepticism is unbelief in Cause and Effect. A man does not see that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see, that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; and what comes out, that was put in. As we are, so we do; and as we do, so it is done to us: we are the builders of our fortunes; cant and lying and the attempt to secure a good which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain. + -WORSHIP As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, Souls proceed into heaven, into hell. -ADDRESS TO CLASS IN DIVINITY COLLEGE Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot; and without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. (We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.) -NATURE The sceptic affirms that the Universe is a nest of boxes, with nothing in the last box. cism is slow suicide. + Scepti -IMMORTALITY We e ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, what ample borrowers of eternity they are! -WORKS AND WAYS The way to mend the bad world is to create the right world. Here is a low political economy plotting to cut the throat of foreign competition, and establish our own; excluding others by force, or making war on them; or, by cunning tariffs, giving preference to worse wares of ours. But the real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war. The way to conquer the foreign artisan is, not to kill him, but to beat his work. -WORSHIP Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. -NATURE |