This is the one remedy for all ills, the panacea of Nature. We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep him So. An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom for a season, would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service. + -MAN THE REFORMER Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure. + -CIRCLES We assume that all thought is already long ago adequately set down in books-all imaginations in poems; and what we say, we only throw in as confirmatory of this supposed complete body of literature. A very shallow assumption. Say rather, all literature is yet to be written. Poetry has scarce chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of Nature to us is, "The world is new, untried. Do not believe the Past. I give you the universe a virgin to-day." -LITERARY ETHICS This great, overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine. -MAN THE REFORMER i How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we find their imitation. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has he enterprises? has he knowledge? it boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it again. -CIRCLES 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 ryefield, the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical streaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to windharps; 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. In -NATURE my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money, stead me nothing. They are all lost on him; but as much Soul as I have avails. If I am merely wilful, he gives me a Rowland for an Oliver, sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the Soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same Soul; he reveres and loves with me. 17 -THE OVER-SOUL When we speak truly, is not he only unhappy who is not in love? his fancied freedom and self-rule,—is it not so much death? He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses. . . And the reason why all men honour love, is because it looks up and not down; aspires and not despairs. THE METHOD OF NATURE 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 traveller rushes for safety, and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. + -NATURE 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 makes into these precincts. Here is 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 -NATURE A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends in a head-ache. -EXPERIENCE Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. + -SELF-RELIANCE As to what we call the masses and common menthere are no common men. All men are at last of a size! + -USES OF GREAT MEN We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice-creams. He is accustomed to carpets, and we have not sufficient character to put floor-cloths out of his mind whilst he stays in the house, and so we pile the floor with carpets. It is as easy to be great as to be small. The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable Souls is because they are not in our experience. -PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER + A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. -EXPERIENCE + Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it; it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. -NATURE Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind may speak, and girt and roadready for the lowest mission of knowledge or goodwill, is frugality for gods and heroes. -MAN THE REFORMER People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of Truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. + -EXPERIENCE Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made, no matter how indirectly to numbers, proclamation is then and there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping thought to him never counts his company. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. -SELF-RELIANCE Be a gift and a benediction. Shine with real light and not with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common men are apologies for men; they bow the head, they excuse themselves with prolix reasons, they accumulate appearances because the substance is not. -SPIRITUAL LAWS |