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JOURNALS
OF
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
1820–1872
VOL. VIII

















JOURNALS
ОР
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
WITH ANNOTATIONS
EDITED BY
EDWARD WALDO EMERSON
AND
WALDO EMERSON FORBES
1849-1855

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912


AL 1323.029 A
FanTAD CILEGO
OCT 6 1913
LIBRARI.
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY EDWARD WALDO EMERSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published November 1912


In compliance with current
copyright law, LBS Archival
Products produced this
replacement volume on paper
that meets the ANSI Standard
239.48-1984 to replace the
irreparably deteriorated
original.
1992





CONTENTS
JOURNAL XL
1849
(From Journals RS, TU, and AZ)
The word God. Circumstance. Railroads ; California.
A Magnet. Greville. The Juno and the Jove. Ali ben
Abu Taleb. Spirit of the Age ; California. Contradic-
tions. Gravitation. Dull Science. The poor Indian.
Town and Country Club. English Scholarship. Pear-
trees. Martial's power. Macaulay. Buying a sunset.
Live people. Duty first ; genius, rectitude, humility.
Plato required Culture. Word and deed. Sweden-
borg. Quetelet. Clough's Borbie. Old words fit the
heights ; Mythology serves. Realism. Finishers. God
with us. · Days. Descartes. Hafiz on Thought. Na-
ture calls from metaphysics. Marcus Antoninus. The
old painters. The chimney-sweep. Two gravestones.
Words. Wilkinson on Swedenborg. Imagination's
Aute. Swedenborg's crime. The Soul's nearness.
Children's teachers. The garden alchemist ; the pear-
tree's signal. Climbers. Riches. Martial on Portia ;
Herrick. Athens. The village fire. St. Anthony to
the fishes. Corrupting philosophy. Federal Govern-
ment's war-power. Macaulay's History. Letter-
writing. Massachusetts. New York. The expansive
Kentuckian. Mountain air. Concord epitaphs. The


CONTENTS
pear-tree's appeal. Calvinism's power. Dante's
strength ; the Masters. Hindoo books. The vine.
Greek books now translated. Men in Nature. Per-
spective in writing. Byron's feats. Otis on women.
Loves. The Oriental cure. Revolution. Fossils stay
dead. Philosophy; three degrees. French and Eng-
lish. Buna's scheme of life. The Magnet. Shak-
speare. Greatness. Let the Instincts write. Women's
bonnets. Walk with Thoreau to Acton. Concord's
possible professors. Our sky. Eyes and no eyes.
England and Europe. Plato's title to fame ; his geo-
metry ; his commentators ; his help. Dante. Web-
ster wanted courage. Perception of Identity; Brooke
and Donne. Rhymes. Dealing with the Days. Gar-
den diary. . . . . . . . . . . . 1-47
Nature, Addresses and Lectures published. Aristotle,
schoolmen, Swedenborg. Man representative of all
life ; great students of Nature, the Flowing. Minds
viviparous and oviparous. Christ not yet portrayed.
The World-temple. Aunt Mary and medicine. Ac-
celeration of thought ; penetration equals longevity;
Plato's power. Face your conditions. The Solitary.
Yield somewhat to your book. Graceful old age, still
at school; Nature's dealing with us. Macaulay criti-
cized. Charles Newcomb comes; subtle and daring
writing; a wasted light. Big-endians and Little-endians.
Thoreau and Concord. Michael Angelo and Raffaele.
Solvers of universal problems. Nature's way. Sym-
bolism. A chosen few. Thoreau's “ Inspiration.”
November walk ; Channing; Verses, Eternity, Time,
the Poet. Affirmative; Germany; Scherb expounds


CONTENTS
vi
Hegel. Goethe. Repiboring man's
Hegel. The World-flower. Alcott, the pencil and
sponge. Goethe. Representative Men sent to friends;
its shortcomings; the laboring man's greatness. Swe-
denborg. Nature's December show. Respect for
farmers. England's limitations and solidity. Rich and
poor. Work gives thought. Love of Superlative.
Channing's criticisms. Natural Aristocracy, courage
of truth. Van Helmont. Duties. Schelling's thought,
its growth through others. Stallo on Naturc. Bird
songs; Feuerbach. Three eras. Chladni an Orpheus.
Culture. Reading . . . . . . . . . 48–82
JOURNAL XLI
1850
(From Journals AZ and BO)
Faces, ideal or portraits. Boys. Two statements; bi-
polarity, melioration, and divinity of Man. Brave
Poets. Marriage. English snubs of the new book.
Fate and Rectitude. Alcote's captious hearers. Byron;
suggested partnerships of authors. The times and the
great tides. Anxiety needless ; trust the great Geome-
ter to reconcile ; Goethe's Winckelmann. Value of
Clergy. Saint and scholar. Proclus. Paule de Viguier.
Samuel Hoar. Parliament on the Times. Experi-
mental philosopher. Expressors the gods. Carlyle's
refrains. Alcott's parliament. Lord Mansfield's de-
cisions. Saint Augustine. Seven years in the vat ;
Irving ; Montaigne ; Pope. The Age ; Magnet and
Mirror. Garrison's virtue and fault. Condé. Abuse.


viji
CONTENTS
Building of Language. Southerner ; our timid repre-
sentatives. Majority. Intellect ; Newton ; discoverers
of law, advances. Wolsey. Superstitions everywhere.
Town and Country Club. Saturday Club foreshad-
owed. Enweri's “Spring.” Silent teachers. The
impressionable man. Abandon. Orator's strength.
Personality commands. The enigmatical face. Shirk.
ing clergy. Allston's methods. Charlotte Brontë's
Shirley. Epitaph. The lecturing tour. Henry James.
Higher Law derided. Lucrecia Mott. Webster's de-
sertion ; Boston's adulation. Concord's celebration.
Everett, Choate, Governor Briggs, Rantoul. Nemesis
levels. Vanity Fair ; Thackeray and Bunyan. Jour-
ney to West, the rivers and lakes. Margaret Fuller
Ossoli dies in wreck; her friends ; her traits ; testi-
monies of friends. Thoreau on thought; stimulus
needed; the percipients. Pallid society ; “ the pro-
gressive god." Thinkers not partisans. Genealogy.
Gifts rare. Charles Newcomb. Van Helmont. The
Marlboro' Road; Channing and Thoreau on Life. 83-122
Melody prior to thought. “ Hero.” My method. My
romance. The artist's chance to show Beauty and
Law. Schelling's distinction. Quality and amount.
Great discoveries are presentiments; instances among
the ancients. Jenny Lind. Early teaching of child.
Oriental superlative. Collins in the kitchen. To
Marlboro' with Channing. A village needs natural-
ist. Higher law ; Archbishop Whitgift ; Mansfield in
Somersett case ; Blackstone on God's law ; Coke.
King James's remark; Bacon's “ Leges legum.”_A
talk with Thoreau ; English and American ; no suc-


ix
CONTENTS
cess yet; feats seemingly impossible. The world wears
well. Democracy. Fame. Culture. Our children.
The plus man. Fisher the Quaker. Margaret Fuller's
letters ; her rhetoric ; her nobility ; first impressions
on friends. The city-builders. Doctrine of Leasts.
Notes for “ Manners." Readings for Ellen. Heat in
speech. True eloquence. Tools. An Essay, the Many-
sided Man. A judge. Men of one idea ; the corpse-
defender. Napoleon on Leonidas. The Merchant.
Luther ; his effect on thought. New England's
Morale. Aunt Mary's writing. Columbus at Vera-
gua. The disappointing visit. Music ; French sen-
tences. Shakspeare's fancy. “Life uninteresting”;
all too short. Napoleon III. Writer an orateur
manqué. Cyrus Stow. Readings . . . . 122-158
JOURNAL XLII
1851
(From Journals BO and Co.)
Western trip. Allingham's “ Morning Thoughts."
Young ideals ; daunting facts ; Divine Reason recon-
ciles. Choate's Alippancy. Tennyson's “ In Memo-
riam.” Turner's expiation. Slavery arouses Con-
science. Drill. Rotation. Inequality necessary. Val-
uations of cities. The lecture's fault. Aunt Mary on
the soul. Hear what the Morning says. Diamonds.
Candidates for Social Circle; the principle. Low tone.
Eloquence. Gloucester land-purchase. The work-
cure. Columbus's letter. Albert H. Tracy of Buffalo.


CONTENTS
Margaret Fuller in society. Webster in the Senate.
Seeing the world. Love of money general. Women
sail, not steer. Poem takes care of itself. Heat and
Imagination in savants. Les stériles. Joy of Beauty.
The Egyptian question of the soul-tests. Infamy of
the Slave Law; Mr. Hoar; New Hampshire states-
men ; Webster. Everett's tarnished fame. The wolf
unreformed. Choate. Webster's fall; the Union made
odious. Mischief of legal crime. The truckling preach-
ers. Where are the men of honour ? The people must
rise. The Old Fugitive Slave Law and the New; hypo-
crisy ; weakness of a lic. Men of honour will still be
born. Criminal statute illegal. Hayne avenged. De-
moralizing the people. Everett forgets his speeches.
Immoral laws scarce in history. Nemesis appears.
Judge Shaw. Compensation to South would be cheap.
Effect of Sims case. Manilius an early Newton.
Napoleon. History of liberty. Elizabeth Hoar on
Campbell's life ; maudlin tears. The lecturing art.
House of Fame. Ballot or gun? The guide. Unfit
companions. Attachments ; balanced antagonisms.
Allingham ; young poets and the Masters. Prudence ;
timeliness. Nature hard to find ; the poet-paradox.
Knitters of the Union. Treat drastically. False to
duty, time of despair. Servant to one's lecture. Dual-
ism, double consciousness. Vasari's anecdotes. Con-
cord votes. Imbecility of good party ; Lip-service.
Tulips . . . . . . . . . . . 159–213
Illusions. Events of Nineteenth Century. Our Cause ;
Destiny. Channing on goodness. Béranger's demo-
cracy. Aristocracy's degrees ; our great leaders ; Web-
Vasari's app ; Lip-serne 6.9-213


CONTENTS
ster. The governing machine. Metamorphosis. Mar-
garet Fuller's gentilesse. Fate should help, not dismay.
Southern life. Heterogeneity ; character. Wealth is
power, not a toy. Canova on Phidias. Sibylline
leaves. Power of smallness. The young speaker ;
Napoleon's head. Inspired discoverers. Fate, com-
pensation. The man behind the town. True and
false. Boston. Wilkinson, power held too lightly.
Everett brought us German thought. America's sifted
immigrants. Bias. Mansfield on investment ; Eben
Francis. Thoreau's great gifts. John Adams on Cour-
age ; his sayings. Horace Greeley's energy. Pan and
the Muses. Spheral people. Greece and Jewry. Im-
portant blood-fusions. Tricky politicians. Webster's
treachery ; Everett's pictured terrors. Nature's eco-
nomy. Our thirty nations. Views of the Wards, father
and son. The older law. The United States Com-
missioner. 1775 forgotten. The Ship of State. Intel-
lect and Love ; Chastity. Doctrine of Leasts. Lib-
erty. The School-tax. Nature's provident generos-
ity. Courtesy. Chaucer on poet and scholar. Fate.
Pythagoras; incarnation. The masked Power. Which
are realities ? Men fit for the day. Autobiographical.
Eloquence. Compensation of bad law. Disguised ty-
rants. Mediation always ; Life's panorama. Tie of
person and event. Tools of the Age. The vesicle.
Shakspeare's pinnacle. Man fits his place. Emman-
uel Scherb's lecture. The longed-for sign. Jenny Lind.
A friend on the Dæmons. Perpetual push. Goethe
the pivot. French morale. Providence's visits. Mar.
garet Fuller illuminator, not writer. Bulwer's Caxtons.


xii
CONTENTS
Carlyle's mirror of writing. Sense of Beauty. The
pickerel. History an allegory. Channing on Nahant
and Truro; giants of Art. Beauty must penetrate.
Selection in Art. The solvent Mind. New Meta-
physics wanted ; tides; inner world. Man's aim.
Edith rejects Heaven. Channing on Hawthorne.
Experience. Celebration of Intellect. The walking
Facility. Transmigration. Woman's Convention ;
criticism. Talk with Thoreau ; loneliness ; moral
union. Neighbor Hosmer. Say, No; Faith. Car.
lyle's Life of Sterling. Personal influence. Family
types. Culture will absorb Hell. Practice needed in
Metaphysics, All-related man. Intellect the king ;
culture. Party politics ; currency ; tariff. Read-
ing . . . . . . . . . . . . 214–267
JOURNAL XLIII
1852
(From Journals DO and GO)
Our interest in the whole ; the great words. The chosen
brave. Reality. Of Henry Thoreau. The writing of
“ Days." Golden age of philosophy. Opportunity ;
my farm. Canvas-back ducks. Our statesmen. Jere-
miah Mason on Law-school. Mr. Arnold on mer-
chants and New Bedford. The undoing of riches. A
strong person. Our politics like European. Right
reading. Dancing test. The tin-pan fable. Little
things beautiful. Samuel Rogers and Aristocracy. Tis-
senet and Indians. Public extravagance. « North-


. .
CONTENTS
xiii
man” quatrain. Gazetted terms. Henry James's
wish. Man a battery. The Purist voter. The Pagan
day. Illustrations. Montreal and Quebec ; the seig-
neuries. Speech to St. George's Society. Truth-
speaking English. Sixteenth Century poets. Snug and
bleak homes. Kossuth. Delia Bacon's belief. Trans-
lations of the Classics. Sylvester Judd. Abuse of
mind. Man a torpedo to man; exaltation; congelation;
the man who thaws us. What is there to save ? Con-
trasts in friends. Great poets of the middle classes.
Napoleon. Thoreau meets his walking thoughts.
Walk with Channing; the dog; haunting lines ; the
lupines. Children. Pity to lose the old scholar's stores;
conceit; equivalence. Metonomy. Walk to Nine
Acre Corner. Channing's views ; “ the Arboretum.”
Trances for hire. New Hampshire public men. Man-
ners in trifles. Washington's noble face. Thoreau on
lightning-rods. Beauty and Strength in poetry and
art. · Webster's Fate overtakes him. English limita-
tion. Man's need of man. He sees and passes, but .
Light remains ; Woman's tours de force. Thoreau
and the preacher. Margaret Swan's high experience.
Brothers. Thoreau praises the weeds. Robert C.
Winthrop ; his oration of despair. Plotinus. Saadi.
Whig doctrine. Souls ; Nature uses all things. Flow-
ers at the Saw-mill Brook. Burns and language. Test
of Eloquence . . . . . . . . . 269-313
Golden mean in girls' temperaments. Delia Bacon on
Lord Bacon. Good neighborhood. Which slaves to
help? Alcott visits his birthplace. America's claim on
England. Horatio Greenough's visit ; his philosophy


xiv
CONTENTS
and art. Our four good and strong men ; the Ho-
rati. English religion. Poetry is truth ; it creates.
Cheap pessimism. Efficiency. Hume's History and
modern history. Robert Peel. Pedantry. Courtesy.
Superlative, true and false. Hobbes on books and con-
versation. Swallowing lies. The Elizabethan. English
names. The lapidary. Western doctrine of Assaults.
English brag. People's respect for law. Quatrain,
« Nature in Leasts."-Wealth and Labour ; the equal-
izations. Mastery. “ Pantheist." Quatrain, “ Sam-
uel Hoar.” Learning for the people. Transmigra-
tion. Plymouth beach and boats. Greenough's say-
ings. School girls. Slight differences of our parties.
European influences ; expense ; church and trade ;
time-serving. The Giants. Marshfield ; Webster dy-
ing; praise and blame. Calhoun. England's fear of
Science ; her lacks. Previous question. Slavery ; che
Constitution and the odious law; Thoreau's hope.
Man's power of thought. Massachusetts poor in liter-
ature. Omens. Pitt, Peel, Burke, Fox. Virility;
Agassiz. Inventors ; Boyden, Bigelow. We wait for
helpful literature. Ideals for nations; England, France,
America. The Century, its combinations and inven-
tions. Sphinx; nations culminate. Cant. Uncle Tom's
Cabin. Napoleon III. Stories from Houssaye; Riva-
rol on Mirabeau; Boucher, Lantara, and Fontenelle.
Fool of the family ; insane success. England's meas-
ure; Roger Bacon, Wykeham, Chaucer, Shakspeare,
the martyrs. Dr. Kirkland and Professor Brazer ;
ministers. Philadelphia boys. Karl Marx's statement
versified. Walk to Lincoln. Channing's humours ;


X
CONTENTS
Thoreau. Countess of Pembroke. True bards. John
Quincy Adams's rules. English University men.
Reading . . . . . . . . . . . 314-356
JOURNAL XLIV
1853
(From Journals VS, DO, and HO)
Shakspeare, English genius. Greek mythology. Bards ;
Thomas Taylor, Ossian. England's results. Stand by
your order. Problem of Alcott. Boston's low estate.
Thought for sale. English statesmen. Sea-serpent.
Poetry of Faith. Welsh Triad. Troilus and Cressida.
Wellington's superiority. Church of England. Taci-
tus on North Sea. German origin. England's wealth
and inventions. American clipper-ships. Drive with
Channing; his humours ; Shawsheen River. Alcuin ;
the sea. The shipyard. Nature's profit and loss.
English a good mixture. Thoreau's austerity. Arthur
Hugh Clough in New England. Creating a National
will. Thierry's History of the Normans. Sylvan's
(Thoreau's) rightful possession of the land. The
artist coffin-maker. The seaside abolishes time. Na-
ture's balanced gifts. Asser and Alfred. English
talent ; modern advance. Mackintosh on slave-own-
ers. Feats of thinking ; game of intellect. Free or
slave? English government generous, plenty of strong
men; absurd fetiches. Thurlow's question. Newton's
pippins. A poison-plot denounced. Scholar must face
alienation. Nahant. Clough's departure. England's


xvi
CONTENTS
spell. Malthus or Poet? Paradox of Christians.
Horatio Greenough's death ; his praise. English re-
serves ; exclusiveness. Fate and Instinct. Frighten
your representative. Lenox; conformity or character ?
New York. Henry James; on Thackeray, New York,
and Boston. Charles Newcomb's noble letters.
Alcott as companion, his strength and weakness. Tho-
reau the Stoic. Thought. Girls' boarding-schools.
Americans underdosed. The visit to Cape Cod.
Lion's roar. Roussel on women. Scholar must have
convictions ; cannot escape his Age. England and
France, Chateaubriand. Ideas not prized; Life's dis-
illusioning. Toussenel's Passional Zoology . 357-403
Nature's ways. Horses of romance. Man's portion at
Creation. Clarendon. England has no idealist since
Shakspeare. Sub-mind. Nature's fine instruments.
Poem “ Freedom.” England's Aowering. Man's
antechambers to eternity. Drops of idealism; Bacon;
Milton. Divine physician's warning needed. Man's
range. The higher logic of Creation. Beauty of Greek
fable. Trust your humanity and Nature; the city.
Cæsar in Britain. Daguesseau and the poem. New
power our loadstone. Universities vs. the Fountain.
Crimes not absolute. Alcote's expansion, and trust in
Nature. Superlative. A liturgy. Women's side-issues.
Mother-wit. Illusions. Thoreau's standard. Dangers
of Quotation. The author hides. A real John Bull.
English despair; Thackeray; they reject the ideal, too
personal; culture needed. Cross of Greek and Gothic;
Facts a superstition. Rainy day books. Jacobi's say-
ing on the Poet. The sunset's spell. Self-respect es-


CONTENTS 'xvii
sential. The x, or missing link. Generalizers are the
nobility. The town the unit of the Republic, Saxon
and Latin words. Materialism does not alarm mystic.
Teachers exist for one word. Shadow. World full of
Memory. Vigor welcome. The admirable X. Dr.
Holmes on lecturing; and Thoreau ; the little girl's
question. Agassiz and water. Women teach us. Fried-
rich Grimm on money in politics. The young Scio-
list. Hume. Firdousi's saying. Death of Madam
Emerson ; her infuence and character. Epitaph of.
Charlemagne's mother. Poet's thought practical. The
majority. France ; Mirabeau's letter to Lafayette.
Notes on France ; quotations. Garrison and Phillips.
Reading . . . . . . . . . 404-437
JOURNAL XLV
1854
(From Journals HO, DO, and 10)
Lectures. The Michigan lawyer's compliment ; Dr.
Bradford's verses on the school-boy's poem. The Ne-
braska Bill. Big Wisconsin; the sixty-five mile sleigh-
ride. Humming metres. Man must learn organically
fike the early men. Death and judgment; the door
open. No finalities in Nature. Reality in writing.
The great man in Time; friends; England has two
nations. Speech on Anniversary of Webster's Seventh
of March Speech; disappointment. Alas for the major-
ity. Culture's rhetoric. Vulgarity of wealth; Boston's
false position. Invisible force. Thoreau's helpful coun-


xviii
CONTENTS
sel. Verses from Tennyson. Napoleon on Science.
Plotinus, Porphyry, Synesius. “ Spirit”-rappings.
The hidden to-day. Evelyn's story. William Wall's
sayings. Hallam, etc., and Englishmen deaf to the
ideal. Browning and Tennyson. Christopher Wren.
The minority. Law of Adrastia. Bonaparte, his sense
and admirable criticism. Man as his real faith. The
indifferent voter. The man on horseback. Hafiz on
brave cheerfulness. Knowledge of men equal to tele-
graph. English and French characteristics; The Rail-
road-president and the Irishman. Hallam's merit and
limitations. Truth never barren. Macaulay. Soli-
tude's harm. Hobbes on Democracy. Roederer on
Napoleon ; his sayings. The step from Johnson to
Carlyle. Prayer for continuity. England can change
front ; at need the Rome of to-day ; her solidarity ;
her men of ideas. Children in Heaven's gardens.
The old painters. Man's sequence of discoveries.
Good out of evil; Tennyson's lines. Thoreau on Cali-
fornia gold-digging. Men's views of the Virgin and
her Son. English noble forerunners. The few great
judges. Proclus interprets the oracle on Socrates. Our
representative duty. The English judges in Scotland.
Strife between English reformers and conservatives.
Women must learn to listen. The Williamstown ad-
dress; the Scholar class, their debt to the founders ;
their past achievement ; the ebb of Spirit; scholar re-
sponsible ; faith. Pythagoras's just fame. Plato and
his followers. French language. Our fathers' blunder in
concessions to Slavery; the bribe and the slow Neme-
sis. Abolition policy not broad and high enough. 439-476


CONTENTS
xix
Swedenborg's ideas received to-day. Cant of the day.
Our escort of friends. Man, not a man ; universal
in relations ; Science not chronological. Ends not
means. Illogical policy; undue reverence for law
when immoral ; ascent the measure of a man; he
must live to an end. The sacred lot of the scholar ;
he must reverence his soul ; love shall expand his
powers. War a teacher ; have you fought out yours ?
History of the Minot house. Macaulay on Bacon ;
argument of sensualism ; Bacon summoned as a wit-
ness. Walk to Estabrook farms with Channing.
Scholars' surrender to the worldly. A Day. Priceless
thought. Man can write but one book. Liebig to
Faraday on pure science. Hafiz on Love. Favorite
topics. All characters in your village. The athletic
English. Style a test. Confidences of books. Feats.
Quotation adds value. Fine old English language. The
pivotal Bacon. Notes on style. Locke. Bacon's life ex-
plained. Poetry seeks resemblance; poem is welcomed,
the poet's mind not. Our debt to a few English au-
thors. Minds do after their kind. Hooker defines
Imagination. Ecclesiastical councils, their residuum.
The “ white feather" questions. Nectarius's good
act. The animal share in writing. Past legislatures like
our own. Hooker, and value of ideal dogmas. The
originator of Heaven's hierarchy. Elizabeth Hoar on
common sense. Old English study of the Greeks.
Temperance makes genius. Universities. The two
nations in England again. Cause of first visit to Eng-
land. Charm and power of transition. Haydon on
English navy. The envied wife. Franklin on babies.


xx
CONTENTS
Solitude justified. The great beryl. Channing. The
sunset. Old English poets. Sidney on Puglione's praise
of horsemen. Imagination. Intellect. Science must
have soul. Queteletism ; saving reactions in America.
Success a measure of brain ; common sense. Madame
de Sablé on thanks to God. English and French be-
fore Alma. Nature gives us points. English finality ;
yet melioration proceeds. Swedenborg good for his
age. Idealists rare, yet present. Majorities rather un-
cultured than wicked. Choate. Judge Shaw. Read-
ing . . . . . . . . . . . . 477-511
JOURNAL XLVI
1855
(From Journals NO and RO)
Struggle for Right. Aim in Europe. Confucius on Cere-
mony ; manners against extravagance. Man's polar-
ity. Revere self. Question to student. The Romany
Girl. Historians as advocates. Plotinus on the Dance
of the Universe. The Dervish Alcott, his magnanim-
ity and tested courage. Criticisms on Carlyle (1).
Positive and superlative. Alfieri on French. Kossuth
on English and French soldier. Man must be rich
in manners. Subjectiveness ; Governor Reynolds ;
Thought explains man. View of England. Lord
Lyndhurst's remark. Integrity. England in Hamil-
! ton, Ontario. Savage Christians. Aunt Mary's bless-
ing. Niebuhr. Learn the steps. The European stock.
Nature teaches radiation ; museums mortify. The


xxi
CONTENTS
mighty Greeks. Landor. Tennyson. Rhyme and
Rhetoric. Quotation rightly used ; Burke's saying.
Common fame; The master-workman or the thinker
must furnish the transit. Common people uncon-
sciously value culture. Philip Randolph's surprise at
Emerson's Anti-slavery work. Have your gospel at
first-hand. Out-of-door thoughts ; the design above
the finish. Prima Pbilosopbia ; lamblichus, Proclus,
Porphyry, Heracleitus, Chaldæan Oracles. Memory.
Science inspired or dull. Percival. Passion. Nature
helps man to express thought. Jove and Phæbus.
The unanswerable answer. Webster and the judge ;
confidence and power in court. House-hunting ;
search for solitude. Culture for results : everything
teaches ; take steps in order. Milton's reserve; flat-
tery in dedications. The loved one's foreignness. Im-
provisation. Channing's poetry. Verses from Ritson.
Hafiz on the sonnet. The thin stream of thought in
the world. The believer. Life expensive. Idealist.
Bias. Tonic opposition. English of XVI and XVII
centuries. Englishman's pocket. Anecdotes of New-
ton. Nature shows everything once in the large. 514-546
Identities for Intellect. Rig Veda Sanhita ; Prayers to
Agni, the Maruts and Aswins. Varuna. Vishnu's three
steps. Behmen on the stars. Cants here and abroad.
Old and modern English writers. Our untrained eyes.
Jacob Behmen. Write what you know. Our leading
men. Attitude towards Death of different men.
Greenough on influence of climate. Niebuhr on Man
and Country. Culture. Dismal Art. Illusion of
Earth. Niebuhr on many books. Sleepy Hollow.


xxii
CONTENTS
Schiller on burial. Cheerfulness. Native innocence.
Nature gives our weights and measures ; the compass.
Running. Statues help us. The Cid. Birthplace. Doc-
trine of Metamorphosis. The year-flower. Scholar's
weakness. Choate on English and Fox. Words-
worth's Royal Osmunda. Morals. Coleridge's influ-
ence. Louis Napoleon. Late at meals. The question
of Women's rights and interests ; they live in the
Kingdom of Illusion. Low stimulation. Fuseli on the
Greeks. The Church and other institutions of God.
Theories of Creation. Immortality ; Superlative.
Aristocracy, self-reliance, manners. Alcott's triumph
at the Conversation. Identical, oceanic Thought.
England's discreditable partnership with Napoleon
III. King Alfred. Tribal bias. Alcott's account of
himself. Self-occupation. Warped Science. Builder
and structure. Depression. Origin of “ stave" in
music ; Scandinavian custom. Thoreau's question.
The sky of Intellect, its priest; the lords of mind.
Thoreau on health of Intellect. Aunt Mary's amen-
ities. Moore's memory. Result, not artist, counts.
Good and Evil. Suggestion even from weeds. Heaven
is sense of power. Dangerous attraction of details.
Notes for Amherst address; the wealth, the light, the
distinction of thought ; the wise men call Ideas gods.
Memoirs of Moore. The new professions. Richter's
search. Sismondi; men of one idea ; thoughts few
because elastic ; nations of one book. The Amherst
professors. Bubb Dodington ; Aristocracy now dif-
fused. Story of Thackeray. Sydney Smith's opinion.
Melioration in fruit a hint on Creation. Illusion of


CONTENTS
xxiii
horse-chestnuts. “The Newness.” Age of Bronze in
England ; their scientific conclusions ; stupid univer-
sities accomplish something. [Some misfortunes of the
year.] Genius and talent. The mushroom-taster. Tre-
bellius on the Gauls. Real tests suggested for col-
leges ; hopes for live men there. Exclusion is for
cause. Skepticism. House of Commons. Rugged
constitution. Chicago viewed from Concord. Radia-
tion of manners. Hotel rules in Davenport ; the Mis-
sissippi. Leclaire the half-breed. Emerson's titles in
Iowa. Reading . . . . . . . . . 547-588





ILLUSTRATIONS
°WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING . . . . . . Frontispiece
From the photograph by H. G. Smith in “Poems of
Sixty-five Years,” edited by F. B. Sanborn.
'Margaret Fuller Ossoli........ 116
After the painting by William Hicks in the possession of
Mrs. Marion Low.
CHARLES King Newcomb . . . . . . . . . 396
From a daguerreotype.





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JOURNAL XL
1849
(From Journals RS, TU, and AZ)
[All page references to passages from the Journals used by
Mr. Emerson in his published works are to the Centenary
Edition, 1903–05.]
« Parcite, dum propero; mergite, dum redeo.” :
MARTIALIS.
[The opening year found Mr. Emerson at his
nornial winter task of lecturing, but refreshed
by his visit to England, Scotland, and France,
and the meeting with interesting men and wo-
men: also he had the sure pleasure found in
coming back to his family and near friends, and
in bearing his part as an American. In this
excursion he had found also what he sought,
1 Mr. Emerson loved to quote the verse in the Scottish bal-
lad « The Drowned Lovers,” the last lines of which are a
good translation of that of Martial: -
O roaring Clyde, ye roar ower loud,
Your stream seems wondrous strang;
Make me your wreck when I come back,
But spare me as I gang.
Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland.


JOURNAL [Age 45
“a whip for his top”; new experiences were to
be digested, to find their place in his work.
He gave a course in Boston, and lectures in
Roxbury, Cambridge, Worcester, Gloucester,
Framingham, Northampton, Providence, Port-
land, and smaller towns. Mr. Alcott had moved
to Boston, and did not return to Concord for
nine years.]
(From RS)
January, 1849.
The word God is the algebraicx.in morals, and
the Hebrews with right philosophy made it un-
speakable. But the stupid world, finding a word,
assumes this scientific for a baptismal name, and
talks of him as easily as of Captain Gulliver.
Circumstance. Napoleon said, “View man as
we may, he is as much the result of his physical
and moral atmosphere, as of his own organi-
zation.” – QUÉTELET.
Perhaps one of the most real advantages of
railroads, and now of California, to the peo-
ple of New England will be the knowledge of
geography which they diffuse. If a man is going
to California, he announces it with some hesi-
tation; because it is a confession that he has
failed at home.


1849) A MAGNET. GREVILLE 5
You tell me they are hospitable in Germany;
yes, but I do not travel to find hospitable peo-
ple. If I knew of any magnet that would point
to that quarter where are the people whom I
wish to see, I would sell all to buy it, and to travel
in the direction it indicated, though to Samar-
cand or Timbuctoo.
From A Treatise of Humane Learning.
Music instructs me which be lyric moods,-
Let her instruct me rather how to show
No weeping voice for loss of Fortune's goods.
Geometry gives measure to th' earth below;
Rather let her instruct me how to measure
What is enough for need, what fit for pleasure.
She teacheth how to lose nought in my bounds,
And I would learn with joy to lose them all.
The Artist shows which way to measure Rounds,
But I would know how first man's mind did fall,
How great it was, how little now it is,
And what that knowledge was which wrought us
this.
FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE.
Since to be reverenced, loved, obeyed, and known,
Man must effect with powers above his own.
LORD BROOKE, Fame and Honour.


JOURNAL
(AGE 45
All what the world admires comes from within;
A doom whereby the sin condemns the sin.
LORD BROOKE, Fame and Honour.
С
was
I saw on Saturday at Ward's the Ludovisi
Juno, which is again one of the miracles of old
sculpture, and indeed of human art, as unac-
countable as Shakspeare's drama. There was
never that face or figure in Nature, from which
it could be modelled. I am sure that the artist
drew from a cloud when he moulded these
features.
Then the Jove's head was a combed moun-
tain.
“Seculum boc bumanum non est seculum.'
“ Quatuor [tres] in bominibus distinxi condi-
tiones apertas evidentes. Est cui vita baec arcta,
quem gloriosa altera consequitur. Est cui vita
baec est excellens, ast postea non erit vita sequens.
Est qui utramque amittens, nec banc, nec sequentem
vitam, babeat.”. — Ali Ben ABU TALEB.
. 1 This human age is not an age.
2 Among mankind I have noted three obvious and evident
conditions:: the man who finds this life narrow, but followed
by another glorious one; the man who finds this life excellent,
but after it no other will follow; the man who, wasting both,
may have life neither here nor hereafter.


1849] SPIRIT OF THE AGE 7
Spirit of the age. Now that the man was ready,
the horse was brought. The timeliness of this in-
vention of the locomotive must be conceded. To
us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political
aid. We could not else have held the vast North
America together which now we engage to do.
It was strange, too, that when it was time to
build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a
shiproad, a telegraph, and, in short, a perfect
communication in every manner for all nations,
- 't was strange to see how it is secured. The
good World - soul understands us well. How
simple the means. Suddenly the Californian
soil is spangled with a little gold-dust here and
there in a mill - race in a mountain cleft; an
Indian picks up a little, a farmer, and a hunter,
and a soldier, each a little; the news flies here
and there, to New York, to Maine, to London,
and an army of a hundred thousand picked
volunteers, the ablest and keenest and bold-
est that could be collected, instantly organize
and embark for this desart, bringing tools, in-
struments, books, and framed houses, with
them. Such a well-appointed colony as never
was planted before arrive with the speed of sail
and steam on these remote shores, bringing
with them the necessity that the government
ec
vernmer


JOURNAL
(AGE 45
shall instantly proceed to make the road which
they themselves are all intimately engaged to
assist.
It was strange, too, that all over the world
about the same moment mineral treasures were
uncovered. We heard of gold in various parts
of the United States ; in Siberia ; in Africa on
the Lomat River; and in other parts of Europe.
Silver, quicksilver, platina, copper, lead, iron,
and coal, all appeared in new quarters about the
same time, i. e., in the year 1848.
Contradictions.
We remember that we forget.
Our freedom is necessary.
The preacher of eternity dates our chrono-
logy.
March 19.
Gravitation is the operator in what we call
mechanical division. Gravitation is Nature's
Grand Vizier and prime favorite. Much that
we call chemical, even electrical action, is really,
at last, his deed. Look at the sponge-like foli-
aceous forms which wet sand and clay take
when falling with the water, in spring, on the
steep sides of “the deep cut” in the railroad,
and one will suspect that Gravity, too, can
ne


1849] GRAVITY. DULL SCIENCE 9
make a leaf. In morals, again, Gravity is the
laissez-faire principle, or Destiny, or Optimism,
than which nothing is wiser or stronger.
That Nature works after the same method
as the human Imagination.
That Nature makes flowers, as the mind
makes images.
That metaphysics might anticipate Jussieu.
That organic matter, and mind, got from the
same law, so correspond.
C.
eas
Our science is very shiftless and morbidly
wise, wise when it is not wanted, blind where
we most wish to see. What a pother in the last
twenty years about geology! Geologists were
crossing all seas and lands, like so many squibs.
Well, why did not they find California ? They
all knew what all men most wanted. Why did
not they find the copper-mines? There is no
Columbus in these sciences with an anticipating
mind; but they are like critics and amateurs;
when the heel of a trapper's foot has turned up
gold or copper or quicksilver, they come and
give it a name.
March 24.
The Indians were a sort of money, it seems,
in Spanish colonies. And the poor Lucayans


10
JOURNAL (AGE 45
were treated according to the proverb: “The
kid was seethed in its mother's milk.” Colum-
bus seems to have been the principal introducer
of American slavery. See Helps's History of
the Conquerors of America and their Bondsmen.
Town and Country Club. At Alcott's last
Tuesday (March 20) we had a meeting of thirty
men, and discussed the expediency of a Club
and Clubroom. Alcott was festal and Olympian,
as always, when friends come; his heart is then
too great; his voice falters and chokes in his
throat. Every newcomer seems large, sacred,
and crowned to him. It was proposed that the
club should rent the room in which we sat (Al-
cott's), and that he should be declared perpet-
ual secretary.
It is much wanted by the country scholars,
a café or reading-room in the city, where, for a
moderate subscription, they can find a place to
sit in and find their friends, when in town, and
to write a letter in, or read a paper. Better still,
if you can add certain days of meeting when
important questions can be debated, communi-
cations read, etc., etc. It was proposed by Hale
and others, some time since, to form in Boston
a “ Graduates' Club.” This would be that.


1849) CLUBS. ENGLISH DRILL II
Then the ministers have a “Hook and Lad-
der,” or a “ Railroad Club.”
Enthusiasm is a fine thing, my son, so it be
guided by prudence, says the grocer; which is
like Ellery Channing's saying of C- , “Yes,
he would draw very well, if he had any talent
for it.”
April 1.
Imbecility and Energy. The key to the Age is
this thing, and that thing.'....
England. The striking difference between
English and our gentlemen is their thorough
drill; they are all Etonians, they know prosody,
and tread securely through all the humanities.
The University is felt. It needs that our peo-
ple should have closer association as scholars,
that they may have their grammar, gazetteer,
and Dibdin not so dusty and cobwebbed; and
I wish our Club to be dignified with literary
exercises.
May 3.
I set out in the Warren lot a couple of
pears, seedlings from my Bartlett, which I
budded myself. The best had died in the
i For the rest of the paragraph, see “ Power" (Conduct
of Life, p. 54).


12
JOURNAL (AGE 45
Heater Piece,' and these two poor old-looking
young things remained. Let us see if they can
thrive.
Teschemacher rejected the suggestion of a
quickness or scientific genius as being any sub-
stitute for constant industry in analysis and
experiment.
Martial gave me to think of the faculty of
writers. He can detach the object with unerring
taste, and knows he can; sees that the power,
perfect in him, differs infinitely from the imper-
fect approaches to the same power in ordinary
scribblers. It is chemical mixture, and not me-
chanical, which makes the writer. The others
have not intelligence enough to know they are
not writers. One thing more. Martial suggests
again, as every purely literary book does, the
immortality. We see we are wiser than we were:
we are older. Can Nature afford to lose such
improvements ? Is Nature a suicide?
seen
Macaulay. The historian of England or France
seems to be compelled to treat of England as
i The little triangle of land which Mr. Emerson had
bought near his home where the Cambridge turnpike leaves
the “Great Road” to Boston via Lexington.


1849) TIDES. DUTY FIRST 13
of an Englishman; the nation has a continuous
existence, memory, history in his head, knows
his rights.
Who buys Channing's house buys a sunset.'
It should be sold in a fair day; then the pur-
chaser gets rivers, mountains, villages, in the
bargain. I would not, if I owned that place,
sell it. I would hold on to it as long as I could
see.
I meet in the street people full of life. I am,
of course, at ebb tide ; they at flood; they seem
to have come from the South, or from the West,
or from Europe. I see them pass with envy at
this gift which includes all gifts.
ness
(From TU)
Valor pays rents as surely as land. Up heart,
and dispose of the day's duty first, and the div-
idend of peace and power will be paid. The
proverb of “Business before friends,” is God's
truth too.
The way to wealth of every kind is plainly
along the upper road, and not by State Street.
1 Mr. Channing at that time owned a house on the slope
of Punkatasset, north of the river below the old Hunt farm.


14
JOURNAL (AGE 45
Convert yourself into wealth, and you shall buy
kings. Sordid calculations convert you into
punk and abhorrence.
The doctrine that genius takes its rise out
of the Mountains of Rectitude— that all beauty
and power, which men covet, are born out
of that Humility egg which they disdain - is
alternately conceded and suggested. How we
love nobility! priest, poet, republican cannot
keep his eyes off it. Yet how rare! The whole
society and every member of it is first or last
adjudged to be “snobbish.” Why, because
every member is referring or looking up to
others, who, in their turn, are referring; and
only one in ten thousand is a person of elevated
sentiments whose condition flows from his char-
acter, — secure, serene, and his own friend?
From a better man than myself (I used to say)
I can easily expect a finer thought: from a
worse, I am incredulous. But that Better we so
slowly believe.
Plato suggested, after Pythagoras, thorough
culture. 'Tis pity our dismasted, rudderless
hulks drifting about on the sea of life should
not be taken into port. Pity that the Common-
wealth should not set its Horace Manns on


1849) PLATO. WORD AND DEED 15
applying the stern culture suggested in the Re-
public to the adults, and so keep them up.
When the school and college drop them, let
Plato take them up, and life would no longer
be forlorn, and they left to the stock quotations
by day, and cards at night.
I was about to add just now, in speaking of
Morals as the foundation of nobility, that we
do with that as our farmers, who carry all their
best peaches and apples to market and feed
their families with the refuse. We parade our
nobilities in poems, instead of working them up
into happiness. Then we must bring the day
about with draff and prose.
Feats. He wrote a fair hand and he could
draw the same lines in capitals with his skates
on the ice.
Giotto, the painter, could draw with his pen
a perfect circle. Tu sei piu tondo che l'O di
Giotto.
Mr. Sylvester told me that Farie, the engi-
neer, could draw a model of any loom or ma-
chine, after once seeing it. He went through
Mr. Strutt's mills, and drew from memory de-
signs of the machinery, which were printed in


16
JOURNAL
[AGE 45
Rees's Cyclopædia, to the great indignation of
Mr. Strutt.
Swedenborg. I look on Swedenborg as on
Kant, Newton, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt,
men of a larger stature than others, and possess-
ing very great advantages in that preternatural
size. He and Newton were both cracked or
bursten; yet 't is easier to see the reflection of
the sphere in globes of this magnitude, cracked
or not, than in the common minute globe.
One must study Quételet to know the limits
of human freedom. In 20,000 population, just
so many men will marry their grandmothers.' ...
Clough's beautiful poem I read again last in
the sitting-room. 'T is a kind of new and better
Carlyle; the Homeric Iteration is one secret;
the truly modern question and modern treat-
ment another; and there is abundance of life
and experience in it. Good passages are, the
prayer to the sun and moon and hours to pass
slowly over Philip and Elspie; and good youth
in it, as Elizabeth Hoar says.
i Passages which follow are printed in “ Fate" (Conduct
of Life, p. 18).


1849) REALISM. FINISHERS 17
The wisdom of words every day might sur-
prise us. After a man has made great progress,
and has come, as he fancies, to heights hitherto
unscaled, the common words still fit his thought;
nay, he only now finds for the first time how
wise they were ; — “Macrocosm,” Reason, Con-
science, Substance, Accidence, Nature, Relation,
Fortune, Fate, Genius, Element, Person; — 't will
be long before he needs a new coat.
The old mythology still serves us, not of
Jove, Mars, etc., but of Nature, Destiny, For-
tune. Words therefore seem wiser than any man,
and to be tools provided by the Genius of Hu-
manity. After the student has wasted all night
speculating on his analogies and ties to the world
and to the starry heaven, the first words he meets
in the morning book are microcosm, macrocosm.
Realism. Do it. Bridge the gulf well and
truly from edge to edge, and the dunces will
find it out. There is but one verdict needful,
and that is mine; if I do it, I shall know it.
Happy is he who finishes his work for its
own sake; and the state and the world is happy
that has the most of such Finishers. The world
will do justice to such. It cannot otherwise : but


18
(AGE 45
JOURNAL
never on the day when the work is newly done
and presented. Every man settles his own rate.
Realism. One would think, from the talk of
men, that riches and poverty were a great mat-
ter, — whilst they are really a thin costume,'
and our life, the life of all of us, is identical.
For we transcend circumstance continually, and
taste the real quality of existence; as, in our
employments, which only differ in the manipu-
lation, but express the same laws; or, in our
thoughts, which wear no broadcloth, and taste
no ice creams. We see God face to face every
hour and know the savor of Nature.
Days. There is the least deliberation in our
life. We worry through the world, and do not
unfold ourselves with leisure and dignity, and
adorn our days suitably. Especially I observe
that we have not learned the art to avail our-
selves of the virtues and powers of our com-
panions. The day is gloomy with politics or
bitter with debt.
Common sense is the wick of the candle.
Intellect. Descartes being asked, where was
i See Electra, in Potter's Euripides (R. W. E.'s note).


1849] THOUGHTS. BEAUTY 19
his library, showed a calf which he was dissect-
ing, and said, “This is my library.".
· We may well ask, “What is the effect of
thoughts?” Hafiz very properly inquires, -
“Why changes not the inner mind
Violet earth into musk?”
“ Dürer's pencil, which first knew
The laws of faces, and then faces drew.”
Reason of the aversation from metaphysics is
the voice of Nature. Nature made the eye to
see other things, but not itself. If you have
sharp eyes, use them, not brag of them.
Beauty. “Things that are natural are never
without a certain grace and excellence. The
cracks and rents of a well-baked loaf induce a
desire to partake of it. So likewise the cleft fig,
the luscious olive, the spiked grain,” etc. —
Marcus AntonINUS.
OSS
Those who painted angels and nativities and
descents from the cross were also writing bio-
graphies and satires, though they knew it not.
The history of humanity is no hopping squib,


20
JOURNAL (AGE 46
but all its discoveries in science, religion, and art,
consecutive and correlated.
“I had rather go a-fishing,” said the chimney-
sweep at Marblehead, — when it was proposed
to abate his price a little, - and enraged the
whole town.
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers
broach this question they begin to quote. I
hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
May 25.
Two gravestones have been planted in my
path within the year, Ellen Hooper's and David
Scott's.' Ellen Hooper connected herself with
all the noblest and most loved figures that have
cheered and enriched me in my own land (or
with all but one: my own Ellen she never knew)
and she gave a value by her interest in all my
writings.
Words. The collegians have seldom made a
better word than “squirt" for a showy sentence.
So I find “tin” for money always comic.
“Honey-pie,” says State Street, when there is
flattery ; “All my eye,” when any exaggeration.
1 The Edinburgh painter. 2 Née Miss Sturgis.


1849] WILKINSON. NEW CHURCH 21
In conversation the game is, to say some-
thing new with old words, and you shall ob-
serve a man of the people picking his way
along, step by step, using every time an old
boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old
place.
Wilkinson, Swedenborg's pupil, after one
hundred years a philosopher-critic with a brain
like Bacon.— Why not read in England? Are
there no mornings in England ? Do they read
Dickens when they first get up, as well as
overnight?
Swedenborgian church an imprisonment in
the letter; never a hero stirs out of it.
Ah, the Imagination has a flute that gets the
atoms of our frame in a dance like planets, and
once so flagellated, the whole man reeling
drunk to the music, they never quite subside
to their old marble.'
1 Compare the closing lines, in the Poems, of " Merlin"
II:-
Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,
Murmur in the house of life,
Sung by the Sisters as they spin ;
In perfect time and measure they
Build and unbuild our echoing clay,
As the two twilights of the day
Fold us music-drunken in.


22
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
Can't forgive Swedenborg the confusion of
planes.' We will pardon a popular orator for a
mistake in categories, but not a categorist, not
Aristotle, Kant, or Swedenborg. Has not the In-
tellect sins? Heshall be degraded out of Olympus
for a thousand years, and shall not eat ambrosia
for that term. Let him be tried by the law of his
tribe. High crime and misdemeanor, ...
Swedenborg was the last Christian.
Nearness. Really the soul is near things, be-
cause it is the centre of the universe, so that
astronomy and Nature and theology date from
where the observer stands. There is no quality
in Nature's vast magazines he cannot touch ;
no truth in science he cannot see; no act in
will he cannot verify, — there where he stands.
I conceive the value of railroads to be this,
in education, namely, to unite the advantages
of town and country life, neither of which we
can spare.'. ..
A great deal that is not set down in the bill.
1 Much that is omitted at the end of this paragraph is
printed in “Swedenborg" (Representative Men, p. 140).
2 The rest of this passage is printed in “ Culture” (Con-
duct of Life, p. 48).


1849) CHILDREN. ALCHEMIST 23
I pay the schoolmaster, but 't is the school-
boys that educate my son.
The children divide their waking time between
school, fruit, and the cats. I like to see them
learn the use of cats; then 't is worth while to
suffer a dog in the house a little; and after, be
sure to let them learn the use of horses.
The tree needs water, and digging about,
and pruning, and protection from its enemies
the slug, the louse, the borer, and so on. More
than all, it needs food; it will die without food;
if you want fruit, you must give manure. Well,
then, a pretty case you make out for the Culti-
vator. Well, it is not gainful, and yet it seems
to me much that I have brought a skilful chem-
ist into my ground and keep him there over-
night, all day, all summer, for an art that can
take common water and clod, and by means
of sunshine, manufacture the handsomest and
most delicious Louise Bonne de Jerseys, Bart-
letts, Bergamots, and brown berries, an inimit-
able manner which no confectioner can approach;
and his method of working is no less beautiful
than his result.'
I A portion of this passage is printed in “ Country Life,"
which is found only in the Centenary Edition (Natural
History of Intellect, p. 146).


24
JOURNAL (AGE 46
In the drought, the pear-tree roots murmured
in the dark, and said, they were sorely put to
it for water, and could not go on another day,
supplying food to the tree above them. But
there is the kind old master who so tended us,
and visits the tree daily; we hear his footsteps
every morn. If we could only give him a sign
of our condition. Be it so. I will instantly, said
the taproot, hang him out a signal on the high-
est bough of the tree, and we will see if he can
understand us. So the taproot ceased working,
and the top bough wanting food, drooped and
hung its head. The master, you may be sure,
was not long in seeing the withering of his fav-
orite, and, much alarmed, he ran in haste and
brought a water-pot and soon after a barrel of
water, and abundantly refreshed the roots, which,
thus restored, showed their good humor to the
very top of the tree.
“Your pears, which you raise, cost you more
than mine, which I buy.” — Yes, they are costly,
but we all have expensive vices; you play at
billiards, and I at pear trees.
Who climbs best? the monkey; no, the squir-
rel goes higher. No, sap climbs better, and will
go into the top bough, and to the last vein and


1849) RICHES. MARTIAL 25
edge of the highest leaf on the tree. Yes, but
a drop of water climbs higher, for look, there
is a cloud above the tree. Well, heat climbs
higher than water, and space higher than heat.
Riches. Neither will poverty suit every com-
plexion. Socrates and Franklin may well go
hungry and in plain clothes, if they like; but
there are people who cannot afford this, but
whose poverty of nature needs wealth of food
and clothes to make them decent.
Martial is the literature of Aristocracy. See
the famous epigram De Porsenna et Mucio
Scavola (Lib. I, 22). And now read this De
Porcia Uxore Bruti :-
Conjugis audisset fatum cum Porcia Bruti,
Et subtracta sibi quæreret arma dolor:
Nondum scitis, ait, mortem non posse negari ?
Credideram satis hoc vos docuissc patrem.
Dixit, et ardentes avido bibit ore favillas.
I nunc, et ferrum, turba molesta, nega.
Lib. I, Epig. 43.
“ Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus,"
says this ancient Herrick in the Ode Ad Avitum,
and all the English lyrists are much indebted


26
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
to him ; Herrick chiefly. Here is the original
Doctor Fell.
Ad Sabidium.
Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.
Martial, like Æsop, or Horace, or Homer,
or a Bible, shows that one book can avail to
touch all the points in the circle of daily man-
ners, and furnish a popular literature, -as well
as a hundred.
[Here follow many references to the Odes
of Martial, ending with this line in which Mr.
Emerson delighted as showing the elegance of
self-service, his own practice:-)
At mihi succurrit pro Ganymede manus.
“The wisdom and the arts of Athens form
in all polished communities a principal object
of study, and, to comprehend and to enjoy
them, is to be a gentleman.” — St. John.
June 20.
At our sad fire last night at the Old Court-
House and the store on the east side, which
burned the Court-House, James Connor found
a door among the chattels of one family, and


neans
1849] THE FIRE. ST. ANTHONY 27
carrying off that prize, he and Sam Staples :
protected their backs by means of it from
the scorching heat, whilst they directed the en-
gine-pipe against the ten-footer under the elm
tree. I had not seen a door perform such good
extra service since its famed feat of the cover-
let.'
At New York, (June 13, 14, 15,) I read
St. Anthony's sermon to the fishes, full of bon-
bomie in the idea and the expletives, but ludi-
crously inapt in some of the points, e. g., re-
minding them how much our Lord loved to
eat them ; but kindly considered in reminding
them how safe they were from rain, wind, dust,
and deluges ; not afraid of crevasses.
He should have reminded them of their few
duties, they have the vacation we men sigh for;
suggested a piscine philosophy in view of pike
and grampus, and not failed to throw in an ef-
fective hint of transmigration and ascent to the
i The admirable Concord citizen alluded to in an earlier
Journal as married by Mr. Emerson, and as jailer of Thoreau,
Alcott, and Lane.
2 The story referred to earlier in the Journals in which the
poor children wondered what “ the poor little children did
who had no door to lay on top of the bedclothes to keep
them warm.”


28
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
inconveniences of pantaloons and Westminster
Catechism one of these days.
In New York I saw Catherine Sedgwick,
daughter of Roderick Sedgwick; also Henry
James.
“For philosophy, O Socrates, is an elegant
thing, if any one moderately meddles with it;
but if he is conversant with it more than is be-
coming, it corrupts the man,” said Callicles. —
Taylor's Plato.
I think it a consideration of some import-
ance, that the Federal Union takes away from
its members the power of declaring peace and
war: so that, let Texas, and California, and
Minnesota, and Oregon, be never so quarrel-
some, once in the Union, their hands are tied.
July 1.
I find England again this summer in Macau-
lay's two volumes, as I found it, last summer,
in London. The same country of wealth, of
birth, of precedent, of decorum. The story is
told with all that ability which one meets so
abundantly in England, and in no other coun-
ime


1849) MACAULAY'S HISTORY
UNI
20
29
try, — full of knowledge of books, and men,
and customs, which it is creditable to know.
The story is quite full of bon-ton. It is written
with extreme diligence and is very entertain-
ing and valuable from the amount of good
information and curious anecdote, and really
has claims to be a history of the people of Eng-
land, as the author has studied to make it. The
second volume is far the best, the character of
James is so dramatically bad, and the character
and conduct of William so excellent. At last,
in the success of William, tears almost come to
the eyes. The persons and incidents are so fine
that it seems strange this period has been neg-
lected so long.
One sad reflection arises on all the course
of the narrative, of wonder, namely, at the de-
pravity of men in power, and at the shocking
tameness with which it is endured. One would
think the nation was all tailors, and mince-pie-
makers.
The writer has a great deal of talent, but no
elevation of mind. There is not a novel or
striking thought in the book,.not a new point
of view from which to consider the events, and
never one thrill or pulse of moral energy im-
parted. He is always a fine, artificial English-


30
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
man, and keeping the highway invariably; well
bred, but for sale (all dated Windsor Castle).
Here is good black blood, English pluck, but
no philosophy ;- a deal of pamphlets now well
bound.
I cannot get enough alone to write a letter
to a friend.' ...
Brag. The feeling of Boston and Massachu-
setts for a few years past has been like that of
the shopmen and of a village on the morning
of a cattle-show, or other holiday, which is to
bring a crowd of strangers into the town; every-
body is building booths, or arranging shop-win-
dows, or laying tables ; everywhere a small pan
to gather some rill of the expected silver shower.
So fuss Boston and Massachusetts on the eve
of a prodigious prosperity; and we build, and
plant, and lay roads, and set up sign-posts, to
attract our share of the general blessing.
In New York, they characterise our hats and
books and beauties as Frogpondish; but we, on
the other hand, pity the whole un-Cochituated
creation.
1 The rest, about hiding the house with trees, is in Society
and Solitude (p. 4).


1849) KENTUCKY. ORCHARD 31
The Kentuckian said that his country was
“bounded on the east by the rising sun, on the
north by the aurora borealis, on the west by the
precession of the equinoxes, and on the south
by the Day of Judgment.”
Mountain air better than gas or tobacco.
July 13.
Yesterday, the day before, and to-day, an-
other storm of heat, like that three weeks ago.
The day is dangerous, the sun acts like a burn-
ing-glass on the naked skin, and the very slugs
on the pear leaves seem broiled in their own
fat. Mercury 94º at 3 P.M.
When a man dies in Concord the neighbors
sum his epitaph,“ he was a good provider,” or
a bad.
I took my hoe and water-pail and fell upon
my sleepy pear trees, broke up the soil, pulled
out the weeds and grass, I manured, and mel-
lowed, and watered, pruned, and washed, and
staked, and separated the clinging boughs by
shingles covered with list : I killed every slug
on every leaf. The detestable pear worm, which


32
JOURNAL (AGE 46
mimics a twig, I detected and killed. The poor
tree tormented by this excessive attention and
industry, must do something, and began to
grow.
My pears and apples were well favored, as
long as I did not go beyond my own hedge:
butif I went down to Edmund's (Hosmer] farm,
his trees were three stories high, and high up
in the air hung a harvest of fruit.
Calvinism. 'T is curious that Swedenborg
should be entangled with Calvinism. 'Tis curi-
ous that all the great mathematicians, be they
never so grand, should be unable to pass the
materialism barrier. Newton is rusty with Cal-
vinism. Cuvier is calvinistic. All the science
of England and France is; all but Goethe and
Oken. Plato and Kepler only have united
geometry to the poetic spirit.
What to do with the stupendous old prig?
S
In Dante pleases the friendly conversation
with Brunetto Latino. — Inferno xv, 82.
Education.
... In la mente m'è fitta, ed or m'accuora
La cara buona imagine paterna


1849)
DANTE'S POWER
3,3
Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora
M'insegnavate come l'uom s'eterna.'
I think, if I were professor of Rhetoric,
teacher of the art of writing well to young men,
- I should use Dante for my text-book. Come
hither, youth, and learn how the brook that flows
at the bottom of your garden, or the farmer
who ploughs the adjacent field, your father
and mother, your debts and credits, and your
web of habits are the very best basis of poetry,
and the material which you must work up.
Dante knew how to throw the weight of his
body into each act, and is, like Byron, Burke,
and Carlyle, the Rhetorician. I find him full of
the nobil volgare eloquenza ; that he knows “God
damn,” and can be rowdy if he please, and he
does please. Yet is not Dante reason or illu-
mination and that essence we were looking for,
I “In my memory is fixed and now comes to my heart the
dear, kind, paternal image of you when in the world, hour
by hour, you caught me how man makes himself eternal.”
Mr. Emerson was reading Dr. John Aitken Carlyle's ad-
mirable prose translation of the Inferno, the original verse be-
ing given on the same page. From a letter to Carlyle, written
in January of this year, it would seem that Mr. Emerson
might have been helpful in having an American edition got
out by the Harpers (Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, vol.
ii, pp. 173, 174).


34
JOURNAL [Age 46
but only a new exhibition of the possibilities
of genius? Here is an imagination that rivals in
closeness and precision the senses. But we must
prize him as we do a rainbow, we can appro-
priate nothing of him.
Could we some day admit into our oyster
heads the immense figure which these flagrant
points compose when united; the hands of Phid-
ias, the conclusion of Newton, the pantheism
of Goethe, the all-wise music of Shakespeare,
the robust eyes of Swedenborg!
I think Hindoo books excellent gymnastic
for the mind as showing treatment.' ...
Passion is logical; and I note that the vine,
symbol of the Bacchus which intoxicates the
world, is the most geometrical and tractable of
all plants.
The Times. The cheap press and the univer-
sal reading, which have come in together, have
caused a great many translations to be made
from the Greek, the German, the Italian, and
the French. Bohn's Library now furnishes me
1 The rest of this passage is in “ Poetry and Imagination”
(Letters and Social Aims, p. 15).


1849) THE TIMES. TENDENCY 35
with a new and portable Plato, as it had already
done with new Goethes: and John Carlyle trans-
lates Dante. To me the command is loud to
use the time by reading these books, and I
should as soon think of foregoing the railroad
ne telegraph as to neglect these. With
these belong the Mediæval Chronicles, — Rich-
ard of Devizes, Asser's Life of Alfred and the
rest in Bohn.
A feature of the times is, that when I was
born, private and family prayer was in the use
of all well-bred people, and now it is not known.
Another feature of the age is the paramount
place of Natural History.
sons
e
S
Men-in-Nature. Some persons have such
determination or tendency, that, if by any heat
their particles could be set free, so as to obey
it, they would at once assume the forked or
horned or clubbed or scaly forms, which they
now suggest.
August.
Correcting manuscripts and proofs for print-
ing makes apparent the value of perspective as
essential to good writing. Once we said genius
was health; but now we say genius is Time.
This doctrine of results, too, from which


36
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
flows genius, also [appears ?] to be geometrical
and mechanical, or, that gravitation reaches up
into the sacred soul.
On the Rhine, Dr. Polidori said to Byron,
“After all, what is there you can do that I can-
not?” “Why, since you force me to say,” an-
swered the other, “ I think there are three
things I can do which you cannot.” Polidori
defied him to name them. “ I can,” said Lord
Byron," swim across that river; I can snuff out
that candle with a pistol shot at the distance of
twenty paces; and I have written a poem, of
which 14,000 copies were sold in one day.” —
Moore's Life of Byron.
Mr. Harrison Gray Otis said, “ that it was
of no use to tie up a woman's property; by
kissing or kicking, her husband would get it
away from her.”
The loves of Aint and iron are naturally a
little rougher than those of the nightingale and
the rose.
There is no remedy for the musty self-con-
ceited English life made up of fictions, hating


1849) THE ORIENT. PHILOSOPHY 37
ideas, - like Orientalism. That astonishes and
disconcerts English decorum. For once there
is thunder he never heard, light he never saw,
and power which trifles with time and space.
August 6.
Revolution is
“ lord of the visionary eye whose lid
Once raised, remains aghast, and will not fall.”
Nature never reproduces the fossil strata.
There are three degrees in Philosophy. Plato
came with geometry; that was one degree.
Plotinus came with mythology, Zoroastrian or
Magian illumination, etc., as exalted or stilted
Plato: that was the second degree. But now
comes my friend with palmistry, phrenology,
mesmerism, and Davisian' revelation : this is
the third degree; and bearing the same relation
to Plotinism which that bore to Platonism.
OW
CON
The French follow the course of rivers, the
English hug the seashore.
La France est capable du tout selon qu'il est
conduit.
i Andrew Jackson Davis wrote on the then new “Spir.
itualistic ” manifestations.


38
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
The French change their Constitution as often
as their shirt.
Will you spend your income, or will you
invest it?'...
It could not be said of Buna,' that she lived
entirely for her dinner, – though she was ten-
derly, patiently absorbed in that capital event
of the day; - no; for she was not less dedicated
to her supper, nor less to her breakfast. He had
studied her character imperfectly who thought
she lived in these. No; she wished to keep her
feet warm, and she was addicted to a soft seat,
and expended a skill and generalship on se-
curing the red chair and a corner out of the
draught and in the air, worthy of a higher seat
in heaven. Neither on these was she exhausted.
In a frivolous age, Buna was earnest. She
screamed, she groaned, she watched at night,
she waited by day for her omelet and her lamp
with smooth handle, and when she went out of
the house it was a perfect row for half an hour.
Buna had catarrh, pleurisy, rush of blood to
1 What follows is printed in «Wealth” (Conduct of Life,
p. 126).
2 This stands for a certain fussy visitor.


1849) MAGNET. SHAKSPEARE 39
the head, apoplexy, diabetes, diarrhea, sunstroke,
atrophy, worms, palsy, erysipelas, consumption,
and dropsy.
The magnet was thrown into Europe, and all
philosophy has taken a direction from it. Men
have studied its currents and got the vortex,
the spiral, and the polarity which now inundate
all thinking and all language, and end in the
charlatanism of Tractors, of Mesmerism and
Phrenology, Pathetism and Davis.
Shakspeare's fun is as wise as his earnest; its
foundations are below the frost; his is a moral
muse simply from its depth; and I value the
intermixture of the common and the transcen-
dental as in Nature.
Then also his knowledge of structure and
complexion ; — he knows what is in a blue
eye, and what is in an adust skin, and does jus-
tice to both. He is all pulverized into proverbs,
and dispersed into human discourse.
Greatness. The difference is immense to ap-
pearance certainly between man and man. Plato
i A portion of the above is printed in “ Art and Criticism,”
which appeared only in the Centenary Edition (Natural His-
tory of Intellect, p. 294).


40
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
.
or Swedenborg is just ready to make a world,
if he do not like this: he is Krishna.
It is no matter how fine is your rhetoric, or
how strong is your understanding, no book is
good which is not written by the Instincts. A
fatal frost makes cheerless and undesirable every
house where animal heat is not. Cold allegory
makes us yawn, whatever elegance it may have.
The Indian squaw with a decisive hat has
saved herself a world of vexation. The tragedy
of our women begins with the bonnet; only
think of the whole Caucasian race damning the
women to cover themselves with this frippery
of rye straw and tags, that they may be at the
mercy of every shower of rain. A meeting-
house full of women and a shower coming up,
—it is as if we had dressed them all in paper.
Put on the squaw's man's hat, and you ampu-
tate so much misery.
Yesterday a ride and walk with Thoreau to
Acton. We climbed to the top of Nagog Hill,
and afterward of Nashobah, the old domain of
Tahatawan and his praying Indians. The wide
1 Tahatawan was the local Sachem of Musketaquid, now
Concord. From him and the Squaw Sachem (his superior,


41
on
1849) NASHOBAH. SIGHTS
landscape is one vast forest skirted by villages
in the horizon. We saw Littleton, Acton, Con-
cord, Chelmsford, Tyngsboro, Dracut. On the
western side, the old mountains ending with
Uncanoonuc on the north. The geology is un-
like ours, and the granite ledges are perpen-
dicular. Fort Pond is a picturesque sheet with a
fine peninsula scattered, park-like, with noble
pines on the western side; Grass Pond a pretty
lake; Nagog seen from Nagog Hill is best, and
Long Pond we came to the shore of. These
four ponds dictated, of course, Tahatawan's lo-
cation of his six hundred acres. Also we visited
the top of Strawberry Hill, and a big chestnut
tree.
I thought the Concord Society should meet
and assign its business to committees; thus:-
Mr. Channing presented a report on Baker
Farm. Mr. Thoreau a report on Fort Pond,
the Cromlech, and the remains of a swamp-fort
near the Pond. Mr. E. called attention to the
dwelling in what is now Woburn), and other prominent In-
dians, Rev. Peter Bulkeley and Mr. Simon Willard bought
the six-mile square forming the original township. (See Mis-
cellanies, “ Historical Address at Concord,” pp. 36–38.)
A very interesting account of this transaction, also of the “ Pray-
ing Indians,” is found in Shattuck's History of Concord.


42
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
Ebby Hubbard Park.' Miss E. Hoar pre-
sented a bunch of Linnæa Borealis found in
Concord. Mr. C. read a paper on the folia-
ceous and sponge-like formations by spring
thaw in the argillite of the Deep Cut on the
Railroad;—and so forth.
There is something finer in our sky and cli-
mate than we have senses to appreciate; it es-
capes us : and yet is only just beyond our reach.
Tantalus must have finer senses.
The houses in Acton seemed to be filled with
fat old people who looked like old tomatoes ;
their faces crumpled into red collops, fatting
and rotting at their ease.
Eyes and no eyes. One man sees the fact or
object, and another sees the power of it; one
the triangle, and the other the cone which is
generated by the revolution of a triangle.
i Fine woods on the left of the Walden road but a short
distance from Mr. Emerson's house, the property of Ebenezer
Hubbard, a farmer-recluse. It was he who left money for
rebuilding the North Bridge at the Battle Ground and mark-
ing the spot where the Minute Men received and delivered
volleys.


1849) EUROPE. PLATO'S FAME 43
August 29.
Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.
Hungary, it seems, must take the yoke again,
and Austria, and Italy, and Prussia, and France.
Only the English race can be trusted with free-
dom.
The French proclamations are hysterical.
If I had a barn-yard fowl that wanted a name,
I should call him France. Never was national
symbol so comically fit.
le
Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or
on any specimen of the Socratic argumentation.
He is much more than an expert.' . .. For we
do not listen with much respect to the verses
of a man who is only a poet, nor to the calcu-
lations of a man who is only an algebraist, but
if the man is at the same time acquainted with
the geometrical foundations of things, and with
their moral purposes, and sees the festal splen-
dor of the day, his poetry is exact, and his arith-
metic musical. His poetry and his mathematics
accredit each other.
1 The rest of the long paragraph is printed in “ Plato"
(Representative Men, pp. 81, 82).


44
JOURNAL (AGE 46
I look upon the stress laid by Plato on ge-
ometry as highly significant.' ... Of course,
he cannot often find a reader; but of course he
ought to have written so.
Parker thinks, that, to know Plato, you must
read Plato thoroughly, and his commentators,
and, I think, Parker would require a good drill
in Greek history, too. I have no objection to
hear this urged on any but a Platonist. But
when erudition is insisted on to Herbert or
Henry More, I hear it as if, to know the tree,
you should make me eat all the apples. It is
not granted to one man to express himself ade-
quately more than a few times: and I believe
fully, in spite of sneers, in interpreting the
French Revolution by anecdotes, though not
every diner-out can do it. To know the flavor
of tansy, must I eat all the tansy that grows
by the wall? ... But if a man cannot answer
me in ten words, he is not wise.
Plato's vision is not illimitable, but it is not
self-limited by its own obliquity, or by fogs and
walls which its own vices create.
Plato is to mankind what Paris or London is
1 What follows is in “ Plato" (Representative Men, pp.
84-86).


1849] PLATO. WEBSTER. 45
to Europe. Europe concentrates itself into a
capital. He has not seen Europe who has not
seen its cities. Plato codifies and catalogues and
distributes. In his broad daylight things reap-
pear as they stood in the sunlight, hardly
shorn of a ray, yet now portable and report-
able.
Before, all things stood enchanted, — not
tangible. He comes, and touches them, and
henceforth any body may.
Doctrine of degrees. The excellence of men
consists in the completeness with which the
lower system is taken up into the higher.'...
Nature. In the last days of August, and the
first of September, the woods are full of agarics.
September 4.
Dante's imagination is the nearest to hands
and feet that we have seen.' ...
Webster. It is true that Webster has never
done anything up to the promise of his facul-
i For the rest of the paragraph, see « Sovereignty of
Ethics ” (Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 189).
2 What follows is printed in “ Powers and Laws of
Thought” (Natural History of Intellect, p. 49).


46
JOURNAL (AGE 46
ties. He is unmistakably able, and might have
ruled America, but he was cowardly, and has
spent his life on specialties. When shall we see
as rich a vase again ? Napoleon, on the other
hemisphere, obeyed his instincts with a fine
audacity, dared all, all; went up to his line,
and over his line; found himself confronted by
Destiny, and yielded at last.
I have many meters of men, one is, their
perception of identity. 'Tis a good mark of
any genius, a single novel expression of the
identity. Thus Lord Brooke's
“ So words should sparkes be of those fires they
strike."
Or Donne's
“That one would almost say her body thought.”
I hold that ecstasy will be found mechanical, if
you please to say so, or, nothing but an ex-
ample on a higher field of the same gentle
gravitation by which rivers run.'...
ar
Rhymes. The iterations or rhymes of Nature
are already an idea or principle of science, and
i The rest of the passage beginning thus is found in “In-
spirations" (Letters and Social Aims, p. 275).


1849) NATURE'S RHYMES. DAYS 47
a guide. The sun and star reflect themselves
all over the world in the form of flowers and
fruits; and in the human head, the doctrine of
series [appears], which takes up again the few
functions and modes and repeats them with
new and wondrous results on a higher plane.
How difficult to deal erect with the Days!
Each of these events which they bring, — this
Concord thieving, the muster, the ripening of
plums, the shingling of the barn, all throw dust
in your eyes, and distract your attention.' ...
Garden Diary.
August 15. Apricot Plums.
September 7. We are so late this year that I
picked the first muskmelons to-day, — four;—
to-day the first ripe tomato : and all the Bart-
lett pears to ripen in the house. The whole pro-
duct of my Bartlett at the corner of the garden
might count forty-five pears.
The Green Gages yield every day a supply,
and the two purple plum trees.
1 The rest of the paragraph, though beginning slightly
differently, is in “ Works and Deeds” (Society and Solitude,
pp. 173, 174).


48
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
To-day, too, we dig seven bushels of excel-
lent Chenangoes.
12th. To-day tomatoes for the first time on
table.
September is the month of melons: melons
last with us till 15th October.'
September 7 was published Nature, Ad-
dresses, and Lectures." Sent presentation cop-
ies to, — My Mother ; Lidian; Elizabeth Hoar;
G. P. Bradford ; H. D. Thoreau ; Mrs. Barlow;
W. E. Channing; S. G. Ward ; J. E. Cabot;
E. P. Peabody; O. W. Holmes; N. Haw-
thorne; William Emerson ; Edward Bangs ;
1 In those days, before the coming of curculio, wart,
borer, “yellows,” canker-worm and the recent moths, when
even the tent-caterpillar was rare, there flourished in the flower
garden below the house Sopsavine (Sops o'wine), early sweet
and sour apples, then Porters, and the delicate Queen Apples,
brought by Mrs. Emerson from Plymouth, Roxbury and York
russets; also Chelmsford, Napoleon, Seckel and Winter Nelis
pears, red cherries, plums (Apricot, Green Gage, two larger
purple plums and smaller “ Plymouth" plums), quinces, four
kinds of currants and two of gooseberries. By the south-east door
were two peach trees, and many young apple and pear trees
in the new acres.
2 Nature had been published in 1836 in a little volume by
itself. Now it was printed in a volume with the various ad-
dresses to literary societies and colleges.


49
1849)
ARISTOTLE
H. W. Longfellow; W. H. Channing; C. T.
Jackson; New York Tribune; Boston Post;
Daily Advertiser; Chronotype; Phila. Literary
World; Christian Examiner.
The Aristotelian method was the athletic
training of the scholars of the seventeenth cen-
tury, and a method so wide, and respective of
such universal relations, that our education
seems narrow, linear, and indigent. Aristotle
easily maintained his ground as master, by vir-
tue of this real superiority, until it was found
that his physics were unsound; then his meta-
physics were discredited, and he was tumbled
from his throne of a thousand years. But the
schoolmen were his pupils, and the Abélards,
then the Galileos, Descartes, Keplers, Grotiuses,
Harveys, Tschirnhausens, Malpighis, and Chris-
tian Wolffs, that preceded Swedenborg, show
their rough training. Like Roman soldiers they
were required to carry more weight in their daily
discipline than they would need in war. And
so, well born of stark Norwegian Berserkers,
and with this iron training, comes Swedenborg,
and shows a power of performance incredible to
the Dryasdusts of the present day. Nobody is
entitled to ask for new great men, who has not


50
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
tested his strength on this anthropometer.
Wilkinson is the only man I know who is
broad-chested enough to cope with him. Hum-
boldt and Goethe only rivals of their universal-
ity. The men of science, so-called, the scholars,
are fops by the side of these colossi.
True Brahmin in the morning meadows wet
Expound the Vedas of the violet;
Or hid in vines peeping through many a loop
See my plums redden and my beurrés stoop.'
Representative. It is my belief that every ani-
mal in our scale of creatures leans upward on
man, and man leans downward on it; that lynx,
dog, tapir, lion, lizard, camel, and crocodile, all
find their perfection in him; all add a support
and some essential contribution to him. He is
the grand lion, he the grand lynx, he the grand
worm, the fish of fishes, and bird of birds ; so
that if one of these tribes were struck out of
being he would lose some one property of his
nature. And I have no doubt that to each of
these creatures man appears as of its own kind;
to a lion, man appears the arch lion; to a stork,
the arch stork. He is the master key for which
I See “ Gardener,” among the Quatrains in the Poems.


1849) MASTERS IN SCIENCE 51
you must go back, to open each new door in
this thousand-gated Thebes."
It was fine when the paleontologist learned
that the frog's egg, on the thirteenth day, added
the gills; and on the fourteenth day lengthened
the tail; and then, referring to the fossils, showed
that this type of animals with gills must have
flourished in the thirteenth geologic age, and
these with the long tails in the fourteenth period.
It is clear that immense advantage comes from
a superior simultaneous survey of all the king-
doms of Nature. How different is the attitude
of Linnæus, Cuvier, and Agassiz, from that of
Leeuwenhök or our own Dr. Harris or Pro-
fessor Peck! the comparison of tribes and king-
doms and the procession of structure in sunfish
and mammal is open to one, whilst Peck and Har-
ris count the cilia and spines on a beetle's wing.
An individual body is the momentary fixa-
tion of a portion of the solids or Auids of the
universe. . . . The tenacity of retention must
1 Compare in the Poems (Appendix)
Day by day for her darlings to her much she added more, etc.
2 The rest of the passage is printed in “ Powers and Laws
of Thought " (Natural History of Intellect, pp. 27, 28).
Compare the same thought in “ Quotation and Originality"
(Letters and Social Aims, p. 200).


52
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
be in exact proportion to the rank of the idea
which the individual represents. So a fixed idea
is the unit of this.
Some minds are viviparous, like Shakspeare
and Goethe. Every word is a poem. Others are
oviparous, alive though incomplete;, and others
are like trees which leave seeds and fruits on
which the living can feed.'
Christ. Modern philosophy has not yet at-
tempted the portrait of the Blessed Jew, that
wonderful youth who fascinated Asia and Eu-
rope. Swedenborg has attempted it, but he is
obviously not the person to do it. He showed
his incapacity by binding himself hand and foot,
and flinging himself at his feet by way of first
salutation.
The highest compliment that can be con-
ferred, ...
I figure to myself the world as a hollow tem-
ple, and every individual mind as an exponent
i Compare « Powers and Laws of Thought” (Natural
History of Intellect, p. 18).
2 See Uses of Great Men”(Representative Men, p. 16).


1849] THE TEMPLE. AUNT MARY 53
of some sacred part therein, as if each man were
a jet of flame affixed to some capital, or node,
or angle, or triglyph, or rosette, or spandril,
bringing out its beauty and symmetry to the
eye by his shining. But when the jet of light is
gone, the groined arch and fluted column re-
main beautiful, and can in an instant be lighted
again and vindicated.
Aunt Mary never liked to throw away any
medicine; but, if she found a drop of laudanum
here, and a pill or two there, a little quinine and
a little antimony, mixed them up and swallowed
them. So when she came to the tea-table-
“Oh, no, she never took tea”;— “Can you
get a little shells?” The cocoa came, and Aunty
took cocoa, because it was soothing, and put a
little tea in it to make her lively, and if there
was a little coffee, that was good for getting rid
of the taste.
I said that the least acceleration of thought
would add indefinite longevity to the man."
And we are to go to the best examples in each
faculty to take notes for the creation of the
complete brain.
1 See « Memory" (Natural History of Intellect, p. 108).


54
JOURNAL (AGE 46
What differences! Some men cannot see the
house till it is built, — cannot see the machine till
the model is placed before their eyes. Moody,
the machinist, when Colburn described any im-
provement to him, cried immediately, “Ah, but
it hits, it hits”; a fatal objection. Plato says,
“ Choose those who can proceed without aid
from their eyes or any other sense, with truth
to being.”
Well, now it seems as if this Plato's power
of grading or ranking all that offers itself at
sight was as good as a duration of a thousand
years. The reason why life is short is, because
we are confounded by the dazzle of new things,
and by the seeming equality which custom sheds
on great and small; we are obliged to spend a
large part of life in corrections which we should
save, if our judgment was sure when we first
beheld things. Plato is like those tamers who
have charmed down the ferocity of vicious ani-
mals, or who by some virulence or ferocity in
their own nature have terrified frantic madmen.
He looks through things at a glance, and they
fly into place, and he walks in life with the se-
curity of a god. It seems as if the winds of ages
swept through this universal thinking, so wide,
so just, yet so minute, that it is impossible that
C10US a


1849) FACE THE CONDITIONS 55
an air of such calmness and long maturity can
belong to the hasty, crude, experimental blotting
of one lifetime.
The celestial mind incapable of offence, of
haste, of care, of inhospitality, of peeping, of
memory, incapable of being embarrassed, incapa-
ble of discourtesy, treating all with a sovereign
equality.
To-day, carpets; yesterday, the aunts; the
day before, the funeral of poor S.; and every
day, the remembrance in the library of the rope
of work which I must spin ;- in this way life
is dragged down and confuted. We try to listen
to the hymn of gods, and must needs hear this
perpetual cock-a-doodle-doo, and ke-tar-kut right
under the library windows. They, the gods,
ought to respect a life, you say, whose objects
are their own. But steadily they throw mud and
eggs at us, roll us in the dirt, and jump on us.
Solitary Imprisonment is written on his coat
and hat, on the lines of his face, and the limbs
of his body, on his brow, and on the leaves of
laurel on his brow. He wrestles hard with the
judge, and does not believe he is in earnest.
“Solitary Imprisonment,” replied the Judge.


56
JOURNAL (AGE 46
Yet with some mitigation. Three times a day
his keeper comes to the window, and puts bread
and water on the shelf. The keeper's dog he
may play with, if he will. Bow-wow-wow, says
the dog. People may come from Asia to see
him, if they like. He is only permitted to be-
come his friend.
For good reading, there must be, of course,
a yielding, sometimes entire, but always some
yielding to the book. Then the reader is
refreshed with a new atmosphere and foreign
habits. But many minds are incapable of any
surrender; they are like knights of a Border
castle, who
“ Carve at the meal
In gloves of steel,
And drink the red wine thro' the helmet barred”;
and, of course, their dining is very unsatisfac-
tory. How admirable a university is Plato's
Republic; yet set X to read it, he would read
nothing in it but X.
For the conduct of life, let us not parade our
rags, let us not, moved by vanity, confess and
tear our hair at the corners of the streets, or in
the sitting-room; but, as age and infirmity steal


1849) OLD AGE AND STUDY 57
on us, contentedly resign the front seat and the
games to these bright children, our better re-
presentatives, nor expect compliments or inqui-
ries — much less, gifts or love — any longer
(which to expect is ridiculous), and, not at all
wondering why our friends do not come to us,
- much more wondering when they do,- de-
cently withdraw ourselves into modest and sol-
itary resignation and rest.
Believers give themselves most leave to spec-
ulate, as they are secure of a return: Nature
does not work for classes, but for the whole: so
she absorbs them, occupies the adult masses
with the care of providing for themselves and
their families, to the exclusion of every other
thought. Nothing but the brandy of politics
will wake them from their brute life. No song
of any muse will they hear. But it is plain that
the adults' education should be undertaken.
When our Republic, O Plato ! shall begin, the
education shall not end with the youth, but
shall be as vigorously continued in maturity.
We have in no wise exhausted the books. As-
tronomy invites, and Geology and Geometry
and Chemistry. See how Humboldt, and Agas-
siz, and Berzelius, and Goethe, and Faraday,
Use


58
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
and Brown, and Lindley, work! Let our state
be provided with proctors who shall drive the
old fellows to school. Let our games offer com-
petition and prizes, and let us keep the fathers
up to as high a point of aim as we do the child-
ren. Then you will have a state. Now nothing
can exceed the disappointment and despondency
of such of the people as have arrived at matur-
ity without marriage, in finding themselves ab-
solutely without proper task, and compelled to
be either brooms and dusters, or else drones
and gourmands. Yet Nature selfishly puts them
all to marrying and providing, and leaves the
exceptions (which she, to be sure, winks at) to
the care of higher power. I mean she always
lets higher power look out for itself, and, if any
soul has seen anything of truth, she knows it
will revolt against all this musty housekeeping
of hers and dedicate itself to sacred uses.
“ Every one for himself,” says Nature.
I look, then, at a soul, born with a task, as
happy.
In
Life. Some of the sweetest hours of life, on
retrospect, will be found to have been spent
with books. Yes; but the sweetness was your
own. Had you walked, or hoed, or swum, or


59
1849)
MACAULAY
sailed, or kept school, in the same hours, it
would have endeared those employments and
conditions.
Nature has taught each creature to put out
from itself its own condition and sphere,' ...
Macaulay again. Macaulay's History is full of
low merits : it is like English manufactures of all
kinds, neat, convenient, portable, saleable, made
on purpose for the Harpers to print a hundred
thousand copies of. So far can Birmingham go.
Macaulay is the Banvard' of English history,
good at drawing a Mississippi panorama, but
'tis cheap work. No memorable line has he
written, no sentence. He is remembered by
flippancy on one occasion against Plato and
Bacon, but has no affirmative talent: he can
write quantities of verses, too, to order; wrote
“ Lays,” or something. No doubt wrote good
nonsense verses at Eton, better than Virgil. His
chef d'æuvre was a riddle on the Codfish. That
was really good.
1 This and much which follows is printed in “ Fate"
(Conduct of Life, p. 41).
2 John Banvard of N. Y. painted such a panorama, cover-
ing half a mile of canvas and known as the “ Three-mile
picture.” He also wrote 1700 poems.
3 It appears, however, that Macaulay was prepared for the
University by private instruction.


60
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
October 19.
Charles Newcomb came, but we grew incapa-
ble of events and influences. He, too, turns the
conversation, if I try a general remark. His man-
uscripts which he brought were six years old, but
full of subtle genius. Intense solitude appears
in every sentence. They are soliloquies, and the
abridged stenographic wit and eloquence, like
that or better than that we are wonted to in
M. M. E. He is Brahmin existing to little use,
if prayer and beauty are not that. Yet he hu-
miliates the proud and staggers the dogmatist,
and subverts all the mounds and fortification
lines of accustomed thought; eminently aristo-
cratic beyond any person I remember to have
met, because self-centred on a deep centre of
genius, - easy, cheerful, condescending, - con-
descending to the greatest, and mortifying Plato
and Jesus, if it were possible, by his genuine
preference of children, and ladies, and the first
piece of Nature, to all their fame and sanctity.
If one's centrality is incomprehensible to us,
we can do nothing with him; we may as well
affect to snub the sun. One will shine as the
other. But though Charles's mind is unsounded,
and the walls actually taken out, so that he
seems open to Nature, yet he does not accumu-


1849)
CHARLES NEWCOMB
61
late his wisdom into any amounts of thought:
rarely arrives at a result - perhaps does not
care to — so that I say, It seems, instead of my
bare walls, your surrounding is really landscapes
and perspectives of temples: yet they avail no
more to you than if they were landscape paper-
hangings or fresco pictures of temples.
Will Fortune never come with both hands full ?
She either gives a stomach and no food,
... or else a feast
And takes away the stomach.
Henry IV.
Charles Newcomb. Ah, dear old Swedenborg,
and is thy saw good,“ The perfection of man is the
love of use"? And this fine luminary, brightest
of all, can ill conceal his dislike of a general re-
mark, spends his mornings at Newport all sum-
mer, in walking; his afternoons, “in society”;
and has read but one book, this year, namely,
an old novel. Dear Swedenborg, if you can catch
this American sprig, will you not whip him
soundly!
He had a fine subtlety like this, “ that, it is
not what thought is, but how he stands to his
thought, that we value in friendship.”
Shakspeare was “the farthest bound of sub-


62
JOURNAL (AGE 46
as
tlety and universality compatible with individ-
uality; the subtilest of authors, and only just
within the possibility of authorship.” Newcomb
is my best key to Shakspeare, and he is just
beyond authorship. The impartiality of Shak-
speare is like that of the light itself, which is
no aristocrat, but shines as mellowly on gipsies
as on emperors, on bride and corpse, on city
and swamp.
“I believe that there is no true theory of
disease that does not at once suggest cure." -
WILKINSON.
Big-endians
Little-endians
Plato
Alcott
Swedenborg
Very
Shakspeare
Newcomb
Montaigne
Channing
Goethe
R. W. E.
Napoleon
Thoreau
Concord. There is not a fox or a crow or
a partridge in Concord who knows the wood-
lands better than Thoreau.
Identity-philosophy makes swinging a chain'
every whit as good as a journey to Oregon, but
great is the illusory energy of Vishnu.
1 Thoreau was the local surveyor.


race
1849] DÆMONS. THE ROADSIDE 63
I supposed the landscape to be full of a race
of Dæmons who move at a faster rate than men,
- so fast as just to escape our organ of sight.
Michael Angelo paints with more will; Raf-
faelle, with the obedience of water and flame.
Everybody would paint like Raffaelle, if the
power of painting were added to everybody.
Once more, as I have somewhere written, he
who addresses himself to modes or wants that
can be dispensed with, goes out of fashion,
builds his house off the road. But he who ad-
dresses himself to problems that every man
must come to solve, builds his house on the
road, and every man must come to it. Jesus's
problems are mine, and therefore to Jesus and
through Jesus must we go, and Swedenborg had
the like wisdom.
Nature pays no respect to those who pay any
respect to her, was H. J.'s' doctrine.
Symbolism. What I want to know is, the
meaning of what I do; believing that any of
- Henry James ?


64
[AGE 46
JOURNAL
my current Mondays or Tuesdays is Fatebook
for me; and believing that hints and telegraphic
signals are arriving to me every moment out of
the interior eternity. I am tormented with impa-
tience to make them out. We meet people who
seem to overlook our game, and read us with
a smile, but they do not tell us what they read.
This is one kind of symbolism. A more lim-
ited one is Swedenborg's fancy that certain books
of Scripture were exact allegories, or written in
the angelic and ecstatic speech, as other books
are not.
To what purpose dark ages and barbarous
Irish, if I know, as I know, five or six men,
without hardly going out of my village, to
whom and with whom all is possible; who re-
store to me Plato, Shakspeare, Montaigne, Hin-
doo cosmology, yea, Buddh himself, with their
audacious intellectual adventure ?
(From AZ)
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before,
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.
H. D. THOREAU.
i From Inspiration, perhaps Thoreau's finest poem.


1849) NOVEMBER WALK 65
Hunc solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis
Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla
Imbuti spectant.
HORACE (Epistola vi, Lib. I).
OV
November 17.
Yesterday saw the fields covered with cob-
webs in every direction, on which the wake of
the setting sun appeared as on water. Walked
over hill and dale with Channing, who found
wonders of colour and landscape everywhere, but
complained of the want of invention. “Why,
they had frozen water last year; why should
they do it again? Therefore it was so easy to
be an artist, because they do the same thing
always," and therefore he only wants time to
make him perfect in the imitation. “And I be-
lieve, too, that pounding is one of the secrets.”
All summer, he gets water au naturel, and, in
winter, they serve it up artistically in this crys-
tal johnny-cake.
Channing thought the cause of cows was, that
they made good walking where they fed.
1 There be those who see this sun, and stars and seasons
passing in their appointed times, unmoved by fear.


JOURNAL
(AGE 46
1
Roomy Eternity
Casts her schemes rarely,
And a rounded age allows
To every quality and part
In the multitudinous
And many-chambered heart.
Poet of poets
..Is Time the distiller;
· Time the refiner,
He hath a vitriol
Which can dissolve
Towns into melody.
Burn up the libraries,
Down with the colleges,
Raze the foundations,
Drive out the doctors,
Rout the philosophers,
Harry the critics,
Men of particulars,
Narrowing niggardly
Something to nothing;
All their ten thousand ways
End in the Néant.
All through the countryside
Rush locomotives;


1849)
THE BLESSED POET
67
Prospering grocers
Poring on newspapers
Over their shop-fires
Settle the state.
But for the poet, —
Seldom in centuries
Comes the well-tempered
Musical man.
He is the waited-for,
He is the complement
Of one man and all men.
The random wayfarer
Thinks the poet of his kin;
This is he that should come,
Tongue of the secret,
Key of the caskets
Of past and of future.
Sudden, the lustre
That hovered round cities,
Round closets of power,
Or chambers of commerce,
Round banks, or round beauties,
Or state-rending factions,
Has quit them, and perches
Well pleased on his form.
The poet received
Foremost of all
Badge of nobility,


68
JOURNAL
[AGE 46
Charter of earth,
Free of the city,
Free of the field,
Knight of each order,
Mate of each class,
Fellow of monarchs,
And, what is better,
Fellow of all men.
II
But over all his crowning grace,
Wherefor thanks God his daily praise,
Is the purging of his eye
To see the people of the sky.
From blue mount and headland dim
Friendly hands stretch forth to him;
Him they beckon, him advise
Of heavenlier prosperities,
And a more excelling grace.
And a truer bosom-glow
Than the wine-fed feasters know.
They turn his heart from lovely maids
And make the darlings of the earth
Swainish, coarse, and nothing worth,
Teach him gladly to postpone
Pleasures to another stage
Beyond the scope of human age,
Freely as task at eve undone
Waits unblamed to-morrow's sun.


1849) INTELLECT. GERMANY 69
Intellect. An affirmative talent is always safe.
The critics may do their worst; it is victory.
WOI
As for Germany, we have had no interest in
it since the death of Goethe. All kinds of power
usually develop themselves at the same time,
and I look in the most active race for the ideal-
ism. The Americans went to Heidelberg to find
Germany, and discovered with surprise that they
had left it behind them in New York. Mr.
Scherb' attempted last night to unfold Hegel
for me, and I caught somewhat that seemed
cheerful and large, and that might, and probably
did, come by Hindoo suggestion. But all ab-
stract philosophy is easily anticipated, - it is so
structural, or necessitated by the mould of the
human mind. Schelling said, “the Absolute is
the union of the Ideal and the Real.”
The world, the universe, is a gigantic flower,
- but the flower is one function or state of the
plant, and the world but a stage or state of the
Pan. As I have written long ago, the universe
is only in transit, or, we behold it shooting the
gulf from the past to the future.
1 Emmanuel Vitalis Scherb, a German patriot, exile or
refugee, who lived for perhaps a year in Concord.


70
JOURNAL
[AGE 46
Alcott is like a slate pencil which has a sponge
tied to the other end, and, as the point of the
pencil draws lines, the sponge follows as fast, and
erases them. He talks high and wide, and ex-
presses himself very happily, and forgets all he
has said. If a skilful operator could introduce a
lancet and sever the sponge, Alcott would be
the prince of writers.
erases
Goethe. Angel song and chorus at opening
of Faust is magazine or “squirt” poetry.
Goethe, as a man who wished to make the most
of himself, was right in avoiding the horrors.
an
I sent Chapman orders to send copies of
Representative Men'to T. Carlyle; J. A. Car-
lyle; Earl of Lovelace; 'Arthur Helps; Mrs.
Paulet; W. E. Forster; John Forster; Arthur
H. Clough; Miss Ellen Randall ; Dr. Samuel
Brown, Edinburgh ; Edwin Field; J. J. G. Wil-
kinson. I must add to the list by the next
steamer, Miss Martineau; Dr. Jacobson (later
Bishop of Chester]; C. E. Rawlins, Jr. ; John
Kenyon, Esq.
1 The book was apparently not actually published until
January 1, 1850, and sheets printed here were sent to Chap-
man to come out simultaneously in London.


1849] REPRESENTATIVE MEN 71
* Many after thoughts, as usual, with my print-
ing, come just a little too late; and my new
book seems to lose all value from their omis-
sion. Plainly one is the justice that should have
been done to the unexpressed greatness of the
common farmer and laborer. A hundred times
I have felt the superiority of George, and Ed-
mund, and Barrows, and yet I continue the
parrot echoes of the names of literary notabil-
ities and mediocrities, which, bring them (if
they dared) into presence of these Concord and
Plymouth Norsemen, would be as uncomfort-
able and ridiculous as mice before cats. ...
It is rare to have the hero and professor
united as in Montaigne, or, I might say, churl
and professor. I value Hyde and Therien be-
cause X would shrivel in their presence; they
solid and unexpressed, he expressed into gold-
leaf. And yet the whole human race agree to
value a man precisely in proportion to his
power of expression, and to the most expressive
man that has existed, namely, Shakspeare, they
have awarded the highest place.
Day laborers, the latter, a Canadian wood-chopper cele-
brated by Thoreau in Walden.
2 A man of some eminence in society and letters in Boston
at that time.


72
JOURNAL (AGE 46
Then again I have to regret that I have not
stated of Swedenborg the most important de-
fect, this, namely, that he does not awaken the
sentiment of piety. Behmen does; St. Bernard
does; Thomas à Kempis, Herbert, and that
Moravian hymn-maker do.
December 14.
Every day shows a new thing to veteran
walkers. Yesterday reflections of trees in the
ice: snowflakes, perfect rowels, on the ice;
beautiful groups of icicles all along the eastern
shore of Flint's Pond, in which, especially
where encrusting the bough of a tree, you
have the union of the most flowing with the
most fixed. Ellery all the way squandering his
jewels as if they were icicles, sometimes not
comprehended by me, sometimes not heard.
How many days can Methusalem go abroad
and see somewhat new? When will he have
counted the changes of the kaleidoscope ?
mers
-
Farmers. When I see one of our young farm-
ers in Sunday clothes, I feel the greatest re-
spect for and joy in them, because I know
what powers and utilities are so meekly worn.
What I wish to know, they know, what I would


1849] BRAVE FARMER. ENGLAND 73
so gladly do, they can do. The cold, gloomy
day, the rough, rocky pasture, the swamps, are
invitations and opportunities to them. And
yet there is no arrogance in their bearing, but
a perfect gentleness, though they know how to
take care of cattle, how to raise and cure and
keep their crops. Why a writer should be vain,
and a farmer not, though the writer admires the
farmer, and the farmer does n't admire the
writer, does not appear.
England. The dinner, the wine, the homes
of England look attractive to the traveller, but
they are the poor utmost that illiberal wealth
can perform. Alas! the halls of England are
musty, the land is full of coal-smoke and car-
pet-smell: not a breath of mountain air dilates
the languishing lungs, — and the Englishman
gets his amends by weaving his web very fine:
he is bold and absolute in his narrow circle ;
he is versed in all his routine, sure, and elegant;
his stories are good, his sentences solid, and all
his statesmen, lawyers, men of letters, and poets,
finished and solid as the pavement.
Rich and poor. The rich man has twelve
hundred acres of land; the poor man has the .


74
JOURNAL
[AGE 46
universe, and much has he to say of it. But when
he, too, comes to hold twelve hundred acres,
we never hear any more about the universe.
Like the New England soil, my talent is
good only whilst I work it. If I cease to task
myself, I have no thoughts. This is a poor
sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is
the generous and spontaneous soil which flow-
ers and fruits at all seasons.
Superlative. People like exaggerated events,
and activity, — like to run to a house on fire,
to a murder, an execution ;- like to tell of a
bankruptcy, of a death, of a crime, or of an en-
gagement. They like a rattling town, where
a great deal of business is done. The student
shuns all this. They like to be in a state of ex-
aggeration. Of course, manly greatness consists
in being so much that the mere wash of the sea,
the observed passage of the stars, or the almost
beard current of time, is event enough and the
full soul cries, Let not the noise of what you
call events disturb me !
Here is a right bit of Ellery Channing :
“Helps's book called Friends in Council is


1849] THE GENTLEMAN 75
inexpressibly dull. In this manufacture, the
modern English excel. Witness their Taylors,
Wordsworths, Arnolds, and Scotts (not Wal-
ter). Wise, elegant, moderate, and cultivated,
yet unreadable.”
Ellery says of Thoreau, “His effects can all
be produced by cork and sand: but the sub-
stance that produces them is godlike and di-
vine.”
Natural Aristocracy. It is a vulgar error to
suppose that a gentleman must be ready to fight.
The utmost that can be demanded of the gen-
tleman is that he be incapable of a lie. There is
a man who has good sense, is well informed,
well read, obliging, cultivated, capable, and has
an absolute devotion to truth. He always means
what he says, and says what he means, however
courteously. You may spit upon him ;— no-
thing could induce him to spit upon you, -
no praises, and no possessions, no compulsion
of public opinion. You may kick him ; - he
will think it the kick of a brute: but he is not
a brute, and will not kick you in return. But
neither your knife and pistol, nor your gifts
and courting will ever make the smallest im-
pression on his vote or word; for he is the


76
JOURNAL (AGE 46
truth's man, and will speak and act the truth
until he dies. He is the truth's Thug, and goes
willingly to ruin for his Thuggee. Is not he a
gentleman ?
Nature. Van Helmont's definition of Nature
is, “Nature is that command of God whereby
a thing is that which it is, and doth what it is
commanded to do.”
Duties are as much impediments to greatness
as cares. If a man sets out to be rich, he cannot
follow his genius; neither can he any more, if
he wishes to be an estimable son, brother, hus-
band, nephew, and cousin.
Neither is life long enough for friendship.'
'Tis easy to see that the people will get sci-
ence as well as [the?] state. Schelling's aperçu
and its statement was a forlorn hope, and all but
fell into the pit. Yet just on the eve of ruin,
Oken seized and made the most of it; of course,
he was ridiculous, and nowhere but in Germany
could have survived. Yet Hegel, a still more
robust dreamer, clung to this identical piece of
nonsense. Then it came rebounding to them in
i The rest of this passage is in “ Considerations by the
Way" (Conduct of Life, p. 273).


1849] GROWING IDEA. STALLO 77
melody from songs of Goethe, and, strange to
say, from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's Mémoires
to the Institute in France. Agassiz brought it
to America, and tried it in popular lectures on
the towns. It succeeded to admiration, the les-
turer having, of course, the prudence to disown
these bad names of his authors. The idea was
that the form or type became transparent in the
actual forms of successive ages as presented in
geology.
e are
Stallo.' Geologic strata“ whose suprapositio
in space is a sufficient warrant for their success
sion in time.”
“The configurations of Nature are more than
a symbol, they are the gesticular expression of
Nature's inner life.”
“The development of all individual forms will
be spiral.”.
“In the song of birds, the animal kingdom
celebrates its constitutional day with trumpets
and fifes.” — FEUERBACH.
I easily distinguish three eras.
1 Johann B. Stallo, born in Germany, published in Boston
in 1848 General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature.
2 Many other quotations from Stallo are given.
Stallo webby er ved in Boge


78
JOURNAL [Ace 46
me
'1. The Greek: when men deified Nature,
Jove was in the air, Neptune in the sea, Pluto
i12 the earth, Naiads in the fountains, Dryads
in the woods, Oreads on the mountains; happy
tseautiful beatitude of Nature;
: 2. The Christian : when the soul became pro-
nounced, and craved a heaven out of Nature
and above it, - looking on Nature now as evil,
- the world was a mere stage and school, a
snare, and the powers that ruled here were
devils, hostile to the soul; and now, lastly,-
3. The Modern: when the too idealistic tend-
encies of the Christian period running into the
diseases of cant, monachism, and a church,
demonstrating the impossibility of Christianity,
have forced men to retrace their steps, and rally
again on Nature; but now the tendency is to
marry mind to Nature, and to put Nature un-
der the mind, convert the world into the instru-
ment of Right Reason. Man goes forth to the
dominion of the world by commerce, by science,
and by philosophy.
Van Helmont's distribution is, Understand-
ing, Will, Memory.
Affirmative. “The soul understands in peace
and rest, and not in doubting.” — VAN HEL-
MONT.


1849] CHLADNI.' CULTURE' 79
The understanding transforms itself into the
image of the thing understood.
“Indeed, study for eternity smiled on me.”
Eloquence. Music. Chladni's experiment seems
to me central. He strewed sand on glass, and
then struck the glass with tuneful accords, and
the sand assumed symmetrical figures. With
discords the sand was thrown about amor-
phously. It seems, then, that Orpheus is no
fable: you have only to sing, and the rocks
will crystallize ; sing, and the plant will organ-
ize; sing, and the animal will be born.
Culture, the height of culture, highest be-
havior consist in the identification of the Ego
with the universe, so that when a man says I
think, I hope, I find, — he might properly say,
the human race thinks, hopes, finds, - he states
a fact which commands the understandings and
affections of all the company, and yet, at the same
time, he shall be able continually to keep sight
of his biographical Ego, - I had an ague, I had
a fortune; my father had black hair, etc., as rhe-
toric, fun, or footman, to his grand and public
Ego, without impertinence or ever confounding
them.


80
JOURNAL [AGE 46
un
[As in previous volumes, a few of Mr.
Emerson's favorite authors from early youth,
steadily recurring in the lists of the first vol-
umes (as Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne,
Shakspeare, Milton, Herbert, Swedenborg,
Wordsworth, and others), are not given in this
list.
In spite, however, of the frequent mention
of Plotinus, Proclus, and the other Neo-Pla-
tonists and of the Oriental Scriptures and
poets, these names will appear, as showing
when Mr. Emerson was reading them. Carlyle
and Goethe will also be mentioned. It often
happens that an allusion to an author or book
may be in a passage not included in the selec-
tions here printed.]
AUTHORS OR Books QUOTED OR REFERRED TO
IN JOURNAL FOR 1849
Desatir, or Sacred Writings of the Ancient
Persian Prophets;
Euripides, Electra (Potter's Translation);
Aristotle;
Cicero; Propertius; Ovid, Amores; Lucan,
Pharsalia; Martial, Epigrams; Marcus Anto-
ninus, Meditations; Saint Anthony, Sermon to
the Fishes ;


81
1849)
READING
Asser, Life of Alfred the Great; Saint Ber-
nard; Abélard;
Firdusi; Enweri; Saadi; Jelaleddin; Ammar
Asjedi of Merw; Hafiz;
Dante; Richard of Devizes, Chronicle of King
Richard; Chaucer; Thomas à Kempis;
Michael Angelo; Luther; Richard Edwards;
Eustachius;
Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke), A Treatise of
Humane Learning, Fame and Honour; Donne;
Ford, The Sun's Darling;
Galileo; Kepler; Van Helmont; Harvey;
Grotius; Malpighi; Henry More; Sir Chris-
topher Wren; Newton; Leeuwenhök;
Leibnitz; Tschirnhausen; George Powell, on
Fletcher; Boerhaave; Christian Wolff;
Linnæus; Winckelmann, History of Ancient
Art; Kant;Laplace; Goethe; Chladni, Acoustics;
Humboldt; Cuvier; Schelling; Hegel; Oken;
Teschemacher; Samuel Laing, Heimskringla;
Von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte der Schönen
Redekünste Persiens; Campbell; Moore, Life of
Byron; Keats; Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; Berzelius;
Webster; Miss Catherine Sedgwick; Prich-
ard, Natural History of Man; Herschel, on Stars
of the Southern Hemisphere; T. W. Harris, In-
sects Injurious to Vegetation ; Faraday; Antoine


82
JOURNAL (AGE 46
Jussieu; Lindley ; Lyell; Thiers, Histoire de la
Révolution Française ;
Macaulay; James A. Saint John, History
of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece ;
George Sand; Gervinus; L. A. Feuerbach,
Das Wesen des Christianthums (?) Lord Mahon,
Life of Louis, Prince of Condé; Theophile Gautier;
Agassiz; J. J. Garth Wilkinson, on Swedenborg;
Henry James; Jones Very; Theodore Par-
ker; Parker Pillsbury; Dickens ; Arthur Helps,
Conquerors of America and their Bondsmen; Lay-
ard, Nineveb; A. H. Clough, Borbie of Tober-
na - Vuolich; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre;
Froude, Nemesis of Faith; Thoreau; W. E:
Channing; Andrew Jackson Davis; Stallo, Gen-
eral Principles of the Philosophy of Nature.


JOURNAL
LECTURES NEAR AND FAR
PARLIAMENT ON THE TIMES
TOWN AND COUNTRY CLUB
WEBSTER'S FALL
DEATH OF
MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI
HIGHER LAW





JRNAL XLI
1850
(From Journals AZ and BO)
[The old year ended and the new began as usual
with Lyceum Lectures through New England.
Then followed the delivery before the Mercan-
tile Library Association in New York of two lec-
tures, on “ The Times” and “England.”]
AT
(From AZ)
January 13, 1850.
In ideal faces I notice unity of expression,
in portraits, variety and compromise, as if in
each individual were four or five rival natures,
one of which was now in the ascendant, and
compelled at certain hours to yield the lead to
the suppressed rival. Every man finds room in
his face for all his ancestors. Every face an
Atrium.
1 Mr. Cabot in his Memoir (vol. ii, p. 570) quotes
Nathaniel P. Willis's account of his first hearing Emerson at
one of these lectures, giving a remarkable description of his
wonderful voice and its effect.


86
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
New York, January 23.
What cunning magnets these boys are, — to
draw all the iron out of the hour!
[Here follows Mr. Emerson's version of Ni-
sami's Nightingale and Falcon, from the German
of Von Hammer-Purgstall, which is printed in
“Persian Poetry,” Letters and Social Aims, pp.
261-262.]
The two Statements, or Bipolarity. My geome-
try cannot span the extreme points which I see.
I affirm melioration, — which Nature teaches
in pears, in the domesticated animals, and in
her secular geology and the development of
complex races. I affirm also the self-equality
of Nature; or that only that is true which is
always true; and that, in California, or in Greece,
or in Jewry, or in Arcadia, existed the same
amounts of private power, as now, and the same
deductions, however differently distributed. But
I cannot reconcile these two statements. I affirm
the sacredness of the individual, the infinite re-
liance that may be put on his determination. I
see also the benefits of cities, and the plausibil-
ity of phalansteries. But I cannot reconcile these
oppositions.


1850) BIPOLARITY. MARRIAGE 87
I affirm the divinity of man; but as I know
well how much is my debt to bread and coffee
and flannel and heated room, I shun to be
Tartuffe, and do affirm also with emphasis the
value of these fomentations. But I cannot re-
concile that absolute with this conditional.
My ancient companion in Charleston, South
Carolina, Mr. Martin Luther Hurlbut, used to
reply to each statement of mine, “Yes, to a cer-
tain extent."
I am struck now and then with a passage
of poetry or prose, which, especially if written
some hundred years ago, amazes me by the for-
titude or self-reliance it discovers in the man
who dared thus firmly to trust his rare percep-
tion as to write it elaborately out. Such a piece
is Donne's Ecstasy. Another is Ferideddin At-
tar, the Persian poet's mysticism in the Bird-
Talk, which I find in Von Hammer, when the
three birds appear before the throne of the
Simorg.
an
Love is temporary and ends with marriage.
Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at,
ignorant of what it sought. Marriage is a good
1 Mr. Emerson's translation is given in full in “ Persian
Poetry” (Letters and Social Aims, pp. 263–265).


88
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
known only to the parties, – a relation of per-
fect understanding, aid, contentment, possession
of themselves and of the world, - which dwarfs
love to green fruit.
The English journals snub my new book; as,
indeed, they have all its foregoers. Only now
they say that this has less vigor and originality
than the others. Where, then, was the degree
of merit that entitled my books to their notice?
They have never admitted the claims of either
of them. The fate of my books is like the im-
pression of my face. My acquaintances, as long
back as I can remember, have always said,
“Seems to me you look a little thinner than
when I saw you last.”
The Times. That is to say, there is Fate; Laws
of the world; what then? We are thrown back
on Rectitude, forever and ever. Only rectitude:
to mend one; that is all we can do. But that
the world stigmatizes as a sterile, chimney-cor-
ner philosophy.
At Alcott's conversation on “The Times”
each person who opened his lips seemed in snuff-
ing the air to snuff nitrous oxide, and away he


1850) CONCERTED WRITING 89
went, — a spinning dervish, — pleasing himself,
annoying the rest. A talent is a nuisance. Each
rode his nag with devotion round the walls of
the universe; I found no benefit in this jar and
jangle. There was much ability and good mean-
ing in the room, but some persons present who
should not have been there, and these, like an
east wind, checked every growth.
Byron's life suggests that a partnership of
authors would have the same immense advan-
tage for literature that concert has in war, in
music, and in trade: Byron's, because in his
case, as in so many in mine, for example, who
am hardly a writer), his talent is conspicuously
partial, and needs a complement. But if one
with solid knowledge— a man of massive mind,
or a man of ideas, powerful generalizations, or
both — had united with Byron, with his un-
matched expressiveness, his heat, his firm duc-
tile thread of gold, a battery had been built,
against which nothing could stand. But in his
isolation Byron is starved for material, has no
thoughts; and his fiery affections are only so
many women, though rigged out in men's
clothes, garnished, too, with beards and mus-
tachios. They vapor.


90
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
It is well worth thinking on. Thus, if Tho-
reau, Ellery, and I could (which is perhaps im-
possible) combine works heartily (being fired by
such a desire to carry one point as to fuse all
our repulsions and incompatibilities), I doubt
not we could engender something superior for
quality and for effect to any of the thin, cold-
blood creatures we have hitherto flung into the
light.
February 19.
The Times. I am part of the solar system.
Let the brain alone, and it will keep time with
that, as the shell with the sea-tide.
We are made of ideas. Let the river roll
which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.
Let us be glad to breathe the great air, and,
if we are born in the geographical age, when
the Niger and Sacramento are explored, and the
North and South Poles touched, roads built,
seas sounded, and charts drawn, let us do these
with good will.
There is a curious shame in our faces. The
age is convict, confessing, sits on the anxious
benches.
We say there is no religion, no poetry, no
heroism, no rage ; death is unperfumed; age
of debility, correctness, levity, of the looking-
seas S


91
1850)
THE TIMES
glass. Not to be bruised by the bruisers, not to
despond in cities, is a mark of merit.
I hold that all the elements are ever co-
present, that what is once true is always true ;
that every day is the finest in the year; what
was background once is foreground now. You
say, there is no religion now.'...
Above, I have written of the necessity of
leaving much to the Supreme Geometer, nor
being annoyed if we cannot demonstrate the
theorem. We are sure that, though we know
not how, Necessity does comport with Liberty,
the Individual with the World, my polarity with
the spirit of the Times. We men are necessary
to each other, yet every one stands on the top
of the world, over the nadir, and under the
zenith. So the riddle of the age has always a
private solution.
Read in Goethe's Winckelmann our cheer-
ful, Franklin-like philosopher's friendly view of
the world. He is considerate and patronizing a
little, be sure, to the gods.
“ When the healthy nature of man works as
1 The rest of the paragraph is printed in “ Worship"
(Conduct of Life, p. 112).
2. This sentence is printed in « Fate" (Conduct of Life,
p. 4).


92
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
a whole; when he feels himself, in the world,
as in a large, beautiful, worthy, and solid whole;
when the harmonious well-being assures him
a clear, free joy; then would the universe, if it
could be conscious, exult as arrived at its aim,
and admire the summit of its own becoming and
being."...
I value the clergy [on the ground] that it is
the planting of a qualified man in every town
whose whole business is to do good in every
form.
The difference between the saint and the
scholar intellectually is that, whilst the scholar
too has many divine thoughts, he uses them to
a convenient and conventional purpose, for a
“Treatise,” for a “History”; but the other
not only has thoughts, but the copula that joins
them is also a thought.
“Knowledge subsists according to the nature
of that which knows, and not according to the na-
ture of that which is known.” — Proclus, Theol.
Plato, vol. ii, but original with Jamblichus.
I remember that when I read a lecture in
New York in which I inserted some notices of


1850) SAMUEL HOAR
93
Paule de Viguier, Mr. Bartlett in his bookstore
inquired where I found her story, and I having
forgotten what German book it was, he be-
lieved that I had invented them.”
Samuel Hoar, Esq. Mr. Hoar is and remains
an entire stranger all his life long, not only in
his village, but in his family. He might bow
and touch his hat to his wife and daughter as
well as to the President. He does the same
thing in politics and at the bar. It is not any
new light that he sheds on the case, but his
election of a side, and the giving his statuesque
dignity to that side, that weighs with juries
or with conventions. For he does this natu-
rally.
[In February was held, at 15 Tremont Place
in Boston, “A Parliament on the Times,” so
called on the card announcing it, evidently for
the purposes of gathering an audience for Mr.
i The lecture was ~ Beauty," and Mr. Emerson found
the charming story of this lady in a German book published
in Darmstadt, 1835, the Letters to Johann Heinrich Merck
from Goetbe, Herder, Wieland, and Others. In a letter from
Sömmering to Merck, the story rehearsed by Mr. Emerson
is told. Larousse, in his Encyclopédie, tells of Paule de Viguier
at more length.


94
JOURNAL (AGE 46
Alcott. A report of the first meeting, written
by Miss Ariana Walker, is given in the Memoirs
of Alcott, by F. B. Sanborn and William T.
Harris (vol. ii, pp. 414-418). A later meeting
was held at the Town and Country Club.]
[February.]
I would have a man of large designs use our
little Boston and noisy New York as suburbs
and villages, to try his pieces on, and find their
faults and supply a good hint if they can.'
Then let him take them to London or to Paris,
to whatever Rome his age affords him, and read
them tentatively there, too, not trusting his
audience much, since, “non è nel mondo se non
volgo," with a reference still to his ultimate tri-
bunal, namely, the few scattered, sensible men,
two or three in the world at a time, who, scat-
tered thinly over the ages, are called by excel-
lence posterity, because they determine its opin-
ion.
1 This was Mr. Emerson's custom. He used to say:
"When I tell a country Lyceum committee that I will read
a new lecture, they are pleased — poor men! They do not
know that the barber learns his trade on the orphan's chin.'
By the time that lecture, after long trying on, is given in New
York or Philadelphia, it will be a very different affair."


1850] EXPRESSORS. CARLYLE 95
Superlative. The talent sucks the substance
of the man. How often we repeat the disap-
pointment of inferring general ability from
conspicuous particular ability. But the accumu-
lation on one point has drained the trunk.
Blessed are those who have no talent! The ex-
pressors are the gods of the world, — Shakspeare
and the rest, — but the same men whom these
expressors revere are the solid, balanced, un-
demonstrative citizens who make the reserved
guard, the central sense of the world.
'Tis because he is not well mixed that he
needs to do some feat by way of fine or expiation.
On
Carlyle. Carlyle is wonderful for his rhe-
torical skill. This trick of rhyme, burden, or
refrain, which he uses so well, he not only em-
ploys in each new paragraph, suddenly treating
you with the last ritornello, but in each new
essay or book quoting the Burden or Chorus
of the last book — You know me, and I know
you; or, Here we are again; come take me up
again on your shoulders, – is the import of
this. He has the skill to make divine oratorios
in praise of the Strand, Kensington, and Kew.
... He contrives in each piece to make, out
of his theme or lucky expression, a proverb


96
JOURNAL (AGE 46
before he has done; and this conclusion of the
last is the exordium of the next chapter. "
It is not the least characteristic sign of the
Times that Alcott should have been able to
collect such a good company of the best heads
for two Monday evenings, for the expressed
purpose of discussing the Times. What was
never done by human beings in another age
was done now; there they met to discuss their
own breath, to speculate on their own navels,
with eyeglass and solar microscope, and no man
wondered at them. But these very men came
in the cars, by steam-ferry and locomotive to the
meeting, and sympathized with engineers and
Californians. Mad contradictions flavor all our
dishes.
Common - sense eloquence. Lord Mansfield's
merit is like that of Plato, Montaigne, Sam
Johnson, Socrates, and Shakspeare, namely, in
his common sense. Each of those decisions con-
tains a level sentence or two which hit the
mark. His sentences are not finished outwardly,
but are inwardly. His sentences are involved,
but a solid proposition is set forth; a true dis-
tinction is drawn. But Alcott can never finish a


1850] MANSFIELD. AUGUSTINE 97
sentence, but revolves in spirals until he is lost
in air. And it is true that Johnson earned his
fame. His reported conversation is up to his
reputation.
Lords Camden and Kenyon sneered at Mans-
field's “equitable decisions,” meaning thereby to
disparage his learning.
Saint Augustine. Of memory, admirable anal-
ysis (Oxford Edition, pp. 188-203) and with an
admirable conclusion (p. 202). “But where in
my memory residest thou, O Lord,” etc. And
“Too late loved I thee, O thou Beauty of
ancient days, yet ever new! too late I love
thee !” etc.
Seven years in the vat. Ellery Channing thinks
the merit of Irving's Life of Goldsmith is that he
has not had the egotism to put in a single new
sentence. It is nothing but an agreeable repeti-
tion of Boswell, Johnson, and Company. And
so Montaigne is good, because there is nothing
that has not already been in books, a good book
being a Damascus blade made by the welding of
old nails and horse-shoes. Everything has seen
service, and been proved by wear and tear in
the world for centuries, and yet now the article


98
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
is brand-new. So Pope had but one good line,
and that he got from Dryden, and therefore
Pope is the best and only readable English poet.
2
The Age. God flung into the world in these
last ages two toys, a magnet and a looking-
glass; and the children of men have occupied
themselves wholly with one or the other, or with
both. Swedenborg, Descartes, and all the phi-
losophers both natural and moral, turned them-
selves into magnets, and have not ceased to
express in every way their sense of polarity; —
Schelling and the existing thinkers most of all.
The most unexpected splendid effects are pro-
duced by this principle, as a cone is generated
by the revolution of a triangle. Religions, phi-
losophies, friendships, loves, poetries, literatures,
are all hid in the horse-shoe magnet; as galva-
nism, electricity, chemistry, heat, light, and Life
and Thought are at last only powers of this
fruitful phenomenon.
A single example occurs for a thousand. So-
ciety disgusts and the poet resolves to go into
retirement and indulge this great heart and feed
his thought henceforward with botany and as-
tronomy ;- behold on the instant, his appetites
are exasperated, he wants dinners and concerts,


1850) MAGNET AND MIRROR
scholars and fine women, theatre and club. And
life consists in managing adroitly these antago-
nisms to intensate each other. Life must have
continence and abandonment.
For the looking-glass, the effect was scarcely
less. Poor dear Narcissus pines on the fountain-
side. Colonel Frémont, on the Rocky Moun-
tains, says, “How we look !” and all cities and
all nations think what the English, what the
French, what the Americans will say. Next, the
trick of philosophizing is inveterate, and reaches
its height; and, last, Symbolism is the looking-
glass raised to the highest power. I wrote above,
“What I want to know is the meaning of what
I do; believing that any of my current Mon-
days or Tuesdays is Fatebook enough for me;
believing that hints and telegraphic signals are
arriving to me, every moment, out of the in-
terior eternity, I am tormented with impatience
to make them out.”:
Garrison is venerable in his place, like the
tart Luther; but he cannot understand anything
you say, and neighs like a horse when you sug-
1 Compare in the Poems (Appendix, p. 326) the lines
beginning, —
The free winds told him what they knew, etc.


100
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
gest a new consideration, as when I told him
that the fate-element in the negro question he
had never considered.
“So that the state only exists, I shall never
want anything,” said the great Condé, and paid
the army himself. - Lord Maron.
Au cæur vaillant rien impossible.
Abuse is a pledge that you are felt. If they
praise you, you will work no revolution.
Language is a quite wonderful city which
we all help to build. But each word is like a
work of Nature, determined a thousand years
ago, and not alterable. We confer and dispute,
and settle the meaning so or so, but it remains
what it was in spite of us. The word beats all
the speakers and definers of it, and stands to
their children what it stood to their fathers.
As far as I know, the misfortune of New
England is, - that the Southerner always beats
us in politics. And for this reason, that it comes
at Washington to a game of personalities. The
Southerner has personality, has temperament,
has manners, persuasion, address, and terror.
The cold Yankee has wealth, numbers, intellect,


1850) TIMID REPRESENTATIVES 101
material power of all sorts, but has not fire or
firmness, and is coaxed and talked and bantered
and shamed and scared till he votes away the
dominion of his millions at home! He never
comes back quite the same man he went; but
has been handled, tampered with. What is the
remedy? Plainly, I think, that we must borrow
a hint from the military art. The Hungarians
said they could have easily beaten the Russians
if in any manner they could have made them
run: but the Russian soldier is more afraid of
his officers than of the enemy: if he runs, he
will assuredly be shot: if he fights, he has a
chance of escape; and therefore he is cut down
and butchered, but dares not run. So let our
representative know that if he misrepresents his
constituency there is no recovery from social
damnation at home.'
IS
Majority. “The army of unright is encamped
from pole to pole, but the road to victory is
known to the Dervish.”
i In these months the debate on further concessions to the
South with regard to Slavery, including the infamous Fugitive
Slave Law, was going on in Congress, Mr. Webster, to the
consternation and grief of the friends of Liberty, justifying
its sacrifice on the altar of the Union.


102
JOURNAL [AGE 46
Intellect. Lagrange thought Newton fortu-
nate in this that the law of universal gravitation
could be discovered but once, whilst the dis-
coverer of the Cape of Good Hope had a rival in
the discoverer of Cape Horn, of Arctic sea and
land and Antarctic sea and land. And yet in
metaphysics there is no terminus, and therefore
no final discovery. Hegel or Oken or whosoever
shall enunciate the law which necessitates grav-
itation as a phenomenon of a larger law, en-
bracing mind and matter, diminishes Newton.
How many centres we have fondly found
which proved soon to be circumferential points !
How many conversations or books seemed
epochs at the moment, which we have now
actually forgotten!
0
e now
As I read of Wolsey yesterday, the Boy-
bachelor at Oxford (where afterwards he built the
beautiful tower of Magdalen College Chapel),
and his early success with the wise old Henry
VII, it seemed that the true distinction and
royalty of kings consists in this privilege of
having pure truth in business spoken to them.
They have the telegraphic despatch. No man
dare lie to them. For good account of Wolsey,
see Wood's Athena Oxonienses, 1, p. 666.


1850) SUPERSTITIONS. CLUB 103
These children of fashion have found no more
satisfaction in their element than the other ex-
perimenters, and they are sallying into our pas-
tures to see if (maybe) it is not there. I think
how many superstitions we have. Patrick Jack-
son did not go to college, and therefore never
quite felt himself the equal of his own brothers
who did. Dancing and equitation, which pov-
erty denied to me, I beheld in all my youth
with awe and unquestioning respect.
ve
Town And Country Club
Members, 1849.' Caleb Stetson; Hill;
T. Davis; Samuel Osgood; Charles T.
Brooks; Samuel Longfellow; George F. Sim-
mons; Francis Cunningham; Frederic A. Eus-
tis; C. Farrar; Thomas B. Mackay ; Henry
D. Thoreau; Nathaniel Gage; Thompson ;
Joseph Angier ; Thomas Starr King; William
B. Greene; James R. Lowell; H. W. Long-
i The editors have supplied the Christian names or initials,
where Mr. Emerson did not give them, in cases where they
were sure. It is doubtful whether all mentioned in this list ac-
cepted, but this is probable in the list of 1850. It is curious
that Mr. Emerson forgot to put his own name and Alcott's
with the others. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was probably
a member.


104
JOURNAL (Age 46
fellow; William A. Tappan; Le Baron Rus-
sell; Samuel Gray Ward; George B. Emerson ;
Samuel K. Lothrop; George P. Bradford ;
T. Lee; G. Russell ; Edward Bangs; J. Elliot
Cabot; Edward E. Hale; C. C. Shackford.
Honorary. C. P. Cranch; Horace Bushnell;
W. H. Channing; Duggan; Hicks; Powers;
Horatio Greenough; N. Hawthorne; H. W.
Beecher; J. Whelpley; Henry James; R. M. S.
Jackson ; J. Peter Lesley.
1850. S. G. Ward; J. W. Browne; Edw.
Bangs; A. B. Alcott; W. E. Channing; J. E.
Cabot ; J. R. Lowell ; T. S. King; L. B. Rus-
sell; W. B. Greene; E. E. Hale; C. C. Shack-
ford; T. Parker; J. S. Dwight; W. E. Good-
son; G. P. Bradford; J. F. Clarke; W. H.
Channing; E. P. Whipple; G. R. Loring;
W. F. Channing.
[But the vision of a club of friends, bound
together, not by conscience, ideas of duty and
of reform, but men genial, poets, and withal
having a saving sense of humour, hovered before
Mr. Emerson's eyes, — premonition of the Sat-
urday Club. In a letter to Mr. Sam Ward
written February 24, he said: “I saw Long-
fellow at Lowell's, two days ago, and he de-


1850) ENWERI. HINTS IN ART 105
clared that his faith in clubs was firm. 'I will
very gladly,' he said, 'meet with Ward and
you and Lowell and three or four others, and
dine together.' Lowell remarked, 'Well, if he
agrees to the dinner, though he refuses the
supper, we will continue the dinner until next
morning.' . . . Just now Lowell has been seized
with aggravated symptoms of the magazine.”
(Emerson's Letters to a friend, No. xxx111.)]
SPRING (from Enweri)
In the garden goes now the wind over the water
To file and to polish the cheeks of the pond.
On tulips plays now the reflection of fire
Which plays now no more in chimney and hearth.
He who yesterday withdrew himself from affairs
Him now desire sets again in activity.
The part that is built teaches the architect
how to build the rest. The streets compress the
mob into battalions. Who taught Raffaelle and
Correggio how to draw ? was it Signor Quadro,
the perspective-master, with his rule and divid-
ers? No, it was the weather-stains on the wall;
the cloud over the house-roof yonder, with that
shoulder of Hercules and brow of Jove; it was
marbled paper; it was a lucky scratch with a
bit of charcoal, which taught the secret of pos-


106
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
sibility, and confounded and annihilated Signor
Quadro and themselves also.
The impressionable man. In the woods I have
one guide, namely, to follow the light, — to go
where the woods are thinnest; then at last I am
sure to come out. So he cannot be betrayed
or misguided, for he knows where the north is,
knows painfully when he is going in the wrong
direction.
Memory, Imagination, Reason are only
modes of the same power, as lampblack and
diamond are the same chemical matter in differ-
ent arrangement.
“Animus habet, non habetur.” — SallusT.
Abandon. Men of genius“ give out oracles
when they are agitated, but are no more than
men, when they are calm.” — DE STAËL.
“To stand on one's own feet" is the maxim
of Demosthenes, as of Chatham, says Heeren,
in all his orations; and it is in the oration of the
συμμορίαι or classes.
He has the best sense whose face is not good
only for one particular thing, but, as Rose Flam-


1850]
PERSONALITY
107
mock says of her father's, it is like his yard-
stick, which will measure dowlas and also cloth-
of-gold. Shakspeare was like a looking-glass
carried through the street.
“Did I not drum well?” said Mr. Gray to
somebody who taunted him with being a drum-
mer's boy.
Personality. The reason why the highwayman
masters the traveller is not his pistol, but his
personality. If the party attacked had really the
superiority in character and love, he could really
conquer without arms. But he must be so charged
and surcharged with love that he is as good
a highwayman as the highwayman. You shall
not match the pirate with a goody, but with a
pirate (i.e., in natural force), and more deter-
mined and absolute by dint of his heart than
the other by help of his arms.
Colonel Forbes [an Englishman], who served
in Garibaldi's army, told me of his being stopped
by brigands in the night in a carriage in Italy.
He got out of the coach and walked up to them.
“ What do you want?” No answer. “Do you
want money?” Yes. Their guns were aimed.
He walked directly up to them and they drew
up their guns. “My good fellows, you have


108
(AGE 46
JOURNAL
e
no
made a mistake. We are soldiers sent by the
Government to Sienna. We have no money,
not even to pay our fare or dinner. It is all paid
by order of the Government. I wish you better
luck the next time.” “Get in, get in ” (to his
companions) and tied in the horses, and off with
“ Addio, a rivederci.”
I should like to set a sculptor to put a face
on a church door that should draw and keep a
crowd about it all the daytime by its character,
good nature, and inscrutable meaning.
Watson Haynes, the sailor, testifies that
when he attempted to enlist the clergy in his
crusade against flogging in the navy, they re-
plied, that their business was to preach the
gospel and not to interfere with the regula-
tions of the navy. And Webster thinks the
gospel was to touch the heart and not to abolish
slavery.
Washington Allston, when he painted blue
sky, began, as Nature does, with a ground of
deep black and painted the light on that. And
when he had occasion to paint a gem, he wrought
on it as long as a lapidary.


1850) SHIRLEY. HOTELS 109
[In March and April Mr. Emerson gave
courses in New York and Philadelphia; also
lectures in Brooklyn and in Paterson, New Jer-
sey.]
Philadelphia, April 6.
I think a novel like Shirley must cultivate its
readers. It is very useful to each in his kind.
I saw at once how a treatise on the conduct of
life would draw men“ to the exclusion of cau-
cus and theatre.”
LAL
ELPH
I read on a tombstone -
“Elizabeth Roe, died, aged 25.
She was, — words is wanting to tell what she
was, — think what a true friend can be, - she
was that.”
I have made no note of these long weary ab-
sences at New York and Philadelphia. I am a
bad traveller, and the hotels are mortifications
to all sense of well-being in me. The people
who fill them oppress me with their excessive viril-
ity, and would soon become intolerable if it were
not for a few friends, who, like women, tem-
pered the acrid mass. Henry James was true
comfort, - wise, gentle, polished, with heroic
manners, and a serenity like the sun.
ere


IIO
JOURNAL
(AGE 46
[April.]
The worst symptom I have noticed in our
politics lately is the attempt to make a gibe out
of Seward's appeal to a higher law than the
Constitution, and Webster has taken part in it.
I have seen him snubbed as “ Higher-Law Sew-
ard.” And now followed by Rufus Choate in
his phrase, “the trashy sentimentalism of our
lutestring enthusiasts.":
Lucretia Mott is the flower of Quakerism.
That woman has a unity of sense, virtue, and
good meaning perfectly impressed on her coun-
tenance which are a guarantee of victory in all
the fights to which her Quaker faith and con-
nection lead her. She told exceedingly well the
story of her contest with the mob at Dover and
Smyrna in Delaware, she and the wife of Mr.
- attending him down to the place where the
mob were to tar and feather him, and it was
perfectly easy to see that she might safely go,
and would surely defend herself and him. No
Compare in « Worship ” what is said at the bottom of
p. 209 (Conduct of Life); also, in Mr. Emerson's speech on
the “- Fugitive Slave Law," delivered in New York, March
7, 1854, his mention of Webster's “ wretched atheism,”
ridiculing Higher Law (Miscellanies, p. 228).


1850] BOSTON'S SUBSERVIENCE I
mob could remain a mob where she went. She
brings domesticity and common sense, and that
propriety which every man loves, directly into
this hurly-burly, and makes every bully ashamed.
Her courage is no merit, one almost says, where
triumph is so sure.
Daniel Webster. I think there was never
an event half so painful occurred in Boston as
the letter with eight hundred signatures to Web-
ster.' The siege of Boston was a day of glory.
This was a day of petticoats, a day of imbecili-
ties, the day of the old women, - la veille.
Many of the names very properly belong there,
— they are the names of aged and infirm peo-
ple, who have outlived everything but their
nightcap and their tea and toast. But I observe
some names of men under forty! I observe that
very few lawyers have set their names. They
are a prudent race, though not very fond of lib-
erty.
It seems 't is now settled that men in Con-L
gress have no opinions; that they may be had
1 This was on the receipt of the news of his “ Seventh of
March Speech” in Congress, justifying the new compromises
with the Slave power, and especially the Fugitive Slave
Law.”
som


112
JOURNAL
(AGB 46
for any opinion, any purpose. Understanding
is the thing required in a member. Virtue is
very good in country places, but impertinent in
public men.
'Tis Virtue which they want, and, wanting it,
Honour no garment to their backs can fit.
Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels.
Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo.'
The badness of the times is making death at- U
tractive.
Andrew Fletcher “would give his life to
serve his country, but would not do a mean act
to save it.”
At the Concord Celebration. I was struck
· with the talent of Everett and Choate, and the
delight of the people in listening to their elo-
quence. ... There have been millions and
millions of men, and a good stump orator only
once in an age.
Governor Briggs is an excellent middle man,
i Seldom does Retribution with her lame foot forsake the
trail of Crime.
2 That is, of the Nineteenth of April. Everett was the
orator


1850) RANTOUL. LEVELLING 113
he looks well when speaking, and seems always
just ready to say something good, but never
said anything; he is an orateur manqué.
Rantoul had an inestimable advantage in be-
longing to the “ Loco-foco party.” All his tedi-
ousness, all his wearisomeness about “Ionic
melody of the Father of History,” and about
the history of Islamism, indeed, all those pain-
ful exertions which collegians call “squirts,”
were patiently and even proudly heard by the
multitude, who were proud of the college learn-
ing of their man. In a Whig these would have
been intolerable, and all scholars would have
suffered from the supposed impatience of the
company. Now, we sat quite at ease and irre-
sponsible.
May 4.
It may be assumed that Nemesis is always
levelling, and if by night you should chance to
hear the burglar gathering your spoons into his
bag, what is it but the caving-in of a little sand
or pebbles at the edge of the bank which is
always falling ? The levelling goes on surely
at all hours, whether you watch it or no.
Thackeray's Vanity Fair is pathetic in its
name, and in his use of the name; an admission


114
(AGE 47
JOURNAL
it is from a man of fashion in the London of
1850 that poor old Puritan Bunyan was right
in his perception of the London of 1650. And
yet now in Thackeray is the added wisdom or
skepticism, that, though this be really so, he
must yet live in tolerance of, and practically in
homage and obedience, to these illusions.
[It appears from Mr. Emerson's account-
book that in the middle of June he made a
journey in the “New West,” first to Cincinnati,
and from there visited the Mammoth Cave (see
“Illusions,” Conduct of Life, pp. 309, 310). He
went down the Ohio River and up the Missis-
sippi to St. Louis and then to Galena, crossing
Illinois by stage and Michigan by the new rail-
road, and then following Lakes Erie and On-
tario to connect with the railroad again at Al-
bany. At Niagara Falls, which he saw probably
for the first time, he met his friend Mr. John
M. Forbes, the deus ex machina of the roads
under construction to Chicago, and later to open
Iowa and Nebraska and the region beyond.
In a letter to Carlyle (No. cxxx in the Cor-
respondence) Mr. Emerson tells of this Western
journey and of his walking and sailing eighteen
miles underground in the Mammoth Cave.


1850] MADAME OSSOLI'S DEATH 115
It is the scholar's misfortune that his virtues
are all on paper, and when the time comes to
use them, he rubs his eyes and tries to re-
member what it is that he should do.
July 21 [?].
On Friday, July 19, Margaret dies on rocks
of Fire Island Beach within sight of and within
sixty rods of the shore. To the last her country
proves inhospitable to her; brave, eloquent,
subtle, accomplished, devoted, constant soul!"
If Nature availed in America to give birth to
many such as she, freedom and honour and
letters and art too were safe in this New World.
She bound in the belt of her sympathy and
friendship all whom I know and love, — Eliza-
beth, Caroline, Ward, the Channings, Ellen
Hooper, Charles Newcomb, Hedge, and Sarah
Clarke.
She knew more select people than any other
i For the account of this tragedy as well as the strange, in-
spiring life of Margaret Fuller Ossoli in New England, and
her later heroism in the service of the Italians in their unsuc-
cessful rising for liberty in 1848-49, see her Memoirs by her
friends Emerson, Rev. William H. Channing, and Rev.
James Freeman Clarke; also Colonel Thomas Wentworth Hig-
ginson's Margaret Fuller Ossoli.


116
JOURNAL
[AGE 47
son
Orc.
person did, and her death will interest more.
Yet her taste in music, painting, poetry, charac-
ter would not be on universal but on idiosyn-
cratic grounds, yet would be genuine.
She had a wonderful power of inspiring con-
fidence and drawing out of people their last
secret. The timorous said, “What shall we do?
How shall she be received, now that she brings
a husband and child home?” But she had only
to open her mouth and a triumphant success
awaited her. She would fast enough have dis-
posed of the circumstances and the bystanders.
For she had the impulse, and they wanted it.
Here were already mothers waiting tediously for
her coming, for the education of their daughters.
Mrs. Ripley thinks that the marriage with
Ossoli was like that of De Staël in her widow-
hood with the young De Rocca, who was en-
amoured of her. And Mrs. Barlow has an
unshaken trust that what Margaret did she
could well defend.
Her love of art, like that of many, was only
a confession of sympathy with the artist in the
mute condemnation which his work gave to the
deformity of our daily life; her co-perception
with him of the eloquence of Form; her aspira-
tion with him to a life altogether beautiful.



MARGARET FILLER OSSOLI





1850] MARGARET FULLER 117
Her heart, which few knew, was as great as
her mind, which all knew (what Jung Stilling
said of Goethe) Elizabeth Hoar says of Mar-
garet; and that she was the largest woman; and
not a woman who wished to be a man.
I have lost in her my audience. I hurry now
to my work admonished that I have few days
left. There should be a gathering of her friends
and some Beethoven should play the dirge.
She poured a stream of amber over the end-
less store of private anecdotes, of bosom histo-
ries which her wonderful persuasion drew out
of all to her. When I heard that a trunk of her
correspondence had been found and opened, I
felt what a panic would strike all her friends,
for it was as if a clever reporter had got under-
neath a confessional and agreed to report all
that transpired there in Wall Street.
Oh, yes, “ Margaret and her Friends" must
be written, but not post-haste. It is an essential
line of American history.
“Yes, that is an example of a destiny spring-
ing from character.”
"I see your destiny hovering before you, but
it always escapes you."
« Nor custom stale her infinite variety."


118
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
Elizabeth Hoar quotes Mrs. Barlow as say-
ing that Margaret never disappointed you. To
any one whose confidence she had once drawn
out, she was always faithful. She could (and she
was alone in this) talk of persons and never gos-
sip, for she had a fine instinct that kept her from
any reality and from any effect of treachery.
The fact is she had large sympathies.
Mrs. Barlow has the superiority to say, of
Margaret, death seems to her a fit and good
conclusion to the life. Her life was romantic
and exceptional: so let her death be; it sets the
seal on her marriage, avoids all questions of so-
ciety, all of employment, poverty, and old age,
and besides was undoubtedly predetermined
when the world was created.
Dr. W. E. Channing said to her, “Miss Ful-
ler, when I consider that you are all that Miss
P. wished to be, and that you despise her, and
that she loves and honours you, I think her
place in Heaven must be very high.”
Lidian says that in the fly-leaf of Margaret's
Bible was written a hymn of Novalis.
She had great tenderness and sympathy, as
Aunt Mary has none. If Aunt Mary finds out
anything is dear and sacred to you, she instantly
flings broken crockery at that.
was
S


1850] MARGARET FULLER
119
Elizabeth Hoar says of Margaret, — Her
friends were a necklace of diamonds about her
neck. The confidences given her were their best,
and she held them to them; that the honor of
the Conversations was the high tone of sincer-
ity and culture from so many consenting indi-
viduals, and that Margaret was the keystone of
the whole. She was perhaps impatient of com-
placency in people who thought they had claims
and stated their contrary opinion with an air.
For such she had no mercy. But though not
agreeable, it was just. And so her enemies were
made.
A larger dialectic, I said, conveys a sense of
power and feeling of terror before unknown,
and Henry Thoreau said “that a thought would
destroy like the jet of a blowpipe most persons,”
and yet we apologize for the power and bow to
the persons. I want an electrical machine. Slum-
bering power we have, but not excited, collected,
and discharged.
If I should be honest, I should say my ex-
ploring of life presents little or nothing of re-
spectable event or action, or, in myself, of a
personality. Too composite to offer a positive
unity, but it is a recipiency, a percipiency. And


120
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
1, and far weaker persons, if it were possible,
than I, who pass for nothing but imbeciles, do
yet affirm by their percipiency the presence and
perfection of Law as much as all the martyrs.
It is the charm of practical men that outside
of all their practicality are a certain poetry and
play.' ...
Every glance at society - pale, withered peo-
ple with gold-filled teeth,ghastly, and with minds
in the same dilapidated condition, drugged with
books for want of wisdom — suggests at once
the German thought of the progressive god,
who has got thus far with his experiment, but
will get out yet a triumphant and faultless race.
Men as naturally make a state as caterpillars
a web. ...
The relation of men of thought to society is
always the same. They abhor Whiggism, they
abhor rebellion. They refuse the necessity of
1 The rest of the paragraph is printed in “Illusions” (Con-
duct of Life, p. 317).
2 The passage is printed in “Worship” (Conduct of Life,
p. 203).


121
1850) GIFTS RARE. NEWCOMB 121
mediocre men, that is, to take sides. They keep
their own self-poise, and the ecliptic is never
parallel with the earth's equator.
Two mottoes for a Genealogy:-
Gaudent compositi cineres sua nomina dici.
CLAUDIAN (?).
Et nati natorum, et qui nascentur ab illis.
VIRGIL.
August 25.
In fifty or three hundred years, a poet; and
the other demonstrations of Divinity are as rare.
In many days, a pleasure; in many months, a
concatenating thought; in years, a law is dis-
cerned.
A few words will give the curious the history
of our age. What a fine, subtle, inward genius
was Charles Newcomb, puny in body and habit
as a girl, yet with an aplomb like a general's,
never disconcerted. Yet he lived and thought in
1842 such worlds of life, all hinging too on the
idea of Being or Reality, on the one part, and
consciousness on the other; hating intellect with
the ferocity of a Swedenborg, and valuing the
Hero in ! Montaigne is his delight.


122
(AGE 47
JOURNAL
Cross
I find in Van Helmont the same thought
which is the genius of Swedenborg too, and of
Pascal, that piety is an essential condition of
science; that “the soul understands in peace and
rest, and not in doubting,” and one would say
that Van Helmont is a cross of Aristotle and
Thomas à Kempis.
September 1.
Yesterday took that secluded Marlboro' road
with Channing in a wagon. Every rock was
painted “Marlboro’,”: and we proposed to take
the longest day in the year and ride to Marl-
boro', — that flying Italy. We went to Willis's
Pond in Sudbury and paddled across it, and
took a swim in its water, coloured like sugar-
baker's molasses. Nature, Ellery thought, is
less interesting. Yesterday Thoreau told me it
was more so, and persons less. I think it must
always combine with man. Life is ecstatical,
and we radiate joy and honour and gloom on
the days and landscapes we converse with.
But I must remember a real or imagined
period in my youth when they who spoke to
me of Nature were religious, and made it so,
was
OT
me
1 In their imagination; the curse of advertising had not yet
fallen on the roadsides.


1850)
MELODY. HERO
123
and made it deep: now it is to the young sen-
timentalists frippery, and a milliner's shop has
as much reason and worth.
I have often observed the priority of music
to thought in young writers, and last night re-
membered what fools a few sounding sentences
made of me and my mates at Cambridge, as in
Lee's' and John Everett's orations. How long
we lived on “Licoö";' on Moore's “Go where
glory waits thee”; and Lalla Rookh; and “When
shall the swan his deathnote singing."
I still remember a sentence in Carter Lee's
oration, “And there was a band of heroes, and
round their mountain was a wreath of light, and
in the midst, on the mountain-top, stood Lib-
erty, feeding her eagle.”
Hero. How much Language thinks for us,
witness that word “Hero.” What has Carlyle,
what has Charles Newcomb added to the bare
word, which has been the inspiration of them
both, and will be of all the generous ?
i Charles Carter Lee, of the class of 1819, one of those
young Southerners whose Aorid or fiery rhetoric and declama-
tion Emerson admired in his college days.
2 “The Song of the Tonga Islanders,” printed by Mr.
Emerson in his collection Parnassus.


124
JOURNAL
[ACE 47
My method. I write Metaphysics, but my
method is purely expectant. It is not even ten-
tative. Much less am I ingenious in instituting
experimenta crucis to extort the secret and lay
bare the reluctant lurking law. No, I confine
my ambition to true reporting, though I only
get one new fact in a year.' This, of course, is
a corollary of the doctrine of Inspiration. But
the scholar may have the mechanical advantage
of posting his observations, and so discovering
Neptune by three records in his day book.
In my romance the lost prince shall be sung
to sleep and again taught to play Quorum” by
nonsense lullabies, which, when he comes to age,
and to the mountains of his country, shall trans-
late themselves into advertisement of those par-
ticulars he is to know.
In my romance, too, Talbot was to come as
poor as Béranger's Romeo 3 into town, yet was
1 This last sentence is in Natural History of Intellect
(p. 11).
2 This game, a sort of hide-and-seek, was usually called
• Corum.”
3 The story of Romeo, steward of Count Raymond Bé-
ranger, who enriched his master, but when his accounts were
questioned, took his staff and scrip and went away poor as he
came.


1850] THE ARTIST'S CHANCE 125
to build his plain cottage with such beauty as to
eclipse the villas of the grandees, and to cut his
walks in curves of inimitable beauty, curves too
whose law he only knew; and to add a fountain-
jet which tapped a mountain.
The artist now should draw men together by
praising Nature, show them the joy of natural-
ists in famous Indian glens, natural. botanic
gardens,- in the profusion of new genera, [so]
that they could only relieve themselves by cries,
of joy; then the joy of the conchologist in his
belix pulcherrima, whose elegant white pattern
becomes invisible in water, visible again when
dry. Let him unroll the earth and sky, and show
the splendour of colour and of form; then let
him, on the top of this delight, add a finer, by
disclosing the secrets of intellectual law; tell
them a secret that will drive them crazy; and
things that require no system to make them
pertinent, but make everything else imperti-
nent. I think; give me the memory to tell of
[these], — or the Imagination, and I could
win the ear of reasonable people, and make them
think common daylight was worth something.
Afterwards let him whisper in their ear the
moral laws, —


126
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
“More fair than heaven's broad causeway paved with
stars
Which Dion learned to measure with sublime de-
light.”,
Beauty. It is curious that we so peremptorily
require beauty, and if it do not exist in any one,
we feel at liberty to insult over that subject,
without end. Thus the poor Donkey is not
handsome, and so is the gibe of all mankind in
all ages, notwithstanding his eminent useful-
ness; whilst those handsome cats, the lion, leop-
ard, tiger are allowed to tear and devour because
handsome mischiefs, and are the badges of kings.
Amount and Quality. Schelling's distinction,
“Some minds speak about things, and some
minds speak the things themselves,” remains by
far the most important intellectual distinction,
as the quality is the important moral distinction.
Searching tests these: What is the state of
mind he leaves me in? and, What does he add?
For Quality, you must have fine disposition,
- it is more essential than talent for the works
of talent.
For Amount, I look back over all my reading,
1 Wordsworth's Dion.


1850) AMOUNT AND QUALITY 127
and think how few authors have given me things:
Plato has, and Shakspeare, and Plutarch, and
Montaigne, and Swedenborg. Goethe abounds
in things, and Chaucer and Donne and Herbert
and Bacon had much to communicate. But the
majority of writers had only their style or rhe-
toric, their Claude Lorraine glass. They were
presentableness, parliamentariness, currency, Bir-
mingham. Wordsworth almost alone in his times
belongs to the giving, adding class, and Cole-
ridge also has been a benefactor.
I was looking lately at a new volume of ser-
mons of a preacher more intellectual than most
of his class, and thought, How wanting in ideas !
How ill the whole printed ethics and religion,
now, would compare with books, in the same
department, of Hooker, Donne, Herbert, Tay-
lor, John Smith, Henry More! As ill would
the Tribune verses or the London Athenæum, or
Fraser's Magazine verses, compare with Donne,
Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher; and all
this in mere amount; in the modern, you can
omit the whole without loss; in the old, some-
what is done and said in every piece.
Every great fact in natural science has been
divined by the presentiment of somebody.


128
JOURNAL
(Age 47
When I looked into Plutarch's Placita Philoso-
phorum the other day, it was easy to see that
Spinoza, Laplace, Schelling, and Oken, and
Plato are preëxistent; that these old men, in
the beginning of science, as we are apt to say,
had little to learn from all our accumulation of
facts.
Thales, Anaximines, Air is the soul and source
of things. Empedocles, Pythagoras, made the first
discovery of the obliquity of the ecliptic, but
one Enopides of Chios challenges to himself
the invention of it. Aristarchus “places the sun
among the fixed stars; that the Earth is moved
about the Sun by its inclination and vergency
towards it, intercepts its light, and shadows its
orb.” What could Copernicus add? Thales,
that the moon borrows all its light from the
sun; that the earth is globular; the moon's
eclipse is perfectly known. Metrodorus, infinite
worlds in infinite space.
There are in this motley list plenty of fan-
cies, notions that lead nowhere but into corners;
thoughts that have no posterity. Then comes
one betraying a mind parallel to the movement
of the world, and, as it is an aperçu of Nature,
so it can be applied again and again as an ex-
planation.
OC
rowS


1850) JENNY LIND. CULTURE 129
Jenny Lind. Of what use for one to go to
California who has a fine talent that reaches
men? All the contents of California, Canton,
India, Turkey, France, England will be offered
and urged on this Swedish girl with a fine voice.
Jenny Lind need not go to California. Cal-
ifornia comes to her. Jenny Lind needs no po-
lice. Her voice is worth a hundred constables,
and instantly silenced the uproar of the mob.
Children. I wrote that it is difficult to begin
the culture too young. Mrs. Barbauld said they
should never remember the time when they knew
not the name of God, and a well-born boy never
did not know the names of the men of genius
who are to be his escort and fraternity through
life. But the young barbarians I see knew no-
thing but footballs until they went to Latin
School and to College, and at Cambridge first
learn the names of the Laureates, and use them, as
country editors do, awkwardly and barbarously.
George Sand has the same thing in view when
she points at the defective education of women.
They learn casually and irregularly, and are not
systematically drilled from childhood to letters.
The Superlative. In the East a war is as read-


130
(AGE 47
JOURNAL
ily undertaken for an epigram or a distich as
in Europe for a duchy. The reader of Hafiz
would infer that all the food was either candy
or wormwood.
For the love of poetry, let it be remembered
that mv copy of Collins, after much search, was
found smuggled away into the Cold brick] oven
in the kitchen.
October 24.
A ride yesterday to Marlboro', though pro-
jected for years, was no good use of the day.
That town has a most rich appearance of rural
plenty and comfort; ample farms, good houses,
profusion of apples, pumpkins, etc. Yellow ap-
ple heaps in every enclosure, whole orchards
left ungathered, and in the Grecian piazzas of
houses pumpkins ripening between the columns.
At Gates's, where Dr. Channing and Mr. Jon-
athan Phillips used to resort, they no longer
keep a public house; closed it to the public last
spring. At Cutting's, though there were oats for
the horse, there was no dinner for men, so we
repaired to the chestnut woods and an old or-
chard for ours. Ellery, who is a perpetual holi-
day, and ought only to be used like an oriflamme
or a garland for Maydays and Parliaments of


1850] A VILLAGE NATURALIST 131
wit and love, was no better to-day, nor half so
good, as in some walks.
Practical naturalist. Now that the civil engi-
neer is fairly established, I think we must have
one day a naturalist in each village as invariably
as a lawyer or doctor. It will be a new subdivi-
sion of the medical profession. I want to know
what plant this is? Pentborum. What is it good
for? in medical botany? in industrial botany?
Now the Indian doctor, if there were one, and
not the sham of one, would be more consulted
than the diplomatic one. What bird is this?
What hyla? What caterpillar? Here is a new
bug on the trees. Cure the warts on the plum
and on the oak. How to attack the rose-bug
and the curculio. Show us the poisons. How
to treat the cranberry meadow.
The universal impulse toward natural science
in the last twenty years promises this practical
issue. And how beautiful would be the profes-
sion. C. T. Jackson, John L. Russell, Henry
Thoreau, George Bradford, and John Lesley
would find their employment. All questions
answered for stipulated fees; and, on the other
hand, new information paid for, as a newspaper
office pays for news.


132
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
[From BO]
Farà da se.'
HIGHER LAW
October.
“ Archbishop Whitgift (of Canterbury), who
had been Coke's tutor, sent unto his pupil,
when the Queen's Attorney, a fair New Testa-
ment, with this message: 'He had now studied
Common Law enough; let him hereafter study
the law of God.'” - Fuller's Wortbies (vol.
ii, p. 130).
Lord Mansfield. Lord Mansfield said in the
case of the slave Somersett, wherein dicta of
Lords Talbot and Hardwicke had been cited to
the effect of carrying back the slave to the
West Indies, “I care not for the supposed dicta
of judges, however eminent, if they be contrary
to all principle. The dicta cited were probably
misunderstood, and, at all events, they are to
be disregarded.”.— CAMPBELL’s Lives of the
Chief Justices, vol. ii, p. 419.
i He will act for himself.
2 Mr. Emerson's respect for Lord Mansfield's quality and
brave rulings from a high plane is shown in his reference to
him in “ Eloquence" (Society and Solitude, p. 88).


133
On-
1850)
HIGHER LAW
[In] Blackstone's Commentaries [it is writ-
ten] :-
“The Creator has laid down only such laws
as were found in those relations of justice that
existed in the nature of things, antecedent to
any positive precept: these are, the eternal im-
mutable laws of good and evil, . . . Such,
among others, are these principles; that we should
live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should
render to every one his due, to which three gen-
eral precepts Justinian has reduced the whole
doctrine of law.” “He has so intimately con-
nected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of
eternal justice with the happiness of each indi-
vidual that the latter cannot be obtained but by
observing the former.”
After this, he says of “ Ethics, or Natural
Law”: “This law of nature being coeval with
mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of
course superior in obligation to any other. It
is binding all over the globe in all countries
and at all times. No human laws are of any
validity if contrary to this; and such of them as
are valid derive all their force and all their
authority, mediately or immediately, from this
original.”
And he proceeds to say that the enacting of


134
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
San
asm
human laws annexing a punishment to a crime,
as murder, “do not superadd any fresh obliga-
tion to abstain from its perpetration; nay, if any
human law should allow or enjoin us to com-
mit it, we are bound to transgress that human
law, or else we must offend both the natural
and divine.” (Vol. i, § 2.)
Lord Coke: “That the common law shall
control acts of Parliament and sometimes shall
adjudge them to be merely void; for where an
act of Parliament is against common right and
reason, the common law shall control it and ad-
judge it to be void.” —8 Rep. f. 118a, apud
LORD CAMPBELL’s Lives of the Chief Justices,
vol. i, p. 290.
King James said to Coke, “My Lords, I al-
ways thought, and by my soul, I have often
heard the boast that your English law was
founded upon reason. If that be so, why have
not I and others reason, as well as the judges?”
– Lives of the Chief Justices, vol. i, p. 272.
“Leges legum ex quibus informatio peti possit
quid in singulis legibus aut bene aut perperam
positum aut constitutum sit.” – Bacon's De
Fontibus Juris, Aphor. 6. .


1850) TALK WITH THOREAU 135
“The wisdom of our laws,” says Lord Coke,
“is most apparent in this, that any departure
from their established principles, although at the
time wearing the specious appearance of advan-
tage, never fails to bring along with it such a
train of unforeseen inconveniences as to demon-
strate their excellence and the necessity of again
having recurrence to them.” —Speech of Sir F.
BURDETT, 1809 (apud Cobbett xv, 973).
October 27.
Rambling talk with Henry Thoreau last night,
in accordance with my proposal to hold a session,
the first for a long time, with malice prepense,
and take the bull by the horns. We disposed
pretty fast of America and England, I maintain-
ing that our people did not get ripened, but, like
the peaches and grapes of this season, wanted a
fortnight's more sun and remained green, whilst
in England, because of the density, perhaps, of
cultivated population, more caloric was generated
and more completeness obtained. Layard is
good example, both of the efficiency as meas-
ured by effect on the Arab, and in its reaction
of his enterprise on him; for his enterprise proved
a better university to him than Oxford or Sor-
bonne.


136
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
Henry thought“ the English all train,” are
mere soldiers, as it were, in the world. And that
their business is winding up, whilst our pioneer
is unwinding his lines.
I like the English better than our people,
just as I like merchants better than scholars ;
for, though on a lower platform, yet there is no
cant, there is great directness, comprehension,
health, and success. So with English.
Then came the difference between American
and English scholars. Henry said, the English
were all bred in one way, to one thing; he had
read many lives lately, and they were all one
life, Southey, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, or who-
soever; they went to Eton, they went to Col-
lege, they went to London, they all knew each
other, and never did not feel the ability of each.
But here, Channing is obscure, Newcomb is
obscure, and so all the scholars are in a more
natural, healthful, and independent condition.
My own quarrel with America, of course, was
that the geography is sublime, but the men are
not;'...
It was agreed, however, that what is called a
success in America or in England is none; that
1 The rest of the paragraph is printed in “ Considerations
by the Way” (Conduct of Life, p. 256).


1850) TALK WITH THOREAU
137
w
an
their book or man or law had no root in nature,
of course!
But in the face of the facts which appear as
soon as a couple of meditative men converse, I
demand another sort of biography than any of
which we have experience, bold, experimental,
varied, availing itself of these unspeakable, in-
computable advantages which this meditative
conversation at once discloses as within reach.
Thus a man should do the feats he so admires.
Why not suddenly put himself to the learning
of tongues, and, like Borrow, master in a few
months the dialects of Europe, Moor and gypsy,
flash and patois: then, in another summer, put
himself at the centre of sciences (which seems
and is so easy when he meditates), and read
from simple arithmetic the activities of chemis-
try, of geology, of astronomy; paint out the
beautiful botany, as Goethe wished, by figur-
ing not only all actual but all possible plants;
then work out a priori politics; then set him-
self, like Walter Raleigh and Columbus and
Cabot, on the finding and survey of new king-
doms, and try, after other months, all the
melodies of music and poetry with the boldest
adventure? Why only one Humboldt, one
Crichton, one Pythagoras, one Napoleon, when


138
(Age 47
JOURNAL
every thinker, every mind, in the ascensions of
conversation, sees his right to all these depart-
ments? ...
Why are we so excellent at the humdrum of
our musty household life, when quite aware of
the majestic prerogatives? We do not try the
virtue of the amulets we have. Thus we can
think so much better by thinking with a wise
man. Yet we come together as a pair of six-
footers, always as six-footers, and never on the
ground of the immensities, which we have to-
gether authentically and awefully surveyed. Why
not once meet and work on the basis of the Im-
mensities, and not of the six feet? ... When shall
we attain our majority and come to our estate?
I complain, too, that grandeurs do not ulti-
mate themselves in grandeurs, but in paltriness.
The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist
meeting-house.
mer
W biggism. “A stubborn retention of customs
is a turbulent thing, not less than the introduc-
tion of new.” – Lord Bacon.
The secret of eloquence is to realize all you
say. Do not give us counters of base coin, but
every word a real value.


1850] CHARITY. ASTRONOMY 139
“ Truth needs no colour with his colour fixed,
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermixed.”
Days. And you think another day another
scream of the eternal wail ?
“Pan is a god, and Apollo is no more.” —
Hazlitt (?).
irtu
In-
CUS
Elizabeth Hoar says there are two kinds of
love of our fellowmen ; one, such as her mother
has, of doing good to them (a kind which she
does not much value); and the other, that of
enjoying their talents and virtues and advan-
tages.
ASTRONOMY
Kepler. 1. Orbits elliptical. 2. Radius vec-
tor describes equal areas in equal times. 3.
Squares of the periodic times as the cubes of
their distances from the sun.
Newton. Every particle of matter gravitates
to every other particle with a force inversely
proportional to the square of the distances.
Newton “found that the weight of the same
body would be twenty-three times greater at the
surface of the sun than at the surface of the
earth.” — BREWSTER.
пе


140.
(AGE 47
JOURNAL
Old Age. The world wears well. These au-
tumn afternoons and well-marbled landscapes
of green and gold and russet, and steel-blue
river, and smoke-blue New Hampshire moun-
tains, are and remain as bright and perfect pen-
cilling as ever.
Democracy. The objection of practical men to
free institutions is that responsibility is shirked.
Every power is exerted by a committee, which
is every moment composed of new persons. If
you should take an Irishman out of the street,
and make him despotic in your town, he would
try to rule it well, because it was his own. But
these rotating governors and legislators go for
their own interest, which is the only permanency
they know. They go for their party, which is
much more permanent than their office, and
for their contract, or claim, or whatever private
interest.
Fame. It is long before Tennyson writes a
poem, but the morning after he sends it to the
Times it is reprinted in all the newspapers, and,
in the course of a week or two, is as well known
all over the world as the meeting of Hector
and Andromache in Homer.


1850) CULTURE. A QUAKER 141
Culture. It occurred yesterday, more strongly
than I can now state it, that we must have an
intellectual property in all property, and in all
action, or they are naught.'...
The one thing we watch with pathetic inter-
est in our children is the degree in which they
possess recuperative force. ...
To the plus man the frost is a mere colour; L
the rain, the wind is nothing.
At Harrisburg, [last] April, I met W. L.
Fisher. The good old Quaker believes in In-
dividualism still: so do I. Fourierism seemed
to him boys' play; and so indeed did money;
though he frankly admitted how much time he
had spent about it: but a vital power in man,
identical with that which makes grass grow, and
the sweet breeze blow; and which should abolish
slavery, and raise the pauper, - that he believes
in, against all experience. So we held sweet
counsel together. A great curiosity he professed,
1 The rest of this passage is printed in “Culture” (Con-
duct of Life, p. 158).
2 The rest of the paragraph is printed in “ Power" (Con-
duct of Life, pp. 60, 61).


142
JOURNAL (AGE 47
In
-- and there again he met me,- to know how
the fact lies in the minds of these poor men that
were sitting in the front car. If there is a right
statement, he felt and said, it ought to satisfy
Paddy too. We agreed that the power of Caro-
lina over Massachusetts and the States was in
the personal force; and, therefore, it is a triumph
of Individualism.
November 16.
Yesterday I read Margaret's letters to C. S.,
full of probity, full of talent and wit, full of
friendship, ardent affections, full of noble aspi-
ration. They are tainted with a female mysticism
which to me appears so merely an affair of con-
stitution that it claims no more respect or reli-
ance than the charity or patriotism of a man
who has just dined well and feels good. When I
talked with G. H., I remember the eggs and
butter seemed to have got into his eyes. In our
noble Margaret her personal feeling colours all
her judgments of persons, of books, of pictures,
and of the laws of the world. This is easily felt
in common women, and a large deduction is civ-
illy made on the spot by whosoever replies to
their remark. But when the speaker has such
brilliant talent and literature as Margaret, she
gives so many fine names to these merely sen-
an


1850) MARGARET FULLER 143
suous and subjective objects that the hearer is
long imposed upon, and thinks so precise and
glittering nomenclature cannot be of mere muscæ
volitantes, but must be of some real ornithology
hitherto unknown to him. '
This mere feeling exaggerates a host of trifles,
as birthdays, seals, bracelets, ciphers, coinci-
dences, contretemps, into a dazzling mythology;
but when one goes to sift it, and find if there
be a real meaning, it eludes all search. Whole
sheets of warm, fluent, florid writing are here,
in which the eye is caught by “carbuncle,” “he-
liotrope," "dragon,” “aloes," "magna Dea,”
“limboes,” “stars,” and “purgatory,” but can
connect all this or any part of it with no univer-
sal experience.
Yet Margaret had her own merits, and we
shall not see her like. What a basis of earnest
love of knowledge and love of character! Her
decided selection, so sagacious generally, of her
friends; in some instances, her election antici-
pates for some years any personal intercourse,
and her fidelity to them, and generous forgiving
appreciation. She estimates society and its opin-
ion very well, - far better than so many peo-
ple of talent. Her expensiveness creates tragic
relation and feeling to it, and thence with ill


144
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
health comes all the unworthy sentimentalism
of Destiny, Dæmon, gold, and the cross.
Yet I draw from this warm refreshening of
fading tints on the canvas of the past admoni-
tions always needed, that what spoke to the
best minds among the young in those years,
1838 to 1842, was the spontaneous and solitary
thought, and not the Birmingham Lacker, and
though Whiggism and cities condemn now, so
did they then, and yet this, somewhat more
real and strong than Whigs or cities, made
itself a place and name, and compelled the reit-
erated visit and inquest of these, though they
still pronounce it imposture, and will require new
visit and inquest, until at last it is stamped, as
good Whiggism and municipality.
It is curious that Margaret made a most dis-
agreeable impression on her friends at first, —
created a strong prejudice which she had then
to conquer. It was so with Elizabeth Hoar,
with Sarah Clarke, and with me.
Sarah Clarke quotes Spenser's sonnet:-
Rudely thou wrongest my dear heart's desire
In finding fault with her too portly pride ;
The thing which I do most in her admire
Is of the world unworthy most envied;


1850) JOURNAL. CITY FOUNDERS 145
For in those lofty looks is close implied
Scorn of base things and sdeign of foul dishonour,
Threatening rash eyes which gaze on her so wide
That loosely they ne dare to look upon her.
Such pride is praise, such portliness is honour,
That boldened innocence bears in her eyes,
And her fair countenance like a goodly banner
Spreads in defiance of all enemies.
Was never in this world aught worthy tried
Without some spark of such self-pleasing pride.
A journal is to the author a book of con-
stants, each mind requiring (as I have so often
said) to write the whole of literature and science
for itself.
το κινήτικον. “All the rest of the Syracusans
were no more than the body, in the batteries of
Archimedes, while he himself was the all mov-
ing and informing soul.” – PLUTARCH, Mar-
cellus.
Certain persons naturally stand for cities, be-
cause they will certainly build them; as, Eras-
tus B. Bigelow, Patrick Jackson, William Emer-
son of Bangor, Alvah Crocker, Samuel Lawrence,
David Neal.
Leasts. St. John and Fénelon are made of
ferocious animalcules; and Homer's poetry be-


146
JOURNAL [AGE 47
gins with whistle, jingle, and word-catching;
and revolutionary thoughts from single occa-
sions and personalities; and the grandeur of
centuries out of the paltriest hours; and the
discoveries of stars and of gravity and of fluxions
are attended by pitiful squabbles.
“Indeed, to play well, takes up the whole
man,” says Evelyn, speaking of the Irish harp.
Architecture, the skeleton, the resistance to
gravity, and the elements make one extreme;
florid, petulant anthropomorphism, which carves
every pump-handle and door-knob into a human
face, is the other; midway between these is the
sobriety and grace of art.
Memoranda for Manners. John Quincy
Adams, wavy iron, limp band.'
Claverhouse, feminine virility.
English red-dough full of culture and power.
Never allude to sickness.
People who are biped weeping willows.
Creep-mouse manners.
Call yourself preacher, pedler, lecturer, tin-
man, grocer, scrivener, jobber, or whatever low-
1 The allusion is to the apparently gossamer band which
bound the terrible Fenris-wolf, in the Norse mythology.


1850] READINGS. HELPFUL HEAT 147
est name your business admits, and leave your
lovers to find the fine name.
Readings for Ellen. Archimedes in Plutarch.
Professor Wallraf and the Medusa at Cologne.
Lockhart's “Count Alarcos.” “The mighty
Tottipottimoy,” from Hudibras. “ Childe Dyr-
ing.”. Story of Belisarius.
Heat. In talking with Mr. Hoar, last night,
I found the advantage, as several times before
in my life, of an inspiring subject. One likes in
a companion phlegm that it is a triumph to dis-
turb. So when we find that our habitual aridity,
incapacity, and egotism can be overpowered by
a generous cause, all impediment brushed away,
and our long unused faculties arouse in perfect
array, and at last obedient to the will, so that
we nobodies are suddenly great and eloquent,
– we can forgive the long hybernation, and
impute our past insignificance to the triviality
of the game.
Eloquence. You shall not impoverish me.
When Campbell heard Joseph Gerald defend
1 This ballad and the passage from Hudibras are printed
in Mr. Emerson's collection Parnassus.


148
[Age 47
JOURNAL
himself in the Court, at Edinburgh, he said to
the stranger next him, “By Heavens, sir, that
is a great man.” “Yes, sir,” he answered ; “ he
is not only a great man himself, but he makes
every other man feel great who listens to him.”
As soon as a man shows the power of expres-
sion, like Chatham, Canning, or Erskine, or
Choate even, all the great mass interests crowd
to him to be their spokesman, so that he is at
once a potentate.
Tools. When will they arrive at manufactur-
Ving day out of night, time out of space, and
space out of time?
An Essay, One of the most agreeable surprises
is to fall in with Mr. X. He comes in to bor-
row a light for his lamp or a shovel of coals to
kindle his fire, and finding you hunting up a
law-case he happens, by the oddest coincidence,
to know the very book and page where it is to
be found; but when the conversation diverges
to politics, he is so at home that you think he
must be a cabinet minister; and we should have
set him down as such, but that there chanced
to be a chemist in the room turning over Dr.
Black's pamphlet, which drew X to make an


1850]
A CRICHTON
149
explanation of the new theory of heat, and the
views he suggested inspired in the whole com-
pany a new interest in so wonderful a science;
and I do not know how many crucibles and
alembics would have been bought the next day
if Mr. Y, Mr. Cowper's friend, had not come
in with some verses of that poet. These, being
read aloud, led X to warm praise, and then to
discourse at large on modern and old poetry,
which he esteemed the chief entertainment and
the nobility of human wit, and drew from its
flights a very curious evidence to the existence
of new and more penetrating senses (to use his
expression) than any that metaphysicians reck-
oned as proper to the human subject. But
glancing at my brother, who is, you know, a
lover of mathematics and still more of mechan-
ics, he made a sudden transition in his talk to
show how extremes were likely to meet, and
how all the ancient fables of poetry were likely to
be realized by the French engineers, and that he
thought that the fancy and imagination of the
century to come would find sufficient food in
following or predicting the progress of the use-
ful arts, without any need of recourse to nursery
giants or truncated angels. And for this opinion
he gave such solid reasons and exhibited such
COU


150
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
a picture of the resources of the machine-shop
and of the laboratory that we all felt as rich as
kings and that the human race were about to be
relieved henceforward from personal labor.
The conversation afterwards took new and
various directions, but our new friend was
never at fault. He added so many vivid
details that he seemed to have been present at
every scene he described. It was certain that he
had lived in many countries, and he seemed to
have lived in different ages of the world, so
intimate was his acquaintance with so many his-
torical persons.'
Mr. Hoar told me that the lawyers said of
Judge Prescott that he repeated his argument
once for each juror.
One Idea, Monomaniacs, Kinds or Specialties.
Besides the genealogists; besides sheriffs, like
the Dartmouth man; and antiquaries or pam-
phlet collectors, like Mr. Chandler; and dead-
men's-men, like Mr. Walker of London, - I
recall the man who so amused the stage-coach
once from Middleborough with his contrivances
for defending his own coffin in his grave from
1 Of course this Mr. X is a composite and idealized.


1850) ONE IDEA. LUTHER 151
body-snatchers. He had contrived a pistol to
go off — pop! from this end, and a pistol —
pop! from that end of the coffin, and he was
plainly spending his life in the sweets of the re-
venge he was going to take hereafter on the
young doctors that should creep to his graveyard.
One Idea. When Bonaparte saw David's pic-
ture of the Straits of Thermopylæ, he said, “A
bad subject; after all, Leonidas was turned.”
I thought last night that the right conclusion
of my chapter on political economy is the state-
ment that the merchant is right,-infinitely
right;—all his rules are laws of the universe,'...
December 9.
I thought, the other day, at Mr. S.'s lecture,
that Luther's religious movement was the foun-
tain of so much intellectual life in Europe; that
is, Luther's conscience animating sympatheti-
cally the conscience of millions, the pulse passed
into thought, and ultimated itself in Galileos,
Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakspeares,
Bacons, and Miltons.
i The rest of this passage is in “ Wealth” (Conduct of
Life, pp. 125, 126).


152
JOURNAL [Age 47
The morale of New England makes its in-
tellect possible. At the South, they are really
insensible to the criminality of their laws and
customs. ...
I like to see the growth of material interests
here, as Power educates its potentate.' ....
wer
Identity. But what is the cause, asked Aunt
Mary once, that, after the sleep of ages, the
human mind should arouse like a giant re-
freshed by slumber?
[She wrote:] “Illimitable prospects can best
apply euphrasy to the understanding," etc.
“Religion, that home of genius, willstrengthen
the mind, as it does the character.”
Columbus at Veragua, 1503. “ I was alone on
that dangerous coast suffering from a fever and
worn with fatigue. All hope of escape was gone.
I toiled up to the highest part of the ship, and
with a quivering voice and fast-falling tears, I
called upon your Highness' war captains from
each point of the compass, to come to my suc-
cor; but there was no reply. At length, groan-
ing with exhaustion, I fell asleep, and heard a
1 What follows is found in “ Power" (Conduct of Life,
pp. 63, 64).


1850] COLUMBUS'S PRAYER 153
compassionate voice address me thus, 'O fool,
and slow to believe and serve thy God, the God
of all. What did he do more for Moses, or for
David, than he has done for thee? From thine
infancy he has kept thee under his constant and
watchful care. He gave thee for thine own the
Indies, and thou hast divided them as it pleased
thee. He gave thee also the keys of those bar-
riers of the Ocean Sea which were closed with
such mighty chains. Turn to him and acknow-
ledge thine error; his mercy is infinite. The
privileges promised by God he never fails in be-
stowing, nor does he ever declare after a service
has been rendered him that such was not agree-
able to his intention or that he had regarded
the matter in another light. His acts answer to
his words, and it is his custom to perform all
his promises with interest.' I heard all this, as
it were, in a trance, but I had no answer to give
in definite words, and could but weep for my
errors. He who spoke to me, whoever it was,
concluded by saying, 'Fear not, but trust: all
these tribulations are recorded on marble, and
not without cause.'” — Letter to King and Queen,
Fourth Voyage, MAJOR, P. 185.


154
JOURNAL (AGE 47
December 18.
Charles Newcomb came, and yesterday de-
parted. But I do not ask him again to come.
He wastes my time; 'tis cruel to think of; de-
stroyed three good days for me! The Pytha-
goreans would have built a tomb for him, —
the unique, inspired, wasted genius!
Music. “Ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit,
on le chante; et ce qui ne vaut pas la peine
d'être chanté, on le danse.” So the Courrier des
Etats Unis extends the mot of Beaumarchais.
“Je crois que le ciel se moque de nous, car il donne
toujours au voisin le sort qui nous conviendrait."
“Quand on paie, c'est pour se dispenser
d'aimer.”
Shakspeare's fancy never flagged. He never
appears the anatomist, never with a mere out-
line, which is to be filled up in a happier hour,
but always gorgeous with new and shining drap-
eries. As a dry thinker, too, he is one of the
best in the world.
1 But not many months later Mr. Emerson was cheered
by his friend, and hopeful of him, as the Journal of 1853 will
show.


155
1850)
RICH LIFE. POET
“ Every action that hath gone before
Whereof we have record, trial did draw
Bias and thwart; not answering the aim
And that unbodied figure of the thought
That gave 't surmisèd shape.”
X complained that life had lost its interest.
'Tis very funny, be sure, to hear this. For
most of us the world is all too interesting,
l'embarras de richesses.
We are wasted with our versatility; with the
eagerness to grasp on every possible side, we all
run to nothing. I cannot open an agricultural
paper without finding objects enough for Me-
thusalem. I jilt twenty books whenever I fix on
one. I stay away from Boston, only because I
cannot begin there to see those whom I should
wish, the men and the things. I wish to know
France. I wish to study art. I wish to read
laws.
Napoleon III acquired such skill in the art
of lying that “the journals complained you
could not depend on the exact contrary of that
which he stated.”
Poet, — no, prose-writer is an orateur manqué.
Did not old Goethe say that Byron's poems


156
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
wereu
were undelivered parliamentary speeches? Much
more is it manifest, my dear Carlyle, that your
rage at stump oratory is inverted love.
Ellery says that “he likes Stow; he is a very
good character, there is only a spoonful of wit,
and ten thousand feet of sandstone.":
AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO
IN JOURNAL FOR 1850
Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximenes apud Plu-
tarch; Empedocles; Metrodorus; Aristarchus
of Samos; nopides ; .
Terence ; Sallust; Manilius;
Claudianus; Proclus; St. Augustine; Bede;
Nisami; Enweri; Richard of Devizes; Chau-
cer; Spanish Ballads, translated by Lockhart;
Columbus, Letters, apud Major; Camden,
1 Cyrus Stow, farmer and butcher, a neighbour of Mr.
Emerson's, a solid, stately bovine man. An anecdote of him
should be preserved. He had no children, and when advanced
in years and in very comfortable circumstances he realized his
desire of going to Washington. He reverently entered the
Capitol to see the chosen great and good of the land making
wise laws. He stayed one day and returned to Concord with
changed face. With lowered voice he told his neighbours that
in those marble corridors were Senators and Representatives
“ drinking and swearing right before me."


1850)
READING
157
Britannia; Sir Edward Coke, Commentary on
Littleton; Hooker; Spenser, Sonnets; Bacon,
De Fontibus Juris;
Van Helmont; John Smith; Descartes ;
Thomas Fuller, Worthies of England; Samuel
Butler; Henry More; John Evelyn; La Fon-
taine, Fables ; Pascal; Molière, Tartuffe ;
Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress; Locke; Spinoza;
Anthony à Wood, Athena Oxonienses; Newton;
Andrew Fletcher ; Kennett, History of England;
Robert Blair; James Thomson; Linnæus,
Philosophia Botanica; Rousseau; Lord Mans-
field, apud Lord Campbell; Sir William Black-
stone, Commentaries; Lagrange; Beaumarchais,
Mariage de Figaro;
Goethe, Correspondence with a Child; Jung
Stilling; Mrs. Barbauld; Laplace; Thomas
Erskine; Eckermann, Conversations with Goetbe;
Sömmering; Heeren; Hegel ; Schelling; Oken;
Lord John Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices;
David Brewster, Life of Newton;
Carlyle; Webster; Levi Frisbie; Rufus
Choate; Karl Otfried Müller, Mythologie;
George Calvert; William Seward ; Orestes A.
Brownson; W. L. Garrison; Cobden; Robert
Rantoul; Charles T. Jackson; John Mitchell
Kemble, The Saxons in England;


158
JOURNAL (AGE 47
George Sand; Margaret Fuller, Marchioness
d'Ossoli; Tennyson, In Memoriam; Thack-
eray, Vanity Fair ; Hugh Doherty;
Henry Ward Beecher; John C. Frémont;
Layard, Nineveh; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
and Shirley; Froude, Nemesis of Faith;
J. B. Stallo, General Principles of Philosophy
in Nature; H. D. Thoreau ; W. E. Channing;
Charles Newcomb.


JOURNAL
LECTURES ON FATE,
POWER, CULTURE, ILLUSIONS
THE SEVENTH OF MARCH
WEBSTER'S FALL
SLAVERY AT THE DOOR
HUMILIATION
THE WOMAN'S CONVENTION





JOURNAL XLII
1851
(From Journals BO and CO)
[In January Mr. Emerson lectured in New
England, and in the following month in the
towns of western New York. In March he gave
a course of six lectures in Pittsburg, Pennsyl-
vania ;— the discomforts of reaching which city,
partly by canal-boat, sleeping on the floor “in
a wreath of legs,” he told in a letter to his wife.
(See Cabot's Memoir, vol. ii, p. 566.)]
(From BO)
MORNING THOUGHTS
Sleep is like death, and after sleep
The world seems new begun,
Its earnestness all clear and deep,
Its true solution won;
White thoughts stand luminous and firm
Like statues in the sun.
Refreshed from supersensuous founts
The soul to blotless vision mounts.
William ALLINGHAM.'
i For Emerson's relations with the poet, see Letters to
William Allingham, edited by his wife.


162
JOURNAL [AGE 47
easures
In the heats of youth we defend the stoical
thesis, — faith without works, — the Platonic
Plenum, etc., and scorn to degrade our life by
the trivial measures of practice. Of course, in
the cardinal instance of love, the crimes of love
are to be expiated and purified away only by
more love, – the flame of love burning up all
mortal taint, etc. But later we begin to see that
some allowance, and always more and more,
must be made to the poor Whiggish facts; that
is to say, the carnage made in human relations,
the breach of the order of society, and the stings
of remorse, from a false position in the actor,
and the cruel false position given to the suf-
ferer, together constitute such a mass of ran-
corous objection, that nothing but a supernat-
ural magnanimity and aplomb in the hero can
confront or make any head against; and all this
is nothing but an expounding from facts of an
occult law which the strutting Pagan Intellect
had not descried, but which is integral part of
theory, and which a Christian soul, to be sure,
would have divined without aid of the offensive
facts.
“ Selon qu'il est conduit, le peuple français est
capable de tout." — RICHELIEU.


1851) HIGHER LAW. TENNYSON 163
The “Sickly Sentimentalism,” the “ Trashy
Sentimentalism,” as it is now called, of keep-
ing the Ten Commandments !
These taunts upon sentimentalism, and higher
law, and the like, which our Senators use, are
the screens of their cowardice.
Tennyson's In Memoriam is the common-
places of condolence among good Unitarians in
the first week of mourning. The consummate
skill of the versification is the sole merit. The
book has the advantage that was Dr. Chan-
ning's fortune, that all the merit was appreci-
able. He is never a moment too high for his
audience. But to demonstrate this mediocrity I
was forced to quote those moral sentences which
make the fame of true bards; such as
“In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed,"
of Wordsworth;
“ 'Tis crown enough to Virtue, still, her own ap-
plause,"
of Ben Jonson; or
“ It was for Beauty that the world was made ”;
and then to ask, Now show me one such line
in this book of Tennyson.


164
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
Turner. The fact that the creator of beauty
in English art, the man who has all his life been
shedding lustre and loveliness in profuse works
of his industrious pencil, is a poor hunks sulk-
ing in a lonely house with his woman Jessica,
- a miser, too, who never asked anybody to
dine, and has made £300,000 by his works, –
is not a dead fact, but significant of the com-
pensations of Nature ; significant that every old,
crooked curmudgeon has a soft place in his
heart; and not without comfort, too, that when
one feels the drawbacks and disgraces and dis-
eases of his temperament and activity, he recalls
that still he too may not be useless or pestifer-
ous if he steadily retires on his task of even a
usty, churlish, expiatory devotion to art
and beauty, like J. M. W. Turner.
ver
The principal thing that occurs now is the
might of the law which makes slavery the sin-
gle topic of conversation in this country. A
great wrong is attempted to be done and the
money power is engaged to do it. But unhap-
pily because it is criminal the feeble force of
conscience is found to set the whole world
against it.


1851) DRILL. ROTATION 165
Diamonds, I read, appear the same in a bowl
of water as out of it, whilst glass loses its light.
Education. Drill. It is better to teach the
child arithmetic and Latin grammar than geo-
graphy or rhetoric or moral philosophy; be-
cause these first require an exactitude of per-
formance in the pupil,' . ..
Man the Inventor. It is frivolous, of course,
to fix pedantically the date of this or that in-
vention.' ...
Rotation. What an excellent principle our
favorite rule of rotation in office would be if
applied in industrial matters. You have been
watchmaker long enough, now it is my turn to
make watches, and you can bake muffins. The
carpenter is to make glass this year, and the
glass-blower staircases. The blacksmith is to
cut me a coat, and the tailor to take charge of
the machine-shop. Mr. Benton has served an
apprenticeship of thirty years to the Federal
i The rest of the passage is found in “ Education” (Lec.
tures and Biographical Sketches, p. 147).
2 Much of what follows is found in “ Fate” (Conduct
of Life, p. 17).


166
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
Senate, has learned the routine, has opened his
views to a national scope, and must now retire
to give place to Johnny Raw.
The odious inequality must be borne. A
superintendent at the mills must have two
thousand dollars, whilst the most industrious
operative has only four hundred. Because, order
and faculty are rare and costly. Why should
not the wheels of the loom say, “See me, I
whirl and buzz with two hundred revolutions
in a minute, whilst that great lazy water-wheel,
down below there, only turns five times. I will
not go faster than he.”
I learned also that the valuations of Massa-
chusetts, of Boston, of New York, are nowise
reliable for direct comparison. As, for example,
the saying that Boston could buy Maine and
have $80,000,000 left. Because the values of
Boston are artificial values, the value of lux-
uries, furniture, books, pictures, inflated prices
of land and house lots and houses, etc., whilst
the values of Maine are primary and necessary,
and therefore permanent under any state of
society.
This consideration of inflation goes into all
farming value. The farmer gets two hundred,


1851] IMMORTALITY. MORNING 167
whilst the merchant gets two thousand dollars.'
... But the farmer's two hundred is far safer,
and is more likely to remain to him. . . . so
that the two sums turn out at last to be equiva-
lent.
I found when I had finished my new lecture
that it was a very good house, only the archi-
tect had unfortunately omitted the stairs.
If immortal, how rich the joy of that aspir-
ing soul whose competitors find him higher
than earthly hopes ! If “not to be," how like
the bells of a fool the trump of fame! But what
renders this idle, the spirit is framed for end-
less happiness in its origin, without one other
object or pursuit — writes my antique Saint-
sibyl.
The Morning. Hear what the morning says,
and believe that.' The house is full of noise,
and contradicts all that the morning hints: worse,
it distracts attention from what the morning
beams on us to all the nonsense which the house
1 Compare - Wealth” (Conduct of Life, p. 102).
2 This sentence occurs also in “ Country Life" (Natu-
ral History of Intellect, p. 157).


168
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
chatters. But there is one good child in the
house who furtively eyes from time to time the
East, through the window, and so keeps his
mind steadily fixed on that which it speaks,
and defends his ears from the rattle around
him.
ears
uro
Diamonds. “A lady in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth would have as patiently digested a
lie as the wearing of false stones, or pendants
of counterfeit pearl, so common in our age.”
THOMAS Fuller's Worthies, vol. ii, p. 294.
January 15.
Last night at the Social Circle' it was urged
that persons were much hurt who had failed to
be elected, etc., and the committee of nomina-
tion which brings one candidate, out of all the
list, before the Club, was thought most invidi-
ous. And much was said on the natural indig-
nation which the rejected candidates feel at hav-
ing a better man preferred to those who stood
prior to him in time of application, etc.
1 A club of Concord's leading citizens, originating in the
Committee of Safety in the days of the Revolution. It still
flourishes. Mr. Emerson was a member almost from the
time of his making his home in Concord until his death, and
valued it highly.


18511
CLUBS. LOW TONE
169
lan
To which, two conclusive answers seemed to
arise. If, when a vacancy occurs, there be sev-
eral names and the first in order of time is a
blameless candidate, but young and nowise club-
able; and, next below him, is the name of a man
who tells the best story in the county, and is as
full of fun and information as Judge Warren or
Harry Lee, or the like excellent talker, – is it
not a cruel wrong to the Club to deprive it, per-
haps for years, of such a member?
Then, secondly, I have no sympathy with
the wounded feelings of candidates who wish to
be preferred to a better man, or who count
themselves injured when an older or better man
is chosen. Let them sympathize with the Club,
and with good sense, instead of sympathizing
with themselves.
Say for a Boston Club: J. Peter Lesley,
Cabot, Ward, Lowell, H. James, Whipple,
Hale, Curtis, Norton, Whittier.'
Low tone. Burns and Goethe and Carlyle,
with great difference of power, understand it
well. Goethe is in this way a great success.
i More than twice as many names were written in the
Journal, but all but those here given were struck out by Mr.
Emerson.


170
[Ace 47
JOURNAL
Aunt Mary and Henry James are proficients,
and Charles Newcomb, Henry Thoreau, and
Ellery Channing.
[Several pages which follow are printed in
“Culture” (Conduct of Life, pp. 157, 158).]
26
7
Eloquence. Bad air, unfriendly audience, faint
heart and vacant thought in the orator are
things of course, and incident to Demosthenes,
to Chatham, to Webster, as inevitably as to the
gentlemen who address the stifling Concord Ves-
try this week. But here and there fell the bolt
of genius, astounding and dazzling, out of this
very fog and stench, burned them all up, melted
away bad air, rowdy mob, coldness, aversion,
partisanship, sterility, in one blaze of wonder,
sympathy, and delight, and the total consump-
tion of all this fuel is the proof of eloquence.
January 22.
Mr. Rogers, of Gloucester, who owns the
rocking stone about half a mile from Gloucester
village, which stone the tide moves, told me a
story of Jarvis, of the Sandwich Glass Company,
who came down there with his gun, and bonded
all the farms, the farmers thinking him a crazy
man with a pocket full of money: so they fol-


1851) WORK CURE. COLUMBUS 171
lowed him, and got each man ten dollars from
him for a bond, and, last of all, his landlord
also got a gold watch and five dollars. Then
Jarvis went up to Boston, put himself in funds,
came down and demanded a deed of all these
lands and houses, to the terror of the owners.
To every reproach, I know now but one an-
swer, namely, to go again to my own work.
“ But you neglect your relations.” Yes, too
true; then I will work the harder. “But you
have no genius.” Yes; then I will work the
harder. “But you have no virtues.” Yes; then
I will work the harder. “But you have de-
tached yourself and acquired the aversion of
all decent people. You must regain some posi-
tion and relation.” Yes; I will work harder.
[Columbus wrote to the King and Queen;-]
“The men with me were one hundred and
fifty, — many fit for pilots and good sailors,
but none of them can explain whither I went.
I started from a point above the port of Bra-
zil. . . . Storms. I put into an island called
Isla de las Bocas, and then steered for terra
firma ... but impossible to give correct ac-
count, because of currents.


172
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
“I ascertained, however, by compass and by
observation that I moved parallel with the coast
of terra firma. No one could tell under what
part of the heavens we were, nor at what period
I bent my course for the island of Española.
The pilots thought we had come to the island
of St. John, whereas it was the land of Mango,
four hundred leagues to the westward of where
they said. Let them answer and say if they know
where Veragua is situated. I assert that they
can give no other account than that they went to
lands where there was an abundance of gold;
this they can certify : but they do not know
the way to return thither for such a purpose ;
they would be obliged to go on a voyage of dis-
covery, as much as if they had never been there
before. There is a mode of reckoning derived
from astronomy which is sure and safe, and a
sufficient guide to any who understands it. This
resembles a prophetic vision.” — H. Major,
p. 191.
February 12 (?).
I must try to recall here, where I sit by the
edge of Seneca Lake, my conversation yester-
day with Albert H. Tracy, of Buffalo.' He
i In “ Immortality” (Letters and Social Aims, p. 332) is
a story of the momentary meeting, in company, of two friends


18511 ALBERT H. TRACY
173
believed that Europe was effete beside Amer-
ica, and fancied that the office of men here
was in many ages to bring the material world
into subserviency to the moral. And that, if one
should expect only such a future as the past,
nations and men might well despair. Nor that
yet were even the means of change apparent,
and that it was utterly futile to hope anything
from such arrangements or philanthropies as
might now organize; for they begin by say-
ing, Now let us make a compact, — which is a
solecism, inasmuch as it implies a sentimental
resistance to the gravities and tendencies which
will steadily, by little and little, pull over your
air castle. There is nothing to tie it to. He be-
lieves in a future of great equalities; but all our
experience, he sees, is of inequalities.
Some persons are thrown off their balance
when in society; others are thrown on to bal-
ance; the excitement of company and the obser-
vation of other characters correct their biases.
Margaret Fuller always appeared to unexpected
advantage in conversation with a circle of per-
after twenty-five years' separation, each vainly questioning the
other if he had received any light. One of them was Albert
Tracy, here mentioned; the other was Lewis Cass.


174
(AGE 47
JOURNAL
sons, with more common sense and sanity than
any other,—though her habitual vision was
through coloured lenses.
Mr. Moseley at Buffalo described Webster's
attitude, when in the Senate, seeking for a word
that did not come: “He pauses, puts his hand
to his brow,- you would think then there was
a mote in his eye. Still it comes not; then he
puts his hands — American fashion - first into
his breast under his waistcoat, deeper than I
can, then, to the bottom of his fobs, bends for-
ward, — then the word is bound to come; he
throws back his head, and out it comes with a
leap, and, I promise you, it has its full effect on
the Senate.”
The country boys and men have in their
mind the getting a knowledge of the world as
a thing of main importance. The New Hamp-
shire man in the cars said that somebody grew
up at home and his father whipped him for sev-
eral years, — he would fall on him in the field
and beat him as he would his cattle. But one
day the boy faced him and held his hands.
Then the boy had never been to school, and
he thought he would go to California. There


mai
1851 DOLLARS. WOMEN 175
he was, a man grown, good, stout, well-look-
ing fellow, six feet, but as ignorant as a horse; be
bad never had any chance ; how could he know
anything? So he went to California, and stayed
there a year, and has come back. He looks
well, he has much improved in his appearance,
but he has not got a ninepence.
And really New Hampshire and Vermont
look on California and railroads as formerly
they did on a peddling trip to Virginia, -as
their education, as giving them a chance to know
something.
Nothing can be more foolish than this re-
proach, which goes from nation to nation, of the
love of dollars. It is like oxen taxing each other
with eating grass, or a society of borers in an oak
tree accusing one another of eating wood; or,
in a great society of cheese-mites, if one should
begin making insinuations that the other was
eating cheese.
And yet there stand the two creations of
Greek sculpture and of Italian painting.
Women carry sail, and men rudders. Women
look very grave sometimes, and affect to steer,
but their pretended rudder is only a masked
sail. The rudder of the rudder is not there.


176
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
The poets ends a copy of his verses to the
printer. Thenceforward he is relieved, the hu-
man race takes charge of it, and it flies from
land to land, from language to language. It hap-
pens that they are in a new style, and he may
even be forced, like Coleridge, or like Campbell,
to prove painfully that he wrote the verses ; -
they have become so entirely the world's pro-
perty that it is hard to prove that he had any-
thing to do with them. But the poetaster, as our
poor little Mulchinock, having made what he
calls verses, goes about reading them to you and
me and all who can be made to listen; begs
them to befriend them, to quote them; to sign
a certificate that they are verses; to subscribe to
his book, to write it up; and, in short, devotes
himself to the business of nurse or attendant to
these poor rhymes, which, God knows, need all
this backing, and will go to the devil in spite of it.
“An epic of a poet who has taken great pains
to get favorable notices of his work in public
prints. Such notices, said Goethe, have ap-
peared in various papers. But at last comes the
Halle Literary Gazette, telling plainly what the
poen is really worth, and thus all the compli-
ments of the other papers are nullified.”—
ECKERMANN, vol. ii, p. 158.
ERMA


SC
1851) SAVING IMAGINATION 177
Genial beat. Imagination. There is and must
be a little air-chamber, a sort of tiny Bedlam in
even the naturalist's or mathematician's brain
who arrives at great results. They affect a stick-
ing to facts; they repudiate all imagination and
affection, as they would disown stealing. But
Cuvier, Oken, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Owen,
Agassiz, Audubon, must all have this spark
of fanaticism for the generation of steam, and
there must be that judicious tubing in their
brain that is in the boiler of the locomotive,
or wherever steam must be swiftly generated.
They all deny it, of course. Goethe had this
air-chamber so large that, like Pericles, he must
wear a helmet to conceal the dreaded infirmity;
but he never owned it; he even persuaded the
people that it was the county jail. If you have
never so much faculty of detail, without this
explosive gas it makes the Dr. Prichards and
Dr. Worcesters and Dr. Warrens, men that hold
hard to facts, Dr. Dryasdusts, the most tedious
and dreaded of mankind. But add this fanati-
cism, and you have Buffons and Davys. Dr.
Jackson's misfortune is that he has none, and,
like his class, is imposed upon by the loud dis-
claimer of the fanatics, and takes Goethe at his
word that his air-chamber is the county jail.


178
[AGE 47
JOURNAL
✓ Nothing so marks a man as bold imagina-
tive expressions.' Henry Thoreau promised to
make as good sentences of that kind as any-
body.
Bettine is the most imaginative person in
our day.
The French call one class of malcontents
with the present order of things, — those who
espouse the liberal side in respect to the poor,
the slave, etc., but who do not propose a rem-
edy,— les stériles.
Beauty. “For there is a language in looks
and gestures, there is a fountain of joy and de-
light concealed deep in the physical structure,
and its waters laugh to the eye of intellect, and
reflect into the hearts of those who behold it
a sunniness and exhilaration greater than we
derive from gazing on the summer sea.” — St.
John, vol. ii, p. 191.
Among the nineteen or twenty things which
make the test questions at the Egyptian funeral
i Most of the rest of this passage is printed in “ Poetry
and Imagination” (Letters and Social Aims, p. 12).


1851] FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW 179
is the question, How did he stand on the
world?' ...
Tests. “Who now awaits in the antechamber;
Johnson or Chesterfield ?” (Examiner.) Sick-
ness and poverty test the heart of the witness.
ness
Bad Times. We wake up with painful augur-
ing, and, after exploring a little to know the
cause, find it is the odious news in each day's
paper, the infamy that has fallen on Massa-
chusetts, that clouds the daylight and takes
away the comfort out of every hour. We shall
never feel well again until that detestable law is
nullified in Massachusetts and until the Gov-
ernment is assured that once for all it cannot
and shall not be executed here. All I have and
all I can do shall be given and done in opposi-
tion to the execution of the law.”
1 The passage in a condensed form is found in “ Farm-
ing” (Society and Solitude, p. 153).
2 On Sunday evening, May 3, Mr. Emerson made an
address to his Concord neighbors on the infamy and iniquity
of the Fugitive Slave Law. The question was no longer as to
how the Southern States should conduct their domestic affairs,
but was brought to the door of every Northern home. For
by the new law any citizen could be required to aid the Fed-
eral officials in securing a fugitive, and the helping or harbor-


180
JOURNAL (AGE 47
Mr. Hoar' has never raised his head since
Webster's speech in last March, and all the
interim has really been a period of calamity to
New England. That was a steep step down-
ward. I had praised the tone and attitude of
the country. My friends had mistrusted it.
They say now, It is no worse than it was be-
fore; only it is manifest and acted out. Well I
think that worse. It shows the access of so
much courage in the bad, so much check of
virtue, terror of virtue, withdrawn. The tame-
ness is shocking.
I am sorry to say it, but New Hampshire
has always been distinguished for the servility
of its eminent men. Mr. Webster had resisted
ing him was punishable by fine and imprisonment. This ad-
dress was for the first time included in the Miscellanies in the
Centenary Edition.
i Squire (Samuel) Hoar, the father of the judge.
2 The lament over the shame of Boston and the subservi-
ency of her people to the South, because of their business in-
terests, follows. It is found in the first of the two speeches
on the Fugitive Slave Law (Miscellanies, pp. 180-181).
Of this brave work Mr. Emerson wrote to Carlyle in July, —
“ In the spring the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill
drove me to some writing and speech-making without hope
of effect, but to clear my own skirts." Yet the work was
strongly and faithfully done.


181
1851)
WEBSTER'S FALL
for a long time the habit of his compatriots, -
I mean no irony, — and by adopting the spirited
tone of Boston had recommended himself as
much as by his great talents to the people of
Massachusetts; but blood is thicker than water,
the deep servility of New Hampshire politics
which has marked all prominent statesmen
from that district, with the great exception of
Mr. Hale, has appeared late in life with all the
more strength that it had been resisted so long,
and he has renounced, — what must have cost
him some perplexity, — all the great passages of
his past career on which his fame is built. His
great speeches are, — his discourse at Plymouth
denouncing slavery ; his speech against Hayne
and Southern aggression; his eulogy on Adams
and Jefferson, a speech which he is known by
and in which he stands by the Fathers of the
Revolution for the very resistance which he
now denounces; and lastly, his speeches and
recent writings on Hungarian liberty. At this
very moment his attitude, assumed as Foreign
Secretary in his letter to Mr. Hulsemann, is
printed in all newspapers before the people in
the most awkward contradiction to his own do-
mestic position, precisely like that of the French
President between French liberty and Roman


182
JOURNAL
[ACE 47
tyranny; or like Hail Columbia, when sung at
a slave-auction.
I opened a paper to-day in which he pounds
on the old strings in a letter to the Washington
Birthday feasters at New York. “ Liberty!
liberty !” Pho! Let Mr. Webster, for de-
cency's sake, shut his lips once and forever on
this word. The word liberty in the mouth of
Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the
mouth of a courtezan.
The fame of Everett is dear to me and to all
his scholars, and I have watched with alarm his
derelictions. Whenever his genius shone, it of
course was in the instinct of freedom, but one
of his scholars cannot but ask him whether
there was no sincerity in all those apostrophes
to freedom and adjurations of the dying De-
mosthenes : was it all claptrap? And as to the
name of New England Societies, which Mr.
Choate, Mr. Webster and Mr. Foote, Mr.
Clay and Mr. Everett address, and are re-
sponded to with enthusiasm,-it is all a disgust-
ing obsequiousness.
Their names are tarnished: what we have
tried to call great is little ; and the merely eth-
nographic fact remains that an immense ex-


1851] THE CONVERTED WOLF 183
ternal prosperity is possible, with pure coward-
ice and hollowness in all the conspicuous official
men. I cannot read longer with any comfort the
local good news even, - Education in Massa-
chusetts, Art Union, Revival in Religion.'...
mes
ord
The little fact comes out more pi
you cannot rely on any man for the defence of
truth who is not constitutionally of that side.
Wolf, however long his nails have been pared,
however neatly he has been shaved and tailored
and taught and tuned to say “virtue" and
“religion,” cannot be relied on when it comes
to a pinch; he will forget his morality, and say
morality means sucking blood.” The man only
can be trusted to defend humanity. And women
are really the heart and sanctuary of our civil-
ization.
Mr. Choate, whose talent consists in a fine
choice of words which he can hang indiscrimi-
nately on any offender, has pushed the priv-
ilege of his profession so far as to ask, “ What
would the Puritans of 1620 say to the trashy
sentimentalism of modern reformers?” And
I See Concord Address on Fugitive Slave Law”
(Miscellanies, p. 181).
2 This sentence occurs in the Address.


184
(AGE 47
JOURNAL
thus the stern old fathers of Massachusetts who,
Mr. Choate knows, would have died at the
stake before soiling themselves with this dam-
nation, are made to repudiate the “trashy sen-
timentalism” of the Ten Commandments. The
joke is too impudent.
The profession of the law has the old objec-
tion that it makes the practitioner callous and
sceptical, — the practice of defending criminals
of all dyes of guilt and holding them up with
vehement protestations that they are injured
but honest men, firm Christians, models of vir-
tue, only a little imprudent and open to prac-
tices of [bad men].
It is the need of Mr. Webster's position that
he should have an opinion ; that he should be
a step in advance of everybody else, and make
the strongest statement in America ; that is vital
to him. He cannot maintain himself otherwise.
Mr. Webster has deliberately taken out his
name from all the files of honour in which he
had enrolled it, - from all association with lib-
eral, virtuous, and philanthropic men, and read
his recantation on his knees at Richmond and
Charleston. He has gone over in an hour to
the party of force, and stands now on the pre-


1851) WEBSTER'S FALL 185
cise ground of the Metternichs, the Castle-
reaghs and the Polignacs, without the excuse
of hereditary bias and of ancient name and title,
which they had. He has undone all that he has
spent his years in doing, - he has discredited
himself. He to talk of liberty, and to rate an
Austrian! He would dragoon the Hungarians,
for all his fine words. I advise Kossuth, after
his experience of Görgey, not to trust Webster.
He would in Austria truckle to the Czar, as he
does in America to the Carolinas; and hunt the
Hungarians from the Sultan as he does the
fugitives of Virginia from Massachusetts. He
may bluster. It is his tactics. We shall make
no more mistakes. He has taught us the ghastly
meaning of liberty, in his mouth. It is kid-
napping and hunting to death men and women,
it is making treason and matter of fine and im-
prisonment and armed intervention of the re-
sistance of (an immoral law?] ...
The very question of property, the house
and land we occupy, have lost all their sun-
light, and a man looks gloomily on his chil-
dren and thinks, What have I done that you
should begin life in dishonour?
I may then add the Union ; nothing seems to
me more bitterly futile than this bluster about
SUNOUT


186
JOURNAL
(Age 47
el
erica
ew
CO
OU
the Union. A year ago we were all lovers and
prizers of it. Before the passage of that law
which Mr. Webster made his own, we indulged
in all the dreams which foreign nations still
cherish of American destiny. But in the new
attitude in which we find ourselves, the degra-
dation and personal dishonour which now rest
like miasma on every house in Massachusetts,
the sentiment is entirely changed. No man can
look his neighbor in the face. We sneak about
with the infamy of crime in the streets and
cowardice in ourselves, and frankly, once for
all, the Union is sunk, the flag is hateful, and
will be hissed.
The Union ! Oh, yes, I prized that, other
things being equal; but what is the Union to a
man self-condemned, with all sense of self-re-
spect and chance of fair fame cut off, — with
the names of conscience and religion become
bitter ironies, and liberty the ghastly nothing
which Mr. Webster means by that word? The
worst mischiefs that could follow from Secession
and new combination of the smallest fragments
of the wreck were slight and medicable to the
calamity your Union has brought us. Another
year, and a standing army, officered by Southern
gentlemen to protect the Commissioners and to


1851) UNION MADE ODIOUS 187
hunt the fugitives, will be illustrating the new
• sweets of Union in Boston, Worcester, and
Springfield. It did not appear and it was in-
credible that the passage of the Law would
make the Union odious; but from the day
it was attempted to be executed in Massachu-
setts, this result has appeared, that the Union
is no longer desirable. Whose deed is that?'
One more consideration occurs, — the mis-
chief of a legal crime; the demoralization of the
community. Each of these per Is who touches
it is contaminated. There has not been in our
lifetime another moment when public men were
personally lowered by their political action. But
here are gentlemen whose names stood as high
as any, whose believed probity was the con-
fidence and fortification of all, who, by fear of
public opinion, or by that dangerous ascend-
ency of Southern manners, have been drawn into
the support of this nefarious business, and have,
of course, changed their relations to men. We
1 Although Mr. Emerson's delivery was usually quiet, it
was always pleasantly varied and modulated, yet, when the
occasion demanded it, he could startle his hearers by its sud-
den strength and fire. The testimony to this range and power
of voice by Nathaniel P. Willis, written, too, in this very year
1851, has been already referred to.


188
JOURNAL (AGE 47
poor men in the country, who might have
thought it an honour to shake hands with them,
would now shrink from their touch ; nor could
they enter our humblest doors. Can the reputed
wealth of Mr. E- restore his good name?
Can Mr. Curtis' reinstate himself? Or could
Mr. Webster obtain now a vote in the State of
Massachusetts for the poorest municipal office?
Well, is not this a loss inevitable to a bad law?
-a law which no man can countenance or abet
the execution , without loss of all self-respect,
and forfeiting forever the name of a gentleman?
We therefore beg you to stand so far the friends
of yourselves and of poor well-meaning men,
your constituents, as not to suffer them to be
put in a position where they cannot do right with-
out breaking your law, or keep the law without
corrupting and dishonouring the community.
The College, the churches, the schools, the
very shops and factories are discredited." ...
I am surprised that lawyers can be so blind
as to suffer the law to be discredited.3 . ..
i The United States Commissioner in Boston, who, in
that capacity, returned the fugitive slave Sims to his master
that very year in April.
2 See Miscellanies, p. 182.
3 Miscellanies, p. 190.


1851] THE UNFAITHFUL CLERGY 189
The fame of Webster ends in this nasty law. ✓
ras
And as for Andover and Boston preachers,
Dr. D— and Dr. S— , who deduce kid- ; }
napping from their Bible, - tell the poor, dear
doctor, if this be Christianity, it is a religion
of dead dogs, let it never pollute the ears and
hearts of noble children again.
Oh, bring back then the age when valor was
virtue, since what is called morality means no-
thing but pudding !- pardon the spleen of a
professed hermit.
Mr. Webster cannot choose but regret his
loss. Tell him that those who make fame ac-
cuse him with one voice.' ... Tell him that he
who was their pride in the woods and moun-
tains of New England is now their mortifica-
tion, ... they never name him, they have
taken his book of speeches from the shelf and
put it in the stove; and all the fribble of the
Daily Advertiser, and of its model, the New York
Journal of Commerce, will not quite compensate
him. I have no fear that any roars of New York
mobs will be able to drown this voice in Mr.
Webster's ear. It can outwhisper all the salvos
1 The rest of this eloquent paragraph is found in the
speech referred to (Miscellanies, pp. 201, 202). .
ever


190
JOURNAL [Age 47
• of their cannon. If it were Mr. Cass, it might
be different; but Mr. Webster has the misfor-
tune to know the voice of truth from the stu-
pid hurrahs of New York.
It will be his distinction to have changed in
one day, by the most detestable law that was
ever enacted by a civilized state, the fairest and
most triumphant national escutcheon the sun
ever shone upon, the free, the expanding, the
hospitable, the irresistible America, home of the
homeless, and pregnant with the blessing of the
world, into a jail or barracoon for the slaves of
a few thousand Southern planters, and all the
citizens of this hemisphere into kidnappers and
drivers for the same. Is that a name will feed
his hungry ambition?
“Inconceivable levity of the public mind” –
an unbroken prosperity the cause.
There are or always were in each country
certain gentlemen to whom the honour and dig-
nity of the community were confided, persons
of elevated sentiments, relieved, perhaps, by
fortune from the necessity of injurious applica-
tion to arts of gain, and who used that leisure
for the benefit of their fellow citizens in the
study of elegant learning, the learning of liberty,
and in their forwardness on all emergencies to
ere
Ons


1851] DEGENERATE NAMES 191
lead with courage and magnanimity against any
peril in the State. I look in vain for such a class
among us, and that is the worst symptom in our
affairs. There are persons of fortune enough
and men of breeding and of elegant learning,
but they are the very leaders in vulgarity of
sentiment. I need call no names. The fact stares
us in the face. They are full of sneers and deri-
sion, and their reading of Cicero and of Plato
and of Tacitus has been drowned under gross-
ness of feeding and the bad company they have
kept. It is the want, perhaps, of a stern and
high religious training, like the iron Calvinism
which steeled their fathers seventy-five years
ago.' But though I find the names of old pa-
triots still resident in Boston, it is only the pre-
sent venerable Mr. Quincy who has renewed the
hereditary honour of his name by scenting the
tyranny in the gale. The others are all lapped
in after-dinner dreams and are as obsequious to
Mr. Webster as he is to the gentlemen of Rich-
mond and Charleston. The want of loftiness
1 Your town is full of gentle names
By patriots once were watchwords made;
Those war-cry names are muffled shames
On recreant sons mislaid.
Note to “ Boston Hymn" (Poems, p. 473).


192
(AGE 47
JOURNAL
CIL
of sentiment in the class of wealth and education
in the University, too, is deplorable. I am sorry
to say I predict too readily their feeling. They
will not even understand the depth of my re-
gret and will find their own supercilious and
foppish version. But I refer them back to their
Cicero and Tacitus, and to their early resolu-
tions.
It was always reckoned, even in the rudest
ages, the distinction of the gentleman, the oath
of honour of the knight, to speak the truth to
men of power or to angry communities, and up-
hold the poor man against the rich oppressor.
Will the educated people of Boston ask them-
selves whether they side with the oppressor or
the oppressed? Yet I know no reason why a
gentleman, who is, I take it, a natural formation,
should not be true to his duties in Boston in
1850, as haughtily faithful, and with as sovereign
superiority to all hazards, as his fathers had
in 1770, or as Mr. Hampden or Mr. Eliot
in London in 1650, or Arundel, or More, or
Milton.
V
I do not value any artificial enthusiasm of
protest got up by individuals in corners, which,
however vehement, tells for nothing on the


1851] THE OLD LAW 193
public mind; but I look eagerly and shall not
have to look long for a spontaneous expression
of the injured people, in fault of leaders, creat-
ing their own, and shaking off from their back
these degenerate and unworthy riders. I make
no secret of my intention to keep them in-
formed of the baseness of their accustomed
leaders. It is well to quote Cicero and Tacitus
when doing the deed of Chiffinch and of Buck-.
ingham.
In the weakness of the Union the law of
1793 was framed, and much may be said in pal-
liation of it. It was a law affirming the exist-
ence of two states of civilization, or an intimate
union between two countries, one civilized and
Christian, and the other barbarous, where can-
nibalism was still permitted ... and the law
became, as it should, a dead letter. It was
merely there in the statute-book to soothe the
dignity of the man-eaters. And we Northern-
ers had, on our part, indemnified and secured
ourselves against any occasional eccentricity of
appetite in our confederates by our own in-
terpretation, and by offsetting state law by state
laws. It was and is penal here in Massachusetts
for any sheriff or town or state officer to lend


194
JOURNAL (AGE 47
himself or his jail to the slave-hunter, and it is
also settled that any slave brought here by his
master becomes free. All this was well. What
Mr. Webster has now done is not only to re-
enact the old law, but to give it force, which it
never had before, or to bring down the free and
Christian State of Massachusetts to the canni-
bal level.
Now this conspiring to hold up a bad law,
and intimate correspondence of leading gentle-
men mutually engaging to run to New York
and to Cambridge, and dine in public on poor
Washington's birthday, and the reading of the
Riot Act, and of Washington's Legacy, and ob-
taining the preaching of Rev. Drs. S_ and
D- , seems for the moment successful; and
I do not know but Mr. Fillmore and Mr.
Webster and Everett flatter themselves that the
difficult Massachusetts is somehow managed,
and that they had really overestimated the tra-
ditionary rebellion of the town of Boston.
Once for all the best lie has this insuperable
objection. They are always at the mercy of a
truth-speaker. It does very well as long as all
the spectators agree to make-believe with them,
but the first unlucky boy that calls things by
their names will ruin the cheat, unless they can


1851] THE UNIVERSE IS TRUE 195
coax the good Creator not to make any more
men. ...
[Suppose it said to the President,] My dear
sir, Thomas Melville is gone, Mr. Cabot is
dead, Mr. Otis of the Hartford Convention
is dead; Mr. Quincy is old; the turbulent
Quincy Adams is at last still; and though there
is an unlucky book of the old Adams printing
about these times, yet, North or South, we
don't hear of anybody who will not be peace-
able. I think you may venture it.
Ah, Mr. President, trust not the information.
The gravid old Universe is spawning on, the
wombs conceive and the breasts give suck to
thousands and millions of hairy babes formed,
not in the image of your statute, but in the im-
age of the Universe,' . .. unless you can sup-
press the English tongue in America, and hin-
der boys from declaiming Webster's Plymouth
Speech, and pass a law against libraries, — all is
futile.
Then, sir, there is England itself, — faults of
her own undoubtedly, — but unhappily now so
clean on this question that she will give pub-
i For much that follows, here omitted, see Miscellanies
(p. 194).


196
JOURNAL
[AGE 47
sons
licity to every vice and trick of ours. There is
France, there is Germany, but worst, a thou-
sand times worse than all, there is this yeaning
America, the yeaning Northwest, millions of
souls to accuse us.
If the thing were to be carried in a close cor-
poration, all the persons might be sounded and
secured. Even in a Senate, even in a House,
they can calculate the exact amount of resist-
ance; but this is quite impossible in a country.
For one, only one truth-speaker will ruin them.
What is the use of logic and legal acumen if
it be not to demonstrate to the people what is
metaphysically true? The fact that a criminal
statute is illegal is admitted by lawyers, and,
that fact once admitted by the people, the whole
structure of this new tyranny falls to the ground.
Why do not the lawyers who are professionally
its interpreters put this home to the people?
There is for every man a statement possible of
that truth which he is most unwilling to receive,
a statement possible, so pungent and so ample
that he cannot get away from it, but must either
bend to it or die of it.' Else, there would be
no such word as eloquence, which means this.
1 This sentence is used in “ Eloquence" (Society and
Solitude, pp. 91, 92).


18511 WEBSTER. HAYNE, CHOATE 197
Mr. Webster did that thing in his better days
for Hayne. Mr. Hayne could not hide from
himself that something had been shown him and
shown the whole world which he did not wish
to see. He left public life and retired, and, it is
said, died of it. Mr. Webster has now in his turn
chosen evil for good, less innocently than Mr.
Hayne, and Mr. Hayne is avenged. For it is
certain that he will be cast and ruined. He fights
with an adversary not subject to casualties. ...
But Aristotle's reply to the question, What
advantage a man may gain by lying ? is still
true; “not to be believed when he speaks the
truth,” — much more, “not to be believed when
he lies again.” :
Webster and Choate think to discredit the
higher law by personalities; they insinuate much
about transcendentalists and abstractionists and
people of no weight. It is the cheap cant of
lawyers and of merchants in a failing condition
and of rogues. These classes usually defend an
immorality by the practice of men of the world,
and talk of dreamers and enthusiasts. Every
woman [that] has been debauched [has been so]
by being made to believe that it is the mode, it is
custom, and none but the priest and a few de-
vout visionaries ever think otherwise. People


198
JOURNAL (AGE 47
never bring their history into politics, or this
thin smoke would deceive nobody.
It is the most impolitic of all steps, this
demoralization of the people. “Poets are the
guardians of reverence in the hearts of the peo-
ple.” It must always happen that the guiding
counsels of ages and nations should come, not
from statesmen or political leaders, always men
of seared consciences, “half villains,” who, it has
been said, are more dangerous than whole ones
(Mr. Webster would be very sorry if this coun-
try should take his present counsel for any but
this particular emergency), but from contempla-
tive men aloof by taste and necessity from these
.doubtful activities, and really aware of the truth
long before the contemporary statesmen, be-
cause more impressionable. Mr. Webster never
opened a jury case without praising the law-
abiding disposition of the people.
Mr. Everett, a man supposed aware of his
own meaning, advises pathetically a reverence
for the Union. Yes, but hides the other horn
under this velvet? Does he mean that we shall
lay hands on a man who has escaped from slav-
ery to the soil of Massachusetts, and so has
done more for freedom than ten thousand ora-


1851) EVERETT’S POSITION 199
tions, and tie him up and call in the marshal,
and say, “I am an orator for freedom; a great
many fine sentences have I turned, — none has
turned finer, except Mr. Webster, -in favor
of plebeian strength against aristocracy; and, as
my last and finest sentence of all, to show the
young men of the land who have bought my
book and clapped my sentences and copied
them in their memory, how much I mean by
them, Mr. Marshal, here is a black man of my
own age, and who does not know a great deal
of Demosthenes, but who means what he says,
whom we will now handcuff and commit to the
custody of this very worthy gentleman who has
come on from Georgia in search of him; I have
no doubt he has much to say to him that is in-
teresting, as the way is long. I don't care if I
give them here are copies of my Concord and
Lexington and Plymouth and Bunker Hill ad-
dresses to beguile their journey from Boston to
the plantation whipping-post.” Does Mr. Ever-
ett really mean this? — that he and I shall do
this? Mr. Everett understands English, as few
men do who speak it. Does he mean this?
Union is a delectable thing, and so is wealth,
and so is life, but they may all cost too much,
if they cost honour.


200
JOURNAL
(AGE 47
It is very remarkable how rare a bad law, an
immoral law, is. Does Mr. Everett know how
few examples in civil history there are of bad
laws? I do not think it will be easy to parallel
the crime of Mr. Webster's law. But the crime
of kidnapping is on a footing with the crimes
of murder and of incest. ... How can Mr.
Everett put at nought all manly qualities, all
his claims to truth and sincerity, for the sake
of backing up this cowardly nonsense?
Does he mean this, – that he and I shall do
this, — or does he secretly know that he will
die the death sooner than lift a finger in the
matter, he or his son, or his son's son, and only
hopes to persuade certain truckmen and con-
stables to do this, that rich men may enjoy
their estates in more security ?
The historian tells us that “ Thrasymachus's
sophistry was political, and his aim the destruc-
tion of freedom, by extinguishing that sense
of justice on which it must ever be based.” —
J. A. St. John, p. 258.
Mr. Webster is fond of fame; his taste is
likely to be gratified. For there is not a man
of thought or ingenuity but at every dinner


201
1851] THE EVIL LAW
table, in every private letter, in every newspaper
I take up, is forced to say something biting of
this enemy of the honor of Massachusetts. He
has the curse of all this country which he has
afflicted.
One way certainly the Nemesis is seen. Here
is a measure of pacification and union. What is
its effect? — that it has made one subject, one
only subject for conversation and painful thought
throughout the Union, Slavery. We eat it, we
drink it, we breathe it, we trade, we study, we
wear it. We are all poisoned with it, and after
the fortnight the symptoms appear, purulent,
making frenzy in the head and rabidness.
What a moment was lost when Judge Shaw
declined to affirm the unconstitutionality of the
Fugitive Slave Law!'
The present crisis is not analogous to the
i For a most interesting account of the doings in Boston,
day by day, and the fierce public feeling, during the period
of the rendition of Sims and Burns, see the account by Rich-
ard H. Dana, who himself took a brave part, in his biography
by Charles Francis Adams. Another remarkable contemporary
document is the charge to the Grand Jury as to the Fugitive
Slave Law by Judge Hoar. (Memoir of Ebenezer Rockwood
Hoar, by Storey and Emerson, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911.)


202
JOURNAL
[Ace 47
Revolution. No liberty of the controlling classes
is now threatened. If the South, or if the Fed-
eral Government threatened the liberty of any
class, I doubt not there would be as violent re-
action as was then. This is merely a case of
conscience, not of anger, a call for compassion,
a call for mercy.
That is one thing; now it is not less impera-
tive that this nation should say, This Slavery
shall not be, it poisons and depraves everything
it touches.
There can never be peace whilst this devilish
seed of war is in our soil. Root it out, burn it up,
pay for the damage, and let us have done with
it. It costs a hundred millions. Twice so much
were cheap for it. Boston is a little city, and
yet is worth near two hundred millions. Boston
itself would pay a large fraction of the sum, to be
clean of it. I would pay a little of my estate with
joy; for this calamity darkens my days. It is a
local, accidental distemper, and the vast interests
of a continent cannot be sacrificed for it.
Hosmer says, “Sims come on a good errand;
for Sumner is elected ; Rantoul and Palfrey are
likely to be; the State of Massachusetts ought
to buy that fellow.”


1851] BUY THE SLAVES 203
I find it has made every student a student
of law.
The destiny of America, the Union,- yes,
great things, dear to the heart and imagination,
and not to be put at risk by every young ranter.
But a larger state, a prior union, still dearer to
heart and imagination, and much longer to be
our country is the World. We will not levy
war against that, to please this New Hampshire
strapper nor the Carolinas.
We will buy the slaves at a hundred millions.
It will be cheaper than any of our wars. It will
be cheap at the cost of a national debt like Eng-
land's.
But we must put out this poison, this con-
flagration, this raging fever of Slavery out of
the Constitution. If Webster had known a true
and generous policy, this would have made him.
He is a spent ball. It is the combined wealth
behind him that makes him of any avail. And
that is as bad as Europe.'
pc.
The doctrine of Manilius is that the earth is
i For an account of Mr. Emerson's delivery of this speech
in Cambridge in the face of tumultuous opposition, as told by
Professor James Bradley Thayer, see Mr. Cabot's Memoir,
vol. ii, pp. 585, 586.


204
JOURNAL
[AGE 47
at rest, pressed on all sides by equal forces : yet
his language is remarkably coincident with the
Newtonian theory of gravitation.
Imaque de cunctis mediam tenet undique sedem.
Idcircoque manet stabilis, quia totus ab illa
Tantundem refugit mundus : fecitque cadendo
Undique ne caderet. Medium totius et imum est
Ictaque contractis consistunt corpora plagis.'
Manilius, lib. i, 167, 170.
Think, you rascal ! “Réfléchissez, Rappelez
vous du mot que j'ai dicté, et écrivez le. Je ne
répéterai pas le mot.” — NAPOLEON.
OLEON.
History of Liberty. 'T is idle to complain of
Abolitionist and Free-Soiler. See-saw, up and
down, tilts the pole, swings the pendulum of
the world. Violence is followed by collapse,
cruelty by pity. You cannot get rid of women;
you cannot cut the heart out, and leave the
life in. The atrocities of savages exasperated
1 The editors hazard this translation of an obscure pas-
sage :- And lowest of all [Earth] holds a middle station
and therefore remains at rest, because the whole Universe
draws back equally from this [place], and by its falling causes
that it shall not fall abroad. Midmost it is and lowest, and
the smitten bodies hold together from the blows which struck
them.


1851) MAUDLIN TEARS 205
Christianity into being and power. Christianity
lived by love of the people. ...
“A nation never falls until the citadel of its
moral being has been betrayed and become un-
tenable.” — KEMBLE.
Elizabeth Hoar finds the life of Campbell to
send her back with new force of attachment to
her Temperance friends in America. Every life
of an European artist shows her that they have
no self-command. Their tears are maudlin, for
they are the tears of wine ; but the ocean and
the elements are at the back of the brave old
Puritans of the world.
(From CO)
May.
Lecturing. Experimentum in corpore vili. Cob-
den and Phillips learned their art at the expense
of many a poor village Lyceum and country
church.
HOUSE OF FAME
Hearest thou not the great swough?
Yes, perdie, quoth I, and well enow.
And what sound is it like ? quoth he.
Like the beating of the sea,
Quoth I, against the rocks hollow .
When tempests do their ships swallow,


206
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
And that a man stand out of doubt
A mile thence, and hear it route.
AUCER.
George Minot' thinks that it is of no use
balloting, for it will not stay, but what you do
with the gun will stay so.
The old guide knows the passes from moun-
tain to mountain, the bridges over gorge and
torrent; and the salvation of numberless lives
is in his oaken staff: and my guide knew not
less the difficult roads of thought, the infinitely
cunning transitions from law to law in meta-
physics ; in the most hopeless mazes he could
find a cheerful road, leading upward and lighted
as by the midday sun.
A topic of the Conduct of Life under the
head of “Prudence " should be how to live
with unfit companions : for, with such, life is,
for the most part, spent.' . ..
When R don't care for Julius, suddenly Ju-
i Mr. Emerson's kindly and simple neighbour in the lit-
tle weather-stained house on the opposite hillside gave this
reason for not going to vote.
2 See “Works and Days "(Conduct of Life, p. 270).


1851] WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 207
lius comes round and cares for R; and shows the
involuntary revelation which character makes
of itself.
I think all solid values run directly into man-
ners.
This floor holds us up by a fight with agencies
that go to pull us down. Again balanced an-
tagonisms.
I like much in Allingham's poetry, but you
must not remember the masters. Chaucer, Mil-
ton, Shakspeare, have seen mountains if they
speak of them. Young writers seem to have
seen pictures of mountains. The wish to write
poetry they have, instead of the poetic fury;
and what they write is studies, sketches, fan-
tasies, and not yet the inestimable poem.' The
vein is too poor to be worth working : it affords
specimens, but not ingots. It is, therefore, a
mere luxury; their work, amateur poetry.' But
whenever I meet true poetry, and though it ap-
pear only in a single mind, I shall sit down to
it as the result and justification of the Age, and
think very little of histories and statutes.
i Mr. Emerson highly valued Allingham's « Touchstone."


208
JOURNAL (Age 48
Prudence. One of the cardinal rules is Time-
liness. My neighbour, the carriage maker, all
summer is making sleighs, and all winter is
making light, gay gigs and chariots for June
and August; and so, on the first days of the
new season, is ready with his carriage, which is
itself an invitation. And the putting the letter
into the post one minute before the mail-bag is
closed is a great triumph over Fate. And in all
our affairs the sense of being ready, and up with
the hour imparts to a man's countenance and
demeanour a wonderful air of leisure and suc-
cess. A man who is always behind time is care-
worn and painful.
Prudence. “Les bons comptes sont des bons
amis.”
Where is Nature? Where shall we go to
study her interior aspects? She is hard to find.
The botanist, after completing his herbarium,
remains a dry doctor, no poet. The lumberer
in Maine woods by Moosehead Lake does not
get into the forest to any purpose, though he
drives logs with his feet in the water all day.
The Poet goes untimely into a dozen inviting
dells, and finds himself not yet admitted, but a
poor excluded dilettante.


1851] THE POET-PARADOX 209
He makes many desperate attempts to throw
the brush at the picture, but rarely makes a
good hit. Ah, when! ah, how rarely! can he
draw a true Æolian note from the harp. And
then comes some fine young gentleman like
Milton or Goethe, who draws on his good Lon-
don boots, and in coat of newest tailoring, with
gold-headed cane, marches forth into the groves,
and straight, as if he were going to his Club, to
the secret sacred dell, where all the Muses and
the shyest gods, fauns, and naiads have their
home. So also did Collins, and so did Spenser:
nay, Walter Scott himself, sheriff of Selkirk-
shire, is admitted in full suit to the crag and
burn.
My texts are,
Moonlight caves when all the fowls
Are safely housed save bats and owls, etc.
Mountains on whose barren breast, etc.
Bubbling runnels joined the sound.
Shakspeare's Threnes.
The railroad and telegraph are great union-
ists. Frank Browne told me that whilst he was
at Savannah they were telegraphing to the


210
JOURNAL [AGE 48
President at Washington, every hour, news of
the Cuban invaders.
Treat drastically. The scholar goes into the
attorney's office, or the carpenter's shop, and,
however civilly, is treated as a trifler. Here is
real business, and he is soon set aside: but
Archimedes and Kant are as much realists as
blacksmiths are ; and they are to deal with in-
tellections as rigorously and drastically as the
joiner with his chisel and board ; and set car-
penter and merchant aside.
I do not forgive any one for not knowing
and standing by his own order. Here are cler-
gymen and scholars voting with the world, the
flesh, and the Devil, against Sumner and free-
dom. New genius always flees to old.
The New John Baptist. It is not to be dis-
guised that all our contemporaries, scholars as
well as merchants, feel the great Despair, are
mere Whigs, and believe in nothing. Repent
ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Lecturing. Danger of doing something. You
write a discourse, and, for the next weeks and
w


1851] DUALISM. VASARI 211
months, you are carted about the country at the
tail of that discourse simply to read it over and
over.
sex a
In feeble individuals, the sex and the diges-
tion are all.' ...
Dualism. I see but one key to the mysteries
of human condition, but one solution to the
old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge;
the propounding, namely, of the double con-
sciousness. ...
Excellent tests of the artist's life in Vasari's
Life of Fra Angelico (Giovanni da Fiesole).
He said, “He who practised the art of paint-
ing had need of quiet, and should live without
cares or anxious thoughts.”
"He altered nothing (of a painting once fin-
ished), but left all as it was done the first time,
believing, he said, that such was the will of
God”; like Jones Very. “He would never
take a pencil in hand until he had first offered
a prayer.”
The rest of the long paragraph is printed in “ Fate”
(Conduct of Life, pp. 30–32).
2 For the rest of the paragraph, see « Fate” (Conduct
of Life, p. 11).


212
JOURNAL
[Age 48
Votes in Concord: for Palfrey, 169; Thomp-
son, 101; Frothingham, 28.
Imbecility of the good party. Speak very mod-
estly of the country and of its virtue. Any ac-
tion of the well-disposed and intelligent class
in its affairs is uniformly reckoned an imperti-
nence, and they are presently whipped back
into their libraries and churches and Sunday-
Schools.
There is one benefit derived from the move-
ment lately. The most polite and decorous
Whigs, all for church and college and charity,
have shown their teeth unmistakably. We shall
not be deceived again. We believed, and they
half believed, that they were honest men. They
have been forced to take prematurely their true
and ignominious place.
I find a text for our very fact in an English
paper speaking of their April 10, 1848: “It
precipitated the Whigs into Toryism, making
them rush into that political infamy for which
they seem to have a constitutional predilection.”
- Leader, May 3, 1851.
Our people mean that men of thought shall be
dilettanti; ornamental merely ; if they dare to
be practical with their ideas of beauty, it is on
e
a


1851) LIP SERVICE. TULIPS 213
their peril. Everett is ornamental with Liberty
and dying Demosthenes, etc., but when he acts
he comes with the planter’s whip in his button-
hole; and Eliot writes, History of Liberty and
votes for South Carolina, and at the Univer-
sity, Mr. Sparks and Mr. Felton carry De-
mosthenes and General Washington clean for
slavery.
The Boston letter to Webster was a shop-till
letter, and the Union party is a shop-till party.
I like that Sumner and Mann and Palfrey
should not be scrupulous and stand on their
dignity, but should go to the stump. They
should not be above their business.
The young minister did very well, but one
day he married a wife, and, after that, he noticed,
that, though he planted corn never so often, it
was sure to come up tulips, contrary to all the
laws of botany."
Every god is still there sitting in his sphere.
i Mr. Emerson cared little for cultivated flowers, rejoicing
in the wild ones. Mrs. Emerson delighted in bulbs, and soon
the small garden close by the house was full of them, and the
vegetables banished to the new acres. From her gifts many
little gardens were begun where her roses now bloom.


214
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
The young mortal comes in, and on the instant
and incessantly fall snowstorms of illusions.'...
It will hereafter be noted that the events of
culture in the Nineteenth Century were, the new
importance of the genius of Dante, Michel An-
gelo, and Raffaele to Americans; the reading
of Shakspeare; and, above all, the reading of
Goethe. Goethe was the cow from which all
their milk was drawn.
They all took the “European complaint"
and went to Italy. Then there was an uprise of
Natural History, and in London, if you would
see the fashionable and literary celebrities, you
must go to the soirées of the Marquis of North-
ampton, President of the Royal Society, or to
the Geological Club at Somerset House.
It seems, however, as if all the young gen-
tlemen and gentlewomen of America spent sev-
eral years in lying on the grass and watching
“the grand movements of the clouds in the
summer sky” during this century.
S
Politics. Bear in mind the difference between
the opponents and the defenders of the shame-
ful statute; that the opposition will never end,
i Sce « Illusions” (Conduct of Life, p. 525).


1851) THE CAUSE. DESTINY 215
will never relax, whilst the statute exists; as
long as grass grows, as long as there is summer
and winter, night and day, world and man, so
long the sentiments will condemn this. But your
statute and its advocacy is a thing; is a phan-
tasm, is a contrivance, a cat's cradle, a petty trap,
a jackstraw that has no root in the world.
But we saw longevity in our cause. It can
well afford to wait; for ages and worlds the stars
of heaven and the thoughts of the mind are the
editors and vote-distributors of the free soil.
“There is no happiness in this life but in
intellect and virtue.” — WORDSWORTH, letter
to Beaumont.
Margaret Fuller. It fitted exactly, — that
shipwreck, – thought Ellery, to the life and
genius of the person. 'T was like Socrates' poi-
son, or Christ's cross, or Shelley's death.
For goodness is a sad business, said Ellery,
and, if he was insurer, he would never insure
any life that had any infirmity of goodness in
it. It is Goodwin' who will catch pickerel; if
you have any moral traits, you 'll never get a
bite.
i An idle old river-god in Concord, who had served a sen-
tence in jail.


216
JOURNAL
(Ace 48
Béranger's answer to those who asked about
the “de” before his name:-
Je suis vilain, vilain, vilain
Je honore une race commune,
Car sensible, quoique malin,
Je n'ai flatté que l'infortune.
Aristocracy. Make yourself useful. That is
the secret to clear your complexion, and make
you desired.
The four degrees of lordship :-
I, Protection ; 2, hospitality ; 3, invention
and art; 4, moral aid.
Webster truly represents the American peo-
ple just as they are, with their vast material in-
terests, materialized intellect, and low morals.
Heretofore, their great men [who] have led
them have been better than they, as Washing-
ton, Hamilton, and Madison. But Webster's ab-
sence of moral faculty is degrading to the coun-
try.
Of this fatal defect, of course, Webster him-
self has no perception.'
Why should we who believe in the Intellect
ever speak or lecture to a public meeting with-
1 The rest is found in the New York « Speech on the
Fugitive Slave Law" (Miscellanies, p. 228).


1851] ELECTION. SYMBOLISM 217
out yielding them a spark of lightning, some
word of transforming, upbuilding truth?
Politics. In this age of tools, one of the best
machines is certainly this governing machine,
which we have brought to such mechanical per-
fection; the distributing political electricity over
a vast area, so as to make the highest energy
consistent with perfect safety. Thus, yesterday
was election day; and a revolution (for every
election is a revolution) went off with the quiet-
ness of a picnic or a sermon. This by means
of universal suffrage, and town-meetings and
ward-meetings.
CON
I believe so much in metamorphosis that I
think the man will find the type, not only in
kind, but in quantity, of all his moral and men-
tal properties in the great world without. He
is to hold to his purposes with the tough im-
practicability of gravitation itself.
Margaret had the attributes of a lady; a
courtesy so real and sincere that it reached the
chambermaid, the mantua-maker, and all who
served her for money.


218
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
The use made of Fate in society is babyish.
Put your finger in your eye. It should rather
be to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of
Nature. The Englishman and Frenchman may
have the November desolation, emptiness, which
cannot see a lamp-post or a dangling rope with-
out temptation to suicide, but to a charged,
healthful, preoccupied mind, night and storm and
cold are not grim, but sternly cheerful even. ...
Let him empty his breast of all that is super-
fluous and traditional, of all dependence on the
accidental, on money, on false fame, falsehood
of any kind ; and speak wild truth, and by man-
ners and actions as unaffected as the weather,
let him be instead of God to men, full of God,
new and astonishing.
I suppose I need not go to St. Louis to know
the flavor of Southern life; there is not only St.
Louis, but all Avernus, in a fiery cigar. Goethe
kept his Acherontian experiences in a separate
bag; and said, if he himself should happen to
fall into that bag, he should be consumed, bones
and all.
Heterogeneity. Character. Men are miscella-
nies, rag-bags, unannealed glass, utter discontin-


1851] BOY AND MAN. WEALTH 219
uity; and all their power absorbed in their in-
dividual antagonisms. “Hot, cold, moist, and
dry, four champions fierce,” contend within the
man. 'Tis Newton's heterogeneous body which
loses the ray of light. Now if a fire, as, for ex-
ample, Love's, could kindle and melt them
over, recast the whole mass, then you should
have logic, unity, and power; a man that would
be felt to the centre of the Copernican system.
I noticed a little boy in the company whose
speech in talking with his mates never went out
as a mendicant from him, engaging him to what
was said, but he remained quite entire when his
speech was gone. So will it be when he is a man.
was
Wealth. The world is babyish, and the use
of wealth is : it is made a toy. Men of sense
esteem wealth to be the assimilation of Nature to
themselves, the converting the sap and juices
of the planet to the nutriment and incarnation
of their design. Power is what they want, not
candy, and they will pay any prices. Power for
what? Power to execute their idea, — which,
in any well-constituted man, of course, appears
the end to which the universe exists and all its
resources might be well applied. Each of the


220
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
elm trees that you see over the land sends its
roots far and wide; every great one to some
river or water course; its roots will run a mile;
and the Education of each vascular man goes
on well in proportion as his masculine roots
draw from all the natures around him their trib-
ute.
“After all Canova had seen, he. was aston-
ished at the Elgin marbles, and happy in find-
ing them real flesh, nothing geometrical, nothing
conventional, but a vera carne; and satisfied of
what he had always believed, that the works
which want this excellence are only copies from
the great masters.” — M. Fuller's Journal.
The best works are slanci spontanei ďuna
musa e ďuna eloquenza ispirata, but these swift
flashings are from minds full of heaped-up fuel
well on fire, acted on by the muse; perfect births.
Never was truer fable than the Sibyl's writing
on leaves which the wind scatters.' ...
The excellence of fairies is to be small. ...
The pride of England is to rule the world in
the little plain chamber of St. Stephen's. In
i See “ Memory” (Natural History of Intellect, p. 95).


1851] THE WAY. GENIUS 221
like manner the whole battle of the world is
fought in a few heads: a little finer order, a little
larger angle of vision commands centuries of
facts and millions of stupid people. We shall
not long go on reckoning prosperity by the cen-
sus, the more fools you have the worse, -
but by the competent heads.
Wor
Is the thing really desirable? then there is a
way to it. In minimis Natura. Vishnu in his
avatar came as a dwarf, and asked for as much
earth as he could cover with three steps. The
evil power was duped, and granted it; and the
dwarf took in a world with each step.
In the youth I heard last Sunday (was] a sort
of rattle of thunderbolts behind there in the back
of his head. He threatened in every sentence to
say somewhat new, bright, fatal. And that is
the charm of eloquence, its potency. Here is
mere play, play of genius, improvisation for the
artist's own delight, and out of the midst of it
he hurls a winged word that becomes a proverb
of the world and conquers kings, and clothes
nations in its colors.
I liked that Margaret Fuller should see in
Napoleon's head his mighty future, and, for all


222
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
the beautiful, even voluptuous mouth, should
find mountains of the slain and the snows of
Russia not irrelevant.
snows
I read somewhere that Dalton did not wait for
empirical confirmation of his “law," but promul-
gated it, struck by its internal evidence. Prob-
ably Kepler's laws were so seen: Newton's was.
And the transcendental anatomy stands so, the
one animal, or the thoughts of God written out;
and Knox's law of races, that Nature loves not
hybrids, and extinguishes them; that the colony
detached from the race deteriorates to the crab.
It would be a great comfort in Metaphysics
to establish a good collection of these instances
of accepted ideas, as a table of constants.
Fate. There is a thick skull, that is Fate. The
crustacea, the birds, the tortoises are fatalists,
yet amelioration must be assumed. These very
walls and jails must be believed to be charity
and protection; and meanness the preparation
of magnificence, as madness is assumed to be a
screen of a too much tempted soul.
In each town you visit, there is some man
who is in his brain and performance an explana-


1851] CITY FOUNDERS. BOSTON 223
tion of all that meets the eye there.' ... If
you see him, all will become plain. Mr. Erastus
Bigelow, Mr. McElrath, Mr. Lawrence, Mr.
Crocker, Mr. Vanderbilt, the old Rotch and
Rodman, Jackson and Lowell, the Dwights at
Springfield, Mr. Mills, Mr. Forbes, are each a
walking city, and, wherever you put them, will
build one.
Also, I believe that nothing can be done
except by inspiration.” ...
[Many pages of matter, printed in “Fate,”
are here omitted.]
People often talk most of that which they do
not represent. Boston talks of Union, and fe-
vers into pro-slavery, but the genius of Boston
is seen in her real independence, productive
power, and Northern acuteness of mind, molv-
Tpóros 'Odúo Devs, which is generically anti-
slavery. Boston Common, Boston Athenæum,
Lowell Institute, Railroads, and the love of Ger-
man literature, - these are the true Boston, and
1 The passage thus beginning is given in “Fate" (Con-
duct of Life), but without the names of the men of brains and
performance which are here retained.
2 The rest of the paragraph is in “Inspiration” (Letters
and Social Aims, p. 271).


224
JOURNAL (AGE 48
not an accidental malignity, or a momentary
importance of a few pug noses, — people too
slight to sail in any but the fairest weather, and
therefore by their very importance praising the
great prosperity of Boston. “If it were always
such weather as this," my Captain Ellis used
to say, “women might take his ship to sea.”
I recall to-day in conversation with William
H. Channing' the impression made by Wilkin-
son. He seemed full of ability, power of labor,
acute vision, marvellous power of illustration,
of great learning in certain directions, having
also the power I so value and so rarely meet of
expansion, expansion, such as Alcott shines with;
– but all this spoiled by a certain levity. ...
· I should say of him that as we see children
at school often expend a prodigality of memory
and of arithmetical power, which, occurring in
an adult subject, would make a Porson, Parr,
or Lacroix, -and see it in such children with-
out respect, — mere boarding-school rattle, —
i Rev. William H. Channing visited Mr. Emerson in
July that they might work together on their Memoir of Mar-
garet Fuller Ossoli, in which Rev. James Freeman Clarke also
bore a part.
2 Dr. John James Garth Wilkinson, the English expositor
of Swedenborg.


1851] DEBT TO EVERETT 225
because it does not seem solid and enduring, or
known to the mind itself, and so secured, but
merely as this year's grass or annual plants,
which a single night in November will annihi-
late, so I believe that all this unrealized ability
seemed insecure. As soon as he himself has
said, “These weapons are mine, and lo! by them
I possess the Universe, as yonder astronomer
does the stars by his tube and chart: O joy, I
cannot live, I am too happy. Hold back thy
thunderbolt, Jove, envy me not my near ap-
proach," then we should sympathize with the
terror and beauty of his gifts, and he would be
sacred to himself and to us.
It did not seem that he was enamoured of
his thoughts, as all good thinkers ought to be.
A fair ample house with excellent windows, but
no fireplace.
Edward Everett had in my youth an im-
mense advantage in being the first American
scholar who sat in the German universities and
brought us home in his head their whole cul-
tured method and results, — to us who did not so
much as know the names of Heyne, Wolf, Hug,
and Ruhnken. He dealt out his treasures, too,
with such admirable prudence, so temperate and


226
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
abstemious that our wonder and delight were
still new. ...
Our W
cre
America. Emigration. In the distinctions of
the genius of the American race it is to be con-
sidered that it is not indiscriminate masses of
Europe that are shipped hitherward, but the
Atlantic is a sieve through which only or chiefly
the liberal, adventurous, sensitive, America-lov-
ing part of each city, clan, family are brought.
It is the light complexion, the blue eyes of
Europe that come: the black eyes, the black
drop, the Europe of Europe, is left.
Bias. I have said so often, and must say once
more, the first fortune is a controlling determi-
nation of genius that leaves Haüy no choice but
to be mineralogist, Paxton no choice but to be
landscape gardener and architect, and Jackson a
chemist; that abolishes so many perplexities. But
that is not enough. He must have adaptation, be-
sides, to men; or else that magazine of sufficiency
that makes him indifferent to other men, like a
statue of a Roman Emperor in a crowd.
Prudence. I was to have quoted respecting
money Lord Mansfield's saying that the funds


1851] THOREAU'S VALUE 227
gave interest without principal ; the land, prin-
cipal without interest; but mortgages, both prin-
cipal and interest.
Mr. Eben Francis told me, twenty years ago,
that it was easy to invest a million, but by no
means so easy to invest the second million. And
I heard the other day that with all his care of
his property, and with all the high rates that
money rents at in Boston, his property has not
increased faster than six per cent for many years
past.
July.
Is it not a convenience to have a person in
town who knows where pennyroyal grows, or
sassafras, or punk for a slow-match ; or Celtis,
- the false elm; or cats-o'-nine-tails; or wild
cherries; or wild pears; where is the best apple
tree, where is the Norway pine, where the beech,
or epigæa, or Linnæa, or sanguinaria, or orchis
pulcherrima, or drosera, or laurus benzoin, or
pink huckleberry, or shag-barks; where is the
best chestnut grove, hazelnuts; where are trout,
where woodcocks, where wild bees, where
pigeons; or who can tell where the stake-driver
(bittern) can be heard; who has seen and can
show you the Wilson's plover?'
1 This expression of the constant pleasure Thoreau's


228
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mix-
ture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of
American engineers, he is captain of huckle-
berry party.
e
John Adams on Courage. “I had formed an
opinion that courage and reading were all that
were necessary to the formation of an officer.
“I had met with an observation among regu-
lar officers that mankind were naturally divided
into three sorts; one third of them are animated
at the first appearance of danger, and will press
forward to meet and examine it: another third
are alarmed by it, but will neither advance nor
retreat, till they know the nature of it, but stand
to meet it. The remaining third will run or fly
upon the first thought of it.” – John ADAMS,
vol. iii, p. 86.
He proceeds —“If this remark is just, as I
believed it was, it appeared to me that the only
way to form an army to be confided in was sys-
knowledge and good will gave his friends is kept here, although
printed in “ Country Life" (Natural History of Intellect,
pp. 161, 162),
i Mr. Emerson, as is shown in this and one or two sim-
ilar passages in his Journals, did not foresee what a benefactor
and influence Thoreau was to become in his own country,
and even abroad, when his short and pure life ended.


1851) JOHN ADAMS. GREELEY 229
tematic discipline, by which means all men may
be made heroes.”
John Adams in 1782 (ætatis suæ 46) told the
Duke of Vauguyon he was going to Paris to
treat of peace with the British Commissioners,
etc. “ He replied that he rejoiced to hear it, for
he believed Mr. Jay and I were cordial, and he
thought it absolutely necessary that I should be
there, for that the immoveable firmness that
Heaven had given me would be useful and
necessary upon this occasion.” — Vol. iii, p. 281.
Loadstone. — “ This substance is in the secret
of the whole globe. It must have a sympathy
with the whole globe.” – John Adams.
I think Horace Greeley's career one of the
most encouraging facts in our Whiggish age. A
white-haired man in the city of New York has
adopted every benevolent crotchet and main-
tained it, until he commands an army of a mil-
lion now in the heart of the United States.
Here we stand shivering on the North wall of
opposition, -we New England idealists, –and
might have taken Boston long ago,“ had we
had the pluck of a louse,” to use the more


230
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
energetic than elegant expression of my travel-
ling friend.
Conversation. Whenever the Muses sing, Pan
spirts poppy-juice all about, so that no one who
hears them can carry any word away. True of
fine conversation.
I don't like linear, but spheral people; but
discontent merely shows incompleteness as you
measure yourself by times and events; as soon
as you express yourself, you will round.
Art. Two ideas, Greece and Jewry, sway us;
look at our apish buildings.
We pass from thought to thought easily, but
not from realization to realization.
rare me
seems
In rare moments there seems to have been
a fusion of all the bloods of the world; as,
in Italy, in the fall of Rome; and in the Cru-
sades.
We are always out-generalled by tacticians,
choked off by the previous question or by in-
sidious assistance, or by sly amendments, or by
false friends.


1851] WEBSTER'S FALL 231
“We shall sink at last into the arms of a vast
conservatism embracing even the fiends in its
charity. Yet without losing sight of the immut-
able laws.”
[Here follow many passages about Webster's
treachery to Liberty, most of which are here
omitted, because printed in the Concord “Speech
on the Fugitive Slave Law” (Miscellanies, pp.
204, 205).]
'Tis inevitable in him, he has animal and
animal-intellect, powers, but no morals; his re-
ligion is literal, Calvinistic, formal; his minis-
ter, I know, esteems him a religious man.
His rhetoric has got purged of the word Lib-
erty, for Fate has been too strong for him.
All the drops of his blood have eyes that
look downward. But not by such as he have
the steps for mankind been taken. We want
an exploding Bonaparte who could take for-
ward steps, instead of these crabs. . . . Now
Columbus was no crab, nor John Adams, nor
Patrick Henry, nor Jefferson, nor Martin Lu-
ther, nor Copernicus. And the American idea
is no crab, but a man incessantly advancing as
the shadow of the dial or the heavenly body


232
JOURNAL (Age 48
that casts it. America is the idea of emanci-
pation. Abolish kingcraft, slavery, feudalism,
black-letter monopoly ; pull down gallows, ex-
plode priestcraft, tariff, open the doors of the
sea to all emigrants. ...
Mr. Everett tells of a bloody line of castles
along the frontier. On the contrary, the people
are all cousins, traders, partners. The only cas-
tles they know or care for are Depots, and the
expressman is the only dragoon, and instead of
a bloody line of castles there is a white line of
flour barrels. He has been reading in his Rob-
ertson instead of in the faces of the people.
It amounts to this, nakedly,- I will give
you a pistareen or a mountain of pistareens, if
you will be quiet about this.
S-
OT
Economy. Nature says thou shalt keep the air,
skate, swim, walk, ride, run. When you have worn
out your shoes, the strength of the sole leather
has passed into the fibre of your body. I measure
your health by the number of shoes and hats
and clothes you have worn out. He is the richest
man who pays the largest debt to his shoemaker.
These thirty nations are equal to any work.
They are to become fifty millions presently and


1851] THOMAS WREN WARD 233
should achieve something just and generous.'
Let them trample out this mischief before it has
trampled out them. For the future of slavery
is not inviting. But the destinies of nations are
too great for our spanning, and what are the in-
struments no policy can show; whether Liberia,
whether flax, cotton, whether the working them
out by Irish and Germans none can tell; or by
what scourges God has guarded his law. But one
thing is imperative, not to do unjustly, not to
steal a man or help steal him, or to call stealing
honest.
Mr. Thomas Wren Ward, old merchant,
sees what he foresaw; knows Yankees can make
everything as soon as it is certain to pay, and
has found one nostrum sovereign, — not free
trade, not laws, not morals, not anti-slavery,
but only the natural growth of the thirty na-
tions. One way or another they arrive at the
same thing which you would compass with your
law. Thus they have got free trade in sub-
stance, though not in form; free trade with
thirty nations. They wanted tariff to protect
their iron. Well, they did not get it; but in-
1 This sentence occurs in the Concord Speech.
2 Father of Mr. Emerson's friend.


234
JOURNAL
[ACE 48
stead of twenty thousand tons, last year they
manufactured eight hundred thousand : which is
getting it. So peace, so abolition of slavery will
be got by lying quiet a little.
But liberty and land are the nostrum.
“Two wrongs don't make a right."
Sam Ward thinks 't will do for Carolina to be
unreasonable and nullify. But not so with Mas-
sachusetts, which is the head : the toe may nul-
lify, but the head must not nullify ; thinks that
the confidence of financiers proves nothing; —
proves everything in reference to old and known
dangers, but nothing in reference to new dangers.
The French stocks stood firm until Louis Phi-
lippe fell. The Union is part of the religion of
this people. Its dissolution has not been con-
templated.
His private opinion is that Disunion is in-
evitable: the North and South are two nations,
it is not slavery that separates them, but climate.
Without slavery they do not agree. The South
does not like the North, and never did, slavery
apart. The North likes the South well enough.
But he reckons abolition by purchase impossi-
ble; thousand million of dollars; a financial
measure so gigantic not to be thought of. In a


1851] THE DARK TIMES 235
common financial measure such an onerous in-
finity of particulars, so many heart-burnings, so
many sacrifices of character, conflict of interests.
What would it be, then, with a complication so
vast as this? It cannot be done.
There must come an end of this too much
prosperity of ours, or it would go on to madness.
Tone of the press not lower on slavery than
on everything else; — criminal on that point,
ready to be criminal on every other.
No measures to be relied on, no concert; it
will come by chance. We stand on a brink and
somebody will get pushed further than he
meant, and when the fat is on the fire we shall
see the blaze.'
Old law of 1793 affirmed slavery in Massa-
chusetts pro honoris causa, just as King James
was styled King of Great Britain, France, and
Ireland.
One thing or the other. If it is ascertained
that the commissioner is only a notary to sur-
i Probably all of the above was Mr. Ward's view. After
some years devoted to letters and art, he came, at his father's
desire, back to Boston to help him in his mercantile business.
Later, he was a banker and for many years the agent of the
Baring Brothers of London.


236
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
render the black man to his hunter, then infamy
attaches to the post. The dislike and contempt
of society very properly attaches to the officer.
People will not stick to what they say, and
the number increases. They cannot remember
1775. Their fathers were seditious. They kept
those ten seditious commandments which God
gave on Sinai.
This filthy enactment was made in the nine-
teenth century, by people who could read and
write. I will not obey it, by God.
A voyage ! [of the Ship of State) yes; but
I do not like that craft which requires that we
shall stand all hours at the pump.
Intellect strips, affection clothes. If the good
God would perfect his police on any day, he
has only to open that upper chamber in each
man's and woman's brain which is his or her
determinate love, and on the instant chastity is
secured by an impregnable guard, as if all the
population lived like naked children in one
nursery.
Doctrine of Leasts. Nature makes everything
cheap : the smallest amount of material; the


1851] . LIBERTY. SCHOOL TAX 237
low-price, the low-fare system is hers ; least ac-
tion, least pain.
Liberty. I think this matter of liberty is one
of those rights which require fine sense to ap-
preciate, and with every degree of civility it
will be more truly felt and defined. ...
There are points from which we can command our life,
When the soul sweeps the future like a glass,
And coming things, full freighted with our fate,
Jut out dark in the offing of the mind.
Festus.
Dives pays a tax of $1000, has but one child,
and sends him to a private school. Lazarus
pays only his poll-tax, and has twenty children,
and wishes to send them all to college. Hav-
ing thus got his hand once into the rich man's
pocket, why not again? In Maine, they spill
the barrel of brandy by law. It is not property,
by their law. It is but one step, now, to say to
the drinker of the brandy, “You are a barrel
of poison, and shall not be allowed to infect
the state with your virus. You shall not marry;
go into the street; go to Poneropolis."
Nature never makes us a present of a fine


238
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
fruit or berry, pear, peach, or plum without
also packing up along with it a seed or two of
the same.
The apple is our national fruit, and in Octo-
ber the country is covered with this most or-
namental harvest. The beautiful colour of the
apple heaps, more lively and varied than the
orange, — balls of scarlet fire, - give a gaiety
and depth to our russet Massachusetts.
I believe in Society, in grace and courtesy,
and mean therefore to write answers to my let-
ters, and not rely longer on mere brute force
of duty.
Me to keep from idleness
Truely I did my business
To make songes as I best coude,
And ofttime I sung them loude;
And made songes a gret del,
Although I coude not make so well
Songes, nor knew the arte all
As coude Lamek's son Tubal,
That found out first the art of song,
For as his brother's hammers rung
Upon his anvil up and down,
Thereof he took the first sowne.
CHAUCER, Book of the Duchesse.


1851]
SCHOLAR. FATE 239
And also, beau Sire, of other things
That is, thou hast no tidings
Of Love's folk, if they be glad,
Ne of nothing else that God made,
And not only fro faare countree
That no tidings come to thee,
Not of thy very neighbours,
That dwellen almost at thy doors,
Thou hearest neither that nor this;
For when thy labor all done is
And hast made all thy reckonings,
Instead of rest and of new things
Thou goest home to thy house anon
And also dumb as a stone
Thou sittest at another book
'Till fully dazed is thy look
And livest as an hermite
Although thy abstinence is lite -
CHAUCER, House of Fame.
We are examples of Fate. Toss up a pebble
and it falls. And the soaring of your mind and
the magnanimity you indulge will fall. But can-
not we ride the horse which now throws us? '
The ancients most truly and poetically repre-
sented the incarnation or descent into Nature
i Here follow other passages from “ Fate” (Conduct of
Life, pp. 8, 9, 20, 42).


240
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
of Pythagoras, his condescension to be born, as
his first virtue.
It is indeed a perilous adventure, this serious
act of venturing into mortality, swimming in a
sea strewn with wrecks, where none indeed go
undamaged. It is as bad as going to Congress;
none comes back innocent.
Those who conquer,— the victory was born
with them. They may well be serene. They
seem to fight, but their lives are insured and
their victories. You like better to hear what
they say. Well you may, for they announce
this success in every syllable.
Memory, Imagination, Reason, Sense are
only masks of one power, as physical and spir-
itual laws are only new phases of limitation.
The poet is the lover loving; the critic is the
lover advised.
Which are the realities, the thoughts or the
iron spikes? And who is truly wanted, the rail-
road engineer or the philosopher? It is a mere
question of time. These roads and roadmakers
must be had, I suppose, and are wanted now
for fifty years good. The men of thought and
of truth to thought are always wanted and for


18511 MEN FIT FOR THE DAY 241
all ages. You are to stand for that which is al-
ways good and the same. There is never a fine
aspiration but is on its way to its body or insti-
tution.
These people that are made now, and for the
day's wants, journeymen, will be impossible to
be organized in a more advanced society, and if
they should there appear would shock by their
barbarism. The world was once a rock and peo-
pled itself with lichen, moss, and sponge, the first
disintegrators. Afterwards it was a cold swamp;
sponge sphagnum, fly, fish, lizard, multiplied.
By and by came men, but rude men; after all,
came Englishmen and planted America; but the
wheel is not scotched, but rotates still, and the
men of to-day cannot live in the warm aërial
future any more than the sauri can escape extir-
pation in the man-bearing granite of Massachu-
setts and New York.'
Rhyme. We are lovers of rhyme and return
and period and reflection.'...
Autobiography. I am never beaten until I
i Compare in the Poems, “The Song of Nature.”
2 Then follow many sentences printed in “ Poetry and
Imagination” (Letters and Social Aims, pp. 46-49).


242
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
know that I am beaten. I meet powerful peo-
ple to whom I have no skill to reply.' ...
All eloquence is a war of posts. What is said
is the least part of the oration. It is the attitude
taken, the unmistakable sign never so casually
given (in the tone of voice, or manner, or word),
that a greater spirit speaks from you than is
spoken to in him..
I believe in the Fable that the Fates fell in
love with Hermes.
Fugitive Slave Law. We have got a better
enemy than ever we had. Perhaps that was all we
wanted. That may accelerate the slow crystal-
lizations of the new men against the antiquated,
against the old dead folks.
The state stands for property, and the slave,
as the highest kind of property, is fitly made
the question between the party of light and the
party of darkness.
We are not such pedants as to suppose a
king comes only with a crown on his head. The
moment a man says, “Give up your rights,
1 The rest of the paragraph is found in “Worship” (Con-
duct of Life, pp. 234, 235).


1851] THE BOND. MEDIATION 243
here is money,” there is tyranny. It comes mas-
querading in monks' cowls and in citizens'
coats; comes savagely or comes politely. But it
is tyranny.
Nay, the gradation is endless, and the family
resemblance meets us throughout creation.
It is not so strange as we say that races mix.'
We think the event severed from the person
and do not see the inevitable tie. It is like the
nudicaulis plant, — the leaf invariably accompa-
nies it, though the stems are connected under-
ground.
Mediator, Mediation. There is nothing else;
there is no Immediate known to us. Cloud on
cloud, degree on degree; remove one coat, one
lamina just like it is the result, — to be also re-
moved. When the symbol is explained, the new
truth turns out to be only a symbol of ulterior
truth. The Judgment Day is in reality the past.
We have all been judged, and we have judged
all. We would gladly think highly of Nature
and Life, but what a country-muster, what a
Vanity-Fair full of noise, squibs and egg-pop
i See English Traits (pp. 49, 50).


244
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
it is! Pass your last week in review, and what
figures move on the swelling scene! Mr. Potter,
Mr. Minot, Mr. Garfield, Tom Hazel," and
the ticket-master are among the best. 'Tis a
one- cent farce; — am I deceived; — or is the
low and absurd a little predominant in the
piece?
Tools. The Age. The Age is marked by this
wondrous nature philosophy as well as by its
better chisels and roads and steamers. But the
attention of mankind is now fixed on rudder-
ing the balloon, and probably the next war -
the war of principles — is to be fought in the
air.
The naturalist can carry us no farther than
the vesicle, which has the capacity of change
into oak, ape, man, and god.
Alcott thinks the American mind a little su-
perior to English, German, Greek, or any other.
It is a very amiable opinion and deserves en-
couragement; and certainly that is best which
1 Respectively, the keeper of a village store where he dis-
pensed his own “ Hair Balm," peppermints, and a few drugs ;
the neighbour across the way; a second-class farmer ; and a
vivacious Irish boy at the primary school opposite Mr. Emer-
son's study-windows.


1851] SHAKSPEARE'S HEIGHT 245
recommends his home and the present hour to
every man. Shall I say it has the confirmation
of having been held of his own country by every
son of Adam ?
Shakspeare. One listens to the magnifying
of Goethe's poem by his critic, and replies,
“Yes, it is good, if you all agree to come in
and be pleased”; and you fall into another com-
pany and mood, and like it not. It is so with
Wordsworth. But to Shakspeare alone God
granted the power to dispense with the humours
of his company: they must needs all take his.
He is always good; and Goethe knew it and
said, “It is as idle to compare Tieck to me as
me to Shakspeare.” I looked through the first
part of Faust to-day, and find it a little too
modern and intelligible. We can make such a
fabric at several mills, though a little inferior.
The miraculous, the beauty which we can manu-
facture at no mill, can give no account of, it
wants."
It is impossible to detach an individual from
the mass without injustice and caricature. Do
i The remainder of the paragraph is found in English
Traits (p. 256), and in “ Poetry and Imagination" (Ler-
ters and Social Aims, p. 69).


246
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
not pity Tom because he is low and will remain
low all his life, but replace him in the circles and
systems wherein he belongs, and there is re-
action, compensation, old aboriginal necessity,
far-reaching universal connection whose good as
well as evil he shares, and in the scope of all
of which only can he be rightly seen.
onun
I listen with great pleasure to the masterly
lectures of Mr. Scherb, and with none the less
that I reserved my opinion and by no means
accept his national estimates. But it is a most
gratifying monument of culture, his lecture.
Such a regnant good sense, such a calm, high,
generalizing criticism, so sane, so superior, so
catholic, so true to religion and reason ; if at all
I feel that they are not his own, but that he is
the good scholar of better masters, my joy is
not the less in the reality of the benefit, or my
satisfaction in the conveyance of these healthy
waters into our American fields.
He has more self-possession than I have seen
in any literary man, and read his lecture to these
twelve persons and the empty benches of the
little Orthodox vestry with an elegance and finish
i Emmanuel Vitalis Scherb, a cultivated German patriot
carlier mentioned.


1851] A SIGN. ANGELS NEAR 247
as if he were addressing an audience of lords
and duchesses in London, as C. remarked. C.
said, too, that this elegance of his could not be
preserved if he had ever once spoken to a la-
bourer here on such a footing as we all use.
If the tree, the mountain, the lake would
only give a token — were it only a waving leaf,
a sigh, a ripple — that it knew the man who was
born by them, and carried them always in his
blood and manners !
Jenny Lind is once for all the standard which
every artist and scholar thinks of as the measure
of remuneration.
“Even the dæmons cannot interfere among
men, but that they are here close to us, all must
believe who see the circles of life. All above, as
below, is organized, and into the innermost be-
ing man may not enter. So let us return the
smiles of the angels who look upon our sports,
as children return those we so condescendingly
bestow. But let the angels know, as we also
know for the children, that our place in the uni-
verse holds good with theirs, and our games are
a part of its music.” [Quoted from a lady, one
of Mr. Emerson's correspondents.]
an
02


248
JOURNAL (Age 48
I wish I could get the fact about horseshoe
nails, which, after being hammered and worn
and recast and hammered and worn, are made
up into Damascus steel, which is thus a result
and simmering down, and last possibility of
iron. I believe the tradition is fabulous. But
such in Nature are men made up of monads,
each of which has held governance of fish or
fowl or worm or fly, and is now promoted to be
a particle of man.
Prudence. Half measures fail. Don't be
leaky.
Power. The French papers say that some-
body is revolutionizing mechanics by convert-
ing the come-and-go force of the pendulum
into a perpetual push, as has been done by
steam in the rotation of the paddle-wheel in-
stead of the oar. Well, this power of perpetual
push, instead of the push spasmodic, is the
differencing power of men. However mild and
gentle the nature, if it has a steady push in one
direction, it is soon a recognized element in
society, and is entitled to shake its head at
twenty times as much genius or force of the
intermittent kind.
СУСГ


1851) PROVIDENCE. MEMOIR 249
Goethe is the pivotal man of the old and new
times with us. He shuts up the old, he opens
the new. No matter that you were born since
Goethe died, — if you have not read Goethe,
or the Goetheans, you are an old fogy, and
belong with the antediluvians.
та
The old Adams and Jay, as Nelson and
Wellington, think as I think about the French,
that they have no morale.
The shape in which Providence appeared to
me was in tradesman's bills, and to my dame in
derangements of her domestic establishment, —
cook, chambermaid, and seamstress.
Miss Peabody ransacks her memory for an-
ecdotes of Margaret's youth, her self-devotion,
her disappointments, which she tells with fer-
vency, but I find myself always putting the pre-
vious question. These things have no value
unless they lead somewhere. If a Burns, if a De
Staël, if an artist is the result, our attention is pre-
1 Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who devoted a long life with
utter generosity and self-forgetfulness, and perhaps an over-
receptive and trustful mind, to the service of humanity. She
was Mr. Alcott's assistant in his school and was the sister of
Mrs. Horace Mann and Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne.


250
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
engaged; but quantities of rectitude, mountains
of merit, chaos of ruins are of no account with-
out result; — 't is all mere nightmare; false
instincts ; wasted lives.
Now, unhappily, Margaret's writing does
not justify any such research. All that can be
said is that she represents an interesting hour
(and group in American cultivation; then that
she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vi-
nous, eloquent talker, who did not outlive her
influence; and a kind of justice requires of us
a monument, because crowds of vulgar people
taunt her with want of position.
Novels. The merit of Bulwer's Caxtons, as of
| Ward's novel, is that his character has a basis
of probity. Thereby he is a gentleman. The
vulgar novelist does not give a natural basis to
a hero, but one of manners and fortune. It
seems a cheap secret: yet it is the secret of the
Most High.
August 11.
Carlyle is a better painter in the Dutch style
than we have had in literature before. It is
terrible — his closeness and fidelity: he copies
that which never was seen before. It is like see-


1851] BEAUTY. THE PICKEREL 251
ing your figure in a glass. It is an improve-
ment in writing as strange as Daguerre's in
picture, and rightly fell in the same age with
that; and yet there is withal an entire reserve
on his own part and the hiding of his hand.
What do we know of his own life? The cour-
age which is grand, the courage to feel that
Nature who made me may be trusted, and one's
self painted as also a piece of Nature, he has not.
Beauty. Once open the sense of beauty, aitd
vulgar manners, tricks, bad eating, loudspeake-
ing, yelps, and all the miscreation of ugliness
become intolerable, and we are reconciled to
the intense selfishness and narrowness of “good
society,” thinking that, bad as it is, the better
alternative as long as health lasts.
George Minot says that old Abel Davis went
up to Temple, New Hampshire, and was one day
fishing there and pulled out a monstrous pick-
erel:“Wal,” said he, “who'd ever have thought
of finding you up here in Temple? You and a
slice of pork will make Viny and me a good
breakfast."
Symbol. Yes, History is a vanishing allegory,
and repeats itself to tediousness, a thousand and


252
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
a million times. The Rape of the Sabines is
perpetual, and the fairest Sabine virgins are
every day pounced upon by rough, victorious
Romans, masquerading under mere New Hamp-
shire and Vermont and Boston names, as Web-
ster, Choate, Thayer, Bigelow, or other ob-
scurity.
Ellery thinks these waterside cottages of
Nahant and Chelsea, and so on, never see the
sea. There, it is all dead water, and a place for
dead horses, and the smell of Mr. Kip's omni-
bus stable. But go to Truro, and go on to the
beach there, on the Atlantic side, and you will
have every stroke of the sea like the cannon of
the “ Sea-Fencibles." There is a solitude which
you cannot stand more than ten minutes.
He thinks the fine art of Goethe and com-
pany very dubious, and 't is doubtful whether
Sam Ward is quite in his senses in his value
of that book of prints of the Italian School,
Giotto and the rest. It may do for very idle
gentlemen, etc., etc.
I reply, There are a few giants who gave the
thing vogue by their realism, — Michel An-
gelo and Ribera and Salvator Rosa; and the
man who made the old Torso Hercules, and
man


1851] BEAUTY. ART. POWER 253
the Phidias — man or men who made the Par-
thenon reliefs — had a drastic style which a
blacksmith or a stonemason would say was
starker than their own. And I adhere to Van
Waagen's belief, that there is a pleasure from
works of art which nothing else can yield.
A woman, never so trim and neat, does not
please by inoffensiveness while she only com-
plies with the exactions of our established de-
corum, but is coarse. But as soon as her own
sense of beauty leads her to the same perfect
neatness, and we ascribe to her secret neatness,
then is she lovely, though sick, poor, and acci-
dentally squalid.
Art. Art lies not in making your object
prominent, but in choosing objects that are
prominent.
To describe adequately is the high power and
one of the highest enjoyments of man.
00
dan.
Our culture or art of life is sadly external. It
is certain that the one thing we wish to know
is, Where is power to be bought?'...
1 The rest of the passage is printed in “ Inspiration”
(Letters and Social Aims, p. 269).


254
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
I take it to be law that every solid in the
universe is ready to become volatile on the ap-
proach of the mind.' ...
Our money is only a second-best, or pis-aller.
We would jump to buy power with it, or first
principles, or first-best.
Where is the New Metaphysics? We are
intent on Meteorology, to find the law of the
variable winds, to the end that we may not get
our hay wet. I also wish a Farmer's Almanac
of the mental moods, that I may farm my
mind. There are undulations of power and im-
becility and I lose days sitting at my table,
which I should gain to my body and mind if I
knew beforehand that no thought would come
that day. I see plainly enough that ordinarily
we take counters for gold, that our eating and
trading and marrying and learning are mistaken
by us for ends and realities, whilst they are only
symbols of true life; and as soon as we have
come by a divine leading into the inner firma-
ment, we are apprised of the unreality or repre-
sentative character of what we had esteemed
solidest. Then we say, Here and now! We
1 See Representative Men (p. 43). .


1851] INNER WORLD. MAN'S AIM 255
then see that before this terrific beauty Nature
too is cheap; that geometry and astronomy
also are its cheap effects, before this pure glory.
Yet, ah! if we could once come in and plant
our instruments and take some instant measure-
ment and inventory of this Dome, in whose
light forms and substances and sciences are dis-
solved — but we never so much as to enter ! —
’t is a glimpse; 't is a peeping through a chink;
the dream in a dream. We play at Bo-peep
with Truth, and cannot write the Chapter of
Metaphysics. We write books, “How to ob-
serve," etc., yet the Kant or the Plato of the
Inner World, which is Heaven, has not come.
September.
Art. 'Tis indifferent whether you say, all is
matter, or, all is spirit; and 'tis plain there is a
tendency in the times to an identity-philosophy.
You do not degrade man by saying, spirit is
only finer body; nor exalt him by saying, mat-
ter is phenomenal merely; all rests on the affec-
tion of the theorist, - on the question whether
his aim be noble.
Here and there were souls which saw through
peaches and wine, politics, money, and women,
saw that these as objects of desire were all alike,


256
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
0
and all cheats: that the finest fruit is dirty, and
must be seen by the soul as it is seen by the
provision-dealer; and that all the other allure-
ments that infatuate men, and which they play
for, are the selfsame thing, with a new gauze or
two of illusion overlaid. But the soul is distin-
guished by its aim, — what is its end? This re-
acts, this far future consummation which it seeks
reacts through ages, and ennobles and beatifies
every modern moment, and makes the individual
grand among his coevals, though they had every
advantage of skill, force, and favor. Here and
there is a soul which is a seed or principle of good,
a needle pointing to the true north, thrown into
the mountains of foolishness and desarts of evil,
and therefore maligned and isolated by the rest.
This soul has the secret of power, this soul
achieves somewhat new and beautiful which en-
dears heaven and earth to mankind and lends a
domestic grace to the sun and the stars.
Edith's opinion. Edith, when a little girl,
whimpered when her mother described the joys
of Heaven. She did not want to go there, she
“wanted to stay” (and she looked round the
room) “where there was folks, and things, and
a door.”


1851) EXPERIENCE. INTELLECT 257
Ellery thinks that he is the lucky man who
can write in bulk forty pages on a hiccough, ten
pages on a man's sitting down in a chair, like
Hawthorne, etc., that will go.
In some sort the end of life is that the man
should take up the universal into himself.'
Experience. I know that men are meteorous,
and the world is, and that the truisms of morals
are the eternal law: but my experience gives
me no ground to believe that I can rashly re-
alize my aspirations, and with these hands and
feet and head obey the poetic rule.
Once again in celebration of the Intellect, it
is true that the world is wrong and we are right;
that our conversation once or twice with our
mates has apprised us that we belong to better
circles than we have yet beheld ; that there is a
music somewhere awaiting us that shall make
us“ forget the taste of meat”; a mental power
whose generalizations are more worth for joy
and for avail than anything that is now called
philosophy or literature;: ...
1 For the rest of this passage, see « Education ” (Letters
and Biographical Sketches, p. 151).
2 For the rest of the paragraph, see “ Poetry and Imagina-
tion” (Letters and Social Aims, p. 63).


258
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
All men know the truth, but what of that?
It is rare to find one that knows how to speak
it.' . . . By and by comes by a facility, a walk-
ing facility. He can move the mountain and
carry off yonder star as easily as he carries the
hair on his head. Yet who is he, and whence?
God knows; his brother is an idiot, his father
is a pawn-broker, his mother is a cow.
Culture. Plainly, a man can spare nothing:
he wants blackest night and whitest day, sharp
eye, fleet foot, strong hand, head of Jove,
health, sleep, appetite, and conscience like a
clock. The finest artist, the tenderest poet wants
the ferocity of cannibals, only transmuted into
his milder instruments, as battery or magazine
to furnish out his long-drawn sweetness.
Michel Angelo and Raphael in the next age
reappeared as Milton and Shakspeare.
October 14.
To-day is holden at Worcester the “Wo-
man's Convention.” I think that as long as
they have not equal rights of property and right
of voting they are not on the right footing. But
1 Much of this passage is printed in Natural History of
Intellect (pp. 46, 47).


1851 WOMAN'S CONVENTION 259
this wrong grew out of the savage and military
period, when, because a woman could not de-
fend herself, it was necessary that she should be
assigned to some man who was paid for guard-
ing her. Now, in more tranquil and decorous
times it is plain she should have her property,
and, when she marries, the parties should, as
regards property, go into a partnership full or
limited, but explicit and recorded.
For the rest, I do not think a woman's con-
vention, called in the spirit of this at Worcester,
can much avail. It is an attempt to manufacture
public opinion, and of course repels all persons
who love the simple and direct method. I find
the evils real and great. If I go from Hanover
Street to Atkinson Street, -as I did yesterday,
- what hundreds of extremely ordinary, paltry,
hopeless women I see, whose plight, inscribed
on their forms, “Leave all hope behind,” is
piteous to think of. If it were possible to repair
the rottenness of human nature, to provide a
rejuvenescence, all were well, and no specific re-
form, no legislation would be needed. For as
soon as you have a sound and beautiful woman,
a figure in the style of the antique Juno, Diana,
Pallas, Venus, and the Graces, all falls into place,
the men are magnetized, heaven opens, and no


260
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
lawyer need be called in to prepare a clause, for
woman moulds the lawgiver.' I should there-
fore advise that the Woman's Convention should
be holden in the Sculpture Gallery, that this
high remedy might be suggested.
October 27.
It would be hard to recall the rambles of last
night's talk with Henry Thoreau. But we
stated over again, to sadness almost, the eter-
nal loneliness. I found that though the stuff
of Tragedy and of Romances is in a moral
union of two superior persons, and the confi-
dence of each in the other, for long years, out of
sight and in sight, and against all appearances,
is at last justified by victorious proof of probity
to gods and men, causing a gush of joyful emo-
tion, tears, glory, or what-not, - though there
be for heroes this moral union, yet they, too, are
still as far off as ever from an intellectual union,
and this moral union is for comparatively low
and external purposes, like the coöperation of
a ship's crew or of a fire-club. But how insular
and pathetically solitary are all the people we
know!...
1 A similar sentence is found in the Boston Address
«« Woman,” given in 1855 (Miscellanies, p. 425).


1851) HOSMER. SAY NO. CARLYLE 261
I saw yesterday, Sunday, whilst at dinner, my
neighbor Hosmer creeping into my barn. At
once it occurred, “Well, men are lonely, to be
sure, and here is this able, social, intellectual
farmer under this grim day, as grimly, sidling
into my barn, in the hope of some talk with
me, showing me how to husband my corn-
stalks. Forlorn enough!”
1 en
Beware of engagements. Learn to say No,
and drop resolutely all false claims. I suppose
I have a letter, each week, asking an autograph;
one each quarter, asking anti-slavery lecture; one
yesterday, asking particulars of the life of Mr.
Carlyle, etc., etc. And every day is taxed by
the garden, the orchard, the barn.
Faith shall be justified. Live for the year,
not for the day. Let logic, let character rule the
hour. That is never vulgar.
October.
In reading Carlyle's Life of Sterling, I still
feel, as of old, that the best service Carlyle has
rendered is to Rhetoric or the art of writing.
Now here is a book in which the vicious con-
ventions of writing are all dropped; you have
no board interposed between you and the
writer's mind, but he talks flexibly, now high,


262
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
now low, in loud, hard emphasis, then in under-
tones, then laughs outright, then calmly nar-
rates, then hints or raises an eyebrow, and all
this living narration is daguerreotyped for you
in his page. He has gone nigher to the wind
than any other craft. No book can any longer
be tolerable in the old husky Neal-on-the-Puri-
tans model. But he does not, for all that, very
much uncover his secret mind.'
A personal influence towers up in the mem-
ory only worthy when we would gladly forget
numbers or money, or climate, gravitation, and
1 This passage, although printed in “ Art and Criticism,”
is retained here because that lecture is only preserved in the
Centenary Edition.
Observe that it is only the style and rhetoric that are praised.
In the letter acknowledging the gift, Mr. Emerson said, “I
rejoiced with the rest of mankind in the Life of Sterling ...
yet I see well that I should have held to his opinion in all
those conferences where you have so quietly assumed the
palm.”
It is remarkable how much more real sympathy was between
Emerson and Sterling, brave poet and idealist and helpful man,
as may be seen throughout their letters (though unhappily
these friends never met) than between Carlyle and Emerson.
Their long and true friendship endured the better that they had
the Atlantic between them. (See Emerson-Sterling Corre-
spondence, passim. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.)


1851] FAMILY TYPES. CULTURE 263
the rest of Fate. Margaret, wherever she came,
fused people into society, and a glowing com-
pany was the result. When I think how few
persons can do that feat for the intellectual class,
I feel our squalid poverty.
Undoubtedly if a Concord man of 1750
could come back in our street to-day, and walk
from the meeting-house to the Depot, he would
recognize all the people as if they were his own
contemporaries. Yes, that is a Buttrick; and
that a Flint; and that Barrett or Minot, ...
for no doubt a regent atom or monad constrains
all the other particles to take its feature and
temperament.
But no man outsees another: no man's ver-
dict is final on another; the reserves, the re-
mains are immense. The observer has really,
though he were Socrates, no sense to apprehend
the other's peculiarity.
November 1.
I suppose at last culture will absorb the
hells also. There is nothing that is not wanted
for bone or fibre, for shade or for color.
Practice is as much wanted for metaphysical as
for weaving or ploughing skill. It is not until


264
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
after a long time exploring this dim field in con-
versation that we begin to see well what is there.
We believe that men will not all or always be
local, spotty, trifling, but that men will come
native to all districts of Nature, all related; who
will suck the earth, the air, the sea; be solidly
related to the forest and the mineral; amphibious,
with one door down into Tartarus, and one
door upward into light, belonging to both; and
when such men are possible, some of the meaner
kinds will become impossible and pass into the
fossil remains.
Culture. War, Party, Luxury, Avarice, Whig-
gery, Radical are so many asses with loaded
panniers, to serve the kitchen of the king, who
is Intellect. There is nothing that does not
pass into lever or weapon, — masses of men,
Christianity.
With culture, too, the self-direction develops.
In the fables, the disk Chakra (?), the weapon
of Hari, is self-directing, and leaps upon his
enemies. In the Edda, the ship of the gods is
self-steered. In the Persian fables, the divine
horses refuse any rider but their own hero. A
man might as easily mount a lion as Kyrat if


e
1851) PARTY. CURRENCY. TARIFF 265
Kyrat’s master have not laid the bridle in his
hands; and the god Freye has a sword so good
that it will itself strew a field with carnage when
the owner so ordered it.
The malignity of parties betrays the want of
great men. If there were a powerful person to be
the Belisarius of Free Soil, he would strike ter-
ror into these rich Whigs and these organized
vulgarities called the Democracy.
The puzzle of currency remains for rich and
poor. I never saw a rich man who thought he
knew whence the hard times came.
But Free Trade must be right and the an-
nexation of England to America, and as for the
tariff, that interests only a few rich gentlemen
in Boston and Philadelphia. The railroad cap-
ital vastly exceeds the manufacturing capital in
Boston, too. But I think we shall never under-
stand political economy until we get Béranger
or Burns or some poet to teach it in songs.
as OT SO
S
I think that a man should compare advanta-
geously with a river, with an oak, with a moun-
tain, endless flow, expansion, and grit.


266
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
AUTHORS OR Books QUOTED OR REFERRED TO
IN JOURNAL FOR 1851
The Vedas; Pythagoras; Sophocles, Electra ;
Herodotus; Socrates; Aristophanes, The Acbar-
nians; Aristotle ;
Manilius ; Tacitus;
Firdusi; Saadi; Ammar;
Chaucer, House of Fame, Book of the Duchesse;
Copernicus ; Luther; Columbus, apud H.
Major;
Spenser; Samuel Daniel ; Donne; Kepler;
Richelieu; Algernon Sidney; Thomas Fuller,
Worthies of England; Fénelon; Robert Hooke;
Newton; Daniel Neal, History of the Puritans;
Buffon ; Collins; Heyne ; John Adams, in
Life and Works, by C.F.Adams; Patrick Henry;
Jefferson; John Jay; Josiah Quincy;
Haüy; Samuel Parr; Mirabeau ; Thomas
Erskine; Burns ; Schiller; Richard Porson;
Friedrich August Wolf; Laing, Heimskringla;
De Staël; John Dalton, New System of Chemical
Philosophy ; Cuvier; Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire ;
Ruhnken; Hug; Van Waagen;
Southey; Campbell; Béranger, Les Mirmi-
dons; Oehlenschläger ; John C. Warren ; Oken;
· Davy; Hallam ; Audubon; Bettine von Arnim;


1851)
READING
267
Webster, Seventh of March Speech; J. E.
Worcester; J. C. Prichard, Physical History of
Man; J. Fenimore Cooper; Jared Sparks; John
G. Palfrey ; Horace Mann; Edward Everett;
Sir John Herschel; Knox, Races of Men;
Carlyle, Life of Sterling; Rufus Choate ; Alcott;
Macaulay; J. A. St. John, Manners and
Customs of Ancient Greece; Joseph Paxton ;
Richard Owen; Bulwer, The Caxtons ; John M.
Kemble, The Saxons in England; Paul Lacroix;
Charles T. Jackson ; Robert Rantoul; Whit-.
tier; Tennyson, In Memoriam; R. M. Milnes;
C. C. Felton; Margaret Fuller Ossoli; W. H.
Channing; Theodore Parker; Henry James ;
Charles Sumner; Horace Greeley;
Dickens; J. J. Garth Wilkinson ; Bailey,
Festus; Arthur Helps, Friends in Council; Wil-
liam Allingham, Sleep;
Thoreau ; W. E. Channing ; J. R. Lowell; J.
Elliot Cabot ; Samuel Eliot, History of Liberty;
Charles Eliot Norton; Edwin P. Whipple.





JOURNAL
CONDUCT OF LIFE COURSE
SPEECH TO ST. GEORGE'S SOCIETY
MONTREAL
KOSSUTH VISITS CONCORD
DELIA BACON
WALKS AND TALKS WITH CHAN-
NING
GLIMPSES OF THOREAU
WASHINGTON'S PORTRAIT
WINTHROP AT COMMENCEMENT
WRITING ON ENGLAND
WEBSTER'S DISAPPOINTMENT AND
DEATH





JOURNAL XLIII
1852
(From Journals DO and GO)
[In January Mr. Emerson delivered in Boston
the course on the Conduct of Life, and one or
more lectures in many New England towns. In
February he lectured in New York City and
State, and in March in Maine and Massachu-
setts.]
(From DO)
At mihi succurrit pro Ganymede manus.'
MARTIAL.
The best in us is our profound feeling of in-
terest in the whole of Nature. Every man feels
that everything is his cousin, that he has to do
with all. Blot out any part of nature, and he
too would lose. The great words of the world
such as analogy : — what a step mankind took
when Plato first spoke that word! analogy is
identity of ratio, and what civilization, what
i Freely rendered, -
My own right hand my cup-bearer shall be.


272
JOURNAL [Age 48
mounting from savage beginnings does it not
require ! the primary and secondary senses, the
several planes or platforms on which the same
truth is repeated. So the word of ambition, the
proud word of modern science is homology.
« These we must join to wake, for these are of the
strain
That justice dare defend, and will the age sustain.”
Horatio Greenough Edwin P. Whipple
H. D. Thoreau Wm. Mathews
J. Elliot Cabot J. G. Whittier
J. Peter Lesley J. R. Lowell
C. K. Newcomb Theodore Parker
John Weiss
W. E. Channing
Henry James J. Whelpley
T. W. Higginson David W. Wasson
George F.and T.H. Talbot, Portland, Maine.
Rev. W. D. Moore, Greensburg, Pa.
Frank B. Sanborn, Hampton Falls, N. H.
George Moore, Andover.'
Reality. The question of life is evermore be-
tween (1) doing something well, — which is an
immense satisfaction to doer and beholder ; -
1 All these Mr. Emerson counted sure friends of Freedom.


ne
1852] REALITY. THOREAU 273
and (2) self-possession, being real. Private life
is the place of honour.
'Tis said, a man can't be aught in politics
without some cordial support in his own dis-
trict; nor can a man dupe others long, who has
not duped himself first.
I prefer'... a little integrity to any ca-
reer. Come back from California, or Japan, or
Heaven, or the Pit, and find me there where I
was. That reality is the charm on which a good
novel relies, as Villette.
The animus disposes the form, as of man or
woman and of every particular man or woman.
C.
Of Henry Thoreau. He who sees the hori-
zon may securely say what he pleases of any
tree or twig between him and it.
The misfortune of scholars is that people are
non-conductors.
The day will come when no badge, uniform,
or star will be worn, ...
I find one state of mind does not remember
or conceive of another state. Thus I have writ-
1 The omitted portion is in “ Illusions” (Conduct of Life,
P. 323).
2 The rest of the paragraph is found in “Greatness"
(Letters and Social Aims, p. 312).


274
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
ten within a twelvemonth verses (“Days”)
which I do not remember the composition or
correction of, and could not write the like to-
day, and have only, for proof of their being
mine, various external evidences, as the MS.
in which I find them, and the circumstance
that I have sent copies of them to friends, etc.,
etc. Well, if they had been better, if it had
been a noble poem, perhaps it would have only
more entirely taken up the ladder into heaven.
See on this poppy journal HO."
Which was the best age of philosophy?
That in which there were yet no philosophers.
Eternity is very long; opportunity is a very
little portion of it, but worth the whole of it. If
God gave me my choice of the whole planet, or
my little farm, I should certainly take my farm.
[Tom Appleton said at the dinner the other
day,] “Canvasback ducks eat the wild celery,
and the common black duck, if it eats the wild
celery, is just as good — only, damn them,
they won't eat it.”
i The sentence referred to, written the next year, is this:
“ Poppy leaves are strewn when a generalization is made, for
I can never remember the circumstances to which I owe it,
so as to repeat the experiment or put myself in the conditions.”


1852] OUR STATESMEN. THEORY 275
The English are not particularly desirous
that foreign nations should be ably represented
at their court: and are very willing to soothe Mr.
Everett or Mr. Lawrence, in all the journals of
the kingdom to any extent of compliment, if they
can get the best end of the bargain from them
when it comes to business. And if Mr. Gallatin
or Mr. Adams were sent, the journals would,
no doubt, be ready to mortify them with any
amount of slight and snubbing, if it would dis-
gust and drive such formidable attorneys home.
Jeremiah Mason said to Richard H. Dana :
“Law school! A man must read law in the
court house.” And Mr. Arnold took “Hoar's
treatise on the Vine" into his garden, but could
not find that kind of buds and eyes on his vines:
and it is true that all the theory in the world
is vain without the thumb of practice. What
could Coke or Blackstone do against the bullies
of the Middlesex Bar, as F- and Butler?
No, you must have equal spunk and face them
down, -ready-witted, ready-handed.
[New Bedford, March (?) 1852.]
Mr. Arnold thinks very humbly of the gen-
eral ability of merchants: they have narrow


276
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
views. Each thinks in the morning, “ I must
make a hundred dollars to-day," and if he looks
further, it is only to reckon how much that
will make in a year. But he has no knowledge
of the scope and issues of his own trade. He
thinks the lawyers have much more extent of
view, and, if he must confide public business
to a class, would confide it to them.
Mr. Arnold explained the advantages and in-
dependence of New Bedford trade. The Ham-
burg ship is sent from New York to New Bed-
ford to load with oil : it is cheaper to load here,
and it is better done. The coopers understand
it. The cooper hugs the oil cask as if he loved
it, and handles it well.
I like that New England, like Greece, should
owe its power to the genius of its people. There
is no prosperity here, no trade, or art, or city,
or great wealth of any kind, but, if you trace it
home, you will find it rooted in the energy of
some individual; and it seems as if the welfare
of the country were the deed of some twenty or
thirty ingenious and forcible persons.
If a young man come home from college, and
find his father coming in every day to dinner in


1852) REAL MEN. READING 277
his shirt-sleeves, from the field, — he is forced
himself to adopt, at once, some lucrative em-
ployment. But if he finds his father at ease in
the parlour, - he will never go to work him-
self. Five hundred pounds a year is a sure re-
cipe to make a fainéant in England.
When a personality reaches such a strength
as that of Peter the Great, or Bonaparte, or
Kossuth, it is a fair offset to the Andes of con-
ventionalism.
European politics are too translatable into
American. The Transcript, Daily Advertiser,
etc., take, on each question, the Metternich
view. In our Massachusetts courts, too, the
judge is on the side of the criminal.
Few know how to read. Women read to find
a hero whom they can love; men, for amuse-
ment; editors, for something to crib; authors,
for something that supports their view : and
hardly one reads comprehensively and wisely.
The new dances, in which the dancers walk
single-file up and down the room, put every
one on his means, and are a severe test. That
is, dancing is only learned to teach us to walk,


278
(AGE 48
JOURNAL
as the Roman soldier carried heavier loads in
peace than in war.
Tin pan. I am made happy by a new thought.
... While this thought glitters newly before me,
I think Wall Street nothing. I accurately record
the thought, and think I have got it. After a
few months, I come again to the record, and it
seems a mere bit of glistening tin or tinsel, and
no such world wisdom. In fact, the universe
had glowed with its eternal blaze, and I had
chipped off this scale, through which its light
shone, thinking this the diamond, and put it in my
jewel box, and now it is nothing but a dead scale.
Beauty. Little things are often filled with
great beauty. The cigar makes visible the res-
piration of the body, an universal fact, of which
the ebb and flow of the sea-tide is only one
example.
“I hate the aristocracy,” said Samuel Rogers
to Judge Duer. “ I hate them.” “What, you !
the friend of Lord Holland, and Lord Essex,
and of so many nobles?” “Yes, I hate them.
I never enter one of their houses, but I am
made to feel that they are the great lords, and
I the low plebeian.”


1852] TISSENET. PUBLIC WASTE 279
[Here follows the remarkable story of M.
Tissenet and the Indians, when he saved his life
adroitly by pretended magic with mirror, wig,
alcohol, and burning-glass, — drawn from Nou-
veaux Voyages dans l'Amérique septentrionale, by
Capitaine Bossu; for which see “Resources”
(Letters and Social Aims, pp. 145, 146). Carlyle
sent the book to Emerson (Correspondence, vol.
ii, pp. 197 and 209).]
April 13.
In the United States Senate, April 12, Mr.
Dawson of Georgia presented a petition from
Harris County, Georgia, calling the attention
of Congress to the enormous expenditures of
the Government: and, as one step toward ar-
resting the lavish expenditures, he was against
granting any additional aid to the Collins line
of steamers, “if the object be to enter into a
contest with Great Britain to display finery and
gewgaws.” — Telegraphic Report.
Northman
The gale that wrecked you on the sand,
It helped my rowers to row ;
The storm is my best galley-hand,
And drives me where I go.


280
JOURNAL (AGE 48
Gazetted terms. After all; Kindred spirit;
Yes, to a certain extent; As a general thing;
Quite a number.
“I do not wish this or that thing my fortune
will procure, I wish the great fortune," said
Henry James, and said it in the noble sense.
ense.
A man is a battery whose circuit should be
complete, like the ball of the earth, which is also
a battery ; but, for the most part, the circuit is
interrupted, and you see only the gear or rig-
ging of a battery.
The Purist who refuses to vote, because the
government does not content him in all points,
should refuse to feed a starving beggar, lest he
should feed his vices.
“Bend one cubit to straighten eight.”
Ellery says, “What a fine day is this! No-
thing about immortality here!”
The illustrations in modern books mark the
decline of art. 'Tis the dram-drinking of the
eye, and candy for food; as whales and horses
and elephants, produced on the stage, show de-
cline of drama.


1852) MONTREAL AND QUEBEC 281
“Il faut écrire,” said Mallet du Pan,“ avec
un fer rouge pour exciter maintenant aucune sensa-
tion.”
TREA
Montreal, April 19.
Saw this morning the shove in the St. Law-
rence, and, as I stood on the quay, acres of ice
floated swiftly by downstream, and, with the
rest, a large piece of the road which I had tra-
versed across the ice on Saturday. A part of the
road was making formidable plunges and revo-
lutions as it was jammed against the shore ice.
ve
TRE
MONTREAL, April 21.
The south shore of the St. Lawrence between
Montreal and Quebec is cut up into seigneuries,
a tract of land of say three leagues square, being
granted to a seigneur, who is to cut roads, build
mills, etc., and he divides the land into lots
among the censitaires who pay an annual rent
of two or three sous on the arpent, and when-
ever they sell their farm, the seigneur receives
one twelfth (?) of the purchase money under
the name of lodes et ventes; and whenever the
seigneur sells his seigneurie, the Crown receives
one fifth of the price of the seigneurie, and these
rights are perpetual. If the land has a new ten-
ant every year, the seigneur has a new twelfth;


282
JOURNAL (Age 48
and if the seigneurie is sold every year, the
Crown a new fifth.
The seigneuries are of all sizes and values,
from £75 to £ 2000 a year; and are divided and
subdivided by inheritance. The Seminary of
Saint Sulpice here owns the whole island of
Montreal, or did own it until the act was passed
called commutation, by which the seigneur is
compelled to sell the fee of the land, if five per
cent be paid for his seigneural rights. The rich-
est seigneurie is that of Beauharnois.
The land is settled in townships to the north
of Montreal, back for one hundred and fifty miles,
almost exclusively by French farmers, - though
there are two or three English settlements, as
New Glasgow, - and is a good wheat country.
They make this year, and at this very time,
April 20, a good deal of maple sugar; the coun-
try eighty miles to the north, now lying under
two or three feet of snow.
The arms or emblem of Canada is a maple
leaf and a beaver.
Mr. Baxter's answer, procured from an engi-
neer, to Thoreau's queries is as follows:-
36,800 English feet in a French arpent.
In Canada, i French pied = 1.06575 Eng.
feet.


1852) MONTREAL ADDRESS 283
In France, 1 French pied=13.11 inches Eng.
In Canada, i licue = 3 miles English.
In Lachine, I saw pass Sir George Simpson,
Governor of the Hudson Bay Company, who,
I was told, is the only man who has gone round
the world by land; an expression which must be
used, of course, with some latitude, as the first
step of it is to sail from Liverpool to New
York.
e ro
[Mr. Emerson's speech at the Dinner of the
St. George's Society, Montreal, April 23, 1852:]
Mr. President, -I am flattered by the invi-
tation to respond to the sentiment of the Chair,
though I am quite uncertain of being able to
show this company how cordially I do it. But
you are to know that we Americans feel our
relation to England to be so strict, — we have
kept our pedigree so pure, — that we praise very
willingly England, as a son praises his mother.
I hope you will not recall M. Talleyrand's
speech to the youth who vaunted his mother's
beauty, “ Mais donc, c'était M. votre père qui
n'était pas si bien." So I hope you will not
be provoked to criticise the American element
in us, that differences us from the English.


284
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
I have taken up so much of the time of my
friends in Montreal that I must cut short what
I have to say. But it strikes me that England
owes her splendid career to the rare coincidence
of a good race and good place. It was a lucky
fit. We say in a yacht-race, that, if the boats are
anywhere nearly matched, it is the man that
wins. Put the best sailing master into either
boat, and he will win.
England is like a ship anchored in the sea,
at the side of Europe and right in the heart of
the modern world. As soon as this ship got a
hardy crew into it, they could not help becom-
ing the sailors and factors of the globe. It was
like a man living in a lighthouse, — his boys
learn to swim like fishes and their playthings
are boats, and, as in sailing round the world
(when there was “no peace beyond the line"),
there were plenty of hard knocks going, they
were good at that game too. So these stout fel-
lows went up and down the world, and were
more abroad than they were at home, and took
early lessons in the game of annexation, until
they have got a good part of the world in their
hands. Well, the more they went abroad, the
more they found to do at home, for, having, as
shopmen say, the very best business stand in the
we
nen


vere sur
1852] MONTREAL ADDRESS 285
whole planet, they were sure of a sale of all the
goods they can possibly manufacture.
With this prosperity, the virtues of the race
shone out. 'Tis said, there are not as great in-
dividuals now as then on earth. Some countries
only furnish officers; and others, men; old Per-
sia, men, and Sparta, officers. France, England,
America furnish officers and engineers to Rus-
sia and Turkey. But England has good rank
and file, and there is not a county or a town
in England but has yielded its contingent of
worthy men, in old or in new times, to the
country and the race. The first name for intel-
lect in the human race is Shakspeare; the first
for capacity in exact science is Newton; and
where, out of his country, has Milton his su-
perior in epic or in lyric song? What lawgiver
in learning or reason has excelled Bacon? These
four; yet this is the country of Chaucer, Spen-
ser, Hooker, Taylor, Dryden, and Locke, and
the race is not yet extinct: witness Scott, Byron,
Coleridge, Wordsworth. These heroes of peace
have been flanked by the heroes of action, by
the Drakes, Blakes, Cavendishes, Cooks, Marl-
boroughs, Nelsons, Wellingtons. And, one
would say, the island has so long been the abode
of a civil and free race that the very dust is the
S SU


286
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
remains of good and brave men, and the air re-
tains the virtue their souls have shed into it, and
they who inhale it feel its quality.
But I do not say these things to feed your
pride and mine, but because we are to hear the
appeal of the ancestors to the children. We must
feel as the Romans who put the statues of their
fathers in the atrium, that every time the man
entered his door, he might pass through the line
of his forefathers.
“ We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakspeare spake; the faith and manners hold
Which Milton held; in everything, we are sprung
From Earth's first blood, - have titles manifold.”
I must not omit to record the pleasure which
a circumstance gave me at the St. George's Fes-
tival in Montreal. The English there compli-
mented each other by saying that they hoped
it would be found that, whenever they met an
Englishman, they found one who would speak
the truth, and we cannot think this festival fruit-
less, if, all over the world, on April 23 (the
birth and death day of Shakspeare also), where-
ever two or three Englishmen are found, they
meet to encourage each other in the nationality
of speaking the truth.


1852 MONTREAL. OLD POETS 287
It is noticeable in Montreal that all the
churches have a national attraction, as well as
religious, for their votaries. St. Andrew's is the
Scottish Kirk; St. Patrick's is the Irish Catho-
lic; St. David's, the Welsh; St. George's the
English; the Bostonians go to the Unitarian.
I found, on the 22d April, ten feet of old
snow on each side of the carriage in riding out
to Judge Day's, three miles from Montreal.
Mr. McDonald made me laugh with his ac-
count of lectures in Montreal. He said, if there
were only two fellows left in Montreal, one
would deliver a lecture and the other would hear
CO
it.
“ Souffrir de tout le monde et ne faire souffrir per-
sonne," was the inscription over a door in the
Sæurs Grises.
There is wonderful prodigality about the Eng-
lish genius in the Sixteenth Century. Their
poets had marvellous stores to draw from, by
simple force of mind equalizing themselves with
the science of ours. There was a posset or drink
called October, and they in like manner knew
how to distil a whole September with harvests
and astronomy into their verses,' ...
i The rest of the paragraph thus beginning is in English
Traits (p. 237).


288
(Ace 48
JOURNAL
Mr. Downer at Dorchester said to me that
they found that, among those who came out of
the city and built or bought country-seats, those
who got snug homes remained, those who got
bleak ones (fine view, etc.) did not stay long,
but sold out; a fact worth inserting in the
“ Economy” lecture.
I
[Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot and
exile, then striving to interest the people of the
United States in his country's behalf, visited
Concord on May 11 and met with a cordial re-
ception. He made an eloquent address in the
Town Hall. Hon. John S. Keyes presided on
this occasion, and Mr. Emerson made the ad-
dress of welcome which is printed in the Mis-
cellanies.]
Wednesday, May 19.
I saw Miss Delia Bacon, at Cambridge, at the
house of Mrs. Becker, and conversed with her
on the subject of Shakspeare.' Miss Bacon
i Miss Delia S. Bacon, an American lady of great intelli-
gence and nobility of character, who became utterly absorbed
in the works attributed to Shakespeare, but which she believed
from her profound studies of the plays, and of Bacon's writings,
were surely mainly the work of the latter and some of his
friends. She cared less about the establishing the authorship
(the secret of which she was sure would be found in Shake-


1852] MISS BACON. CLASSICS
289
thinks that a key will yet be found to Shak-
speare's interior sense; that some key to his
secret may yet be discovered at Stratford, and I
fancy, thinks the famous epitaph,“Good friend,
for Jesus' sake forbear,” protects some expla-
nation of it. Her skepticism in regard to the
authorship goes beyond the skepticism of Wolf
in regard to Homer, or Niebuhr to Latin his-
tory.
The multitude of translations from the Latin
and Greek Classics, that have been lately pub-
lished, have made great havoc with the old study
of those languages. At Cambridge, every student
is provided with a Bohn's translation of his
speare's coffin) than that the world should, through her expla-
nations and promptings, learn the true science of all things which
the plays were written to unfold. Mr. Emerson, Carlyle, and
especially Hawthorne, our consul in England, while Miss
Bacon was working herself to death there, though none of them
accepted her belief, held this lonely and devoted apostle in high
respect, and gave her all the help and furtherance they could.
She literally gave her reason and life to her work, which she
pursued in great poverty and absolute isolation in England for
three or four years. (See various mentions of Miss Bacon in
the Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, and in Hawthorne's Eng-
lish Note-Books; also the interesting and tragic story of her life,
Delia Bacon, by Leonard Bacon, Houghton Mifflin & Co.
1888.)


290
JOURNAL
(AGE 48
yan
author, and much the same effect is produced as
when lexicons were first introduced. The only
remedy would be a rage for prosody, which would
enforce attention to the words themselves of the
Latin or Greek verse.
I saw Judd' in Augusta, in February, and
asked him who his companions were? He said,
“sunsets.” I told him, I thought they needed
men. He said, “He was a priest, and conversed
with the sick and dying." I told him, Yes, very
well, if people were sick and died to any pur-
pose; but, as far as I had observed, they were
quite as frivolous as the rest, and that a man per-
emptorily needed now and then a reasonable
word or two.
To what base uses we put this ineffable intel-
lect! To reading all day murders and railroad
accidents, to choosing patterns for waistcoats and i
scarfs.
A man is a torpedo to a man. I see him with
wonder; he looks open and radiant, a god in
the world; he understands astronomy, love, and
i Rev. Sylvester Judd, the author of Margaret, a Tale of
the Real and Ideal.


sess
1852] FATE OF THE MAN-CHILD 291
heroism. But I touch him, and am frozen by
him. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this
Brother. Beware of a pair of eyes! What a puz-
zle! He is little enough, and nobody; as he
comes down the hill, the sun shining in his eyes,
the east wind blowing, he is only sensible, like
an ox, of petty inconveniences. But he takes a
book, or hears a fact or sentiment, he dilates;
he knows nature, and the unspoken, unpene-
trated universe. In this exaltation all bars sink,
he is open as the element, - one man is sud-
denly tantamount to the race. These powers, so
great, yet so haphazard discovered, - how easily
he might have missed them! Well, now he has
them, and the magnificent dreams begin. All
history, nay, all fable, Alexander, Haroun Al-
raschid, Hari himself, could do no more than
this unaided person will. We hear and believe.
But, from month to month, from year to year,
he delays, and does not. He has passed out of
the exaltation, and his hands are not equal to his
thought, nor are the hands of his mind equal to
the eyes of his mind. This tremendous limita-
tion, this Fate, whereby that which seems so facile,
and, of course, only gets done by here and there
a special hero, to do one specialty of it, once in
five hundred years; another to do another spe-
2
em


292
JOURNAL
[AGE 49
cialty in another five hundred years; and so it
takes two thousand years for the dream of one
hour to be fulfilled.
Observe, that the whole history of the intel-
lect is expansions and concentrations.' . ..
But all this old song I have trolled a hundred
times already, in better ways, only, last night,
Henry Thoreau insisted much on“ expansions,”
and it sounded new.
But of the congelation I was to add one word,
that, by experience, having learned that this old
inertia, or quality of oak and granite, inheres in
us, and punishes, as it were, any fit of geniality,
we learn with surprise that our fellow man, or
one of our fellow men or fellow women, is a
doctor or enchanter, who snaps the staunch iron
hoops that bind us, thaws the fatal frost, and
sets all the particles dancing each round each.
He must be inestimable to us to whom we can
say what we cannot say to ourselves.
June 1.
The belief of some of our friends in their du-
ration suggests one of those musty household-
ers who keep every broomstick and old grate,
put in a box every old tooth that falls out of
1 See Natural History of Intellect (p. 58).


1852] CONTRAST IN FRIENDS 293
their heads, preserve the ancient frippery of
their juvenile wardrobe, and they think God
saves all the old souls which he has used up.
What does he save them for?
Smith, in The Divine Drama, rightly sees
the unconventionality of the Supreme Actor.
And I find in my platoon contrasted figures;
as, my brothers, and Everett, and Caroline,' and
Margaret, and Elizabeth, and Jones Very, and
Sam Ward, and Henry Thoreau, and Alcott, and
Channing. Needs all these and many more to
represent my relations."
Besides, what we ask daily is to be conven-
i Caroline Sturgis, later Mrs. William Tappan, of Lenox.
2 In this connection it may be mentioned that, during the
summer, Hawthorne, returning from three years' sojourn in
Lenox, came to Concord with his wife and three children
and bought the “Wayside” on the Lexington road for his
home, although his appointment in the next summer to the
United States consulship at Liverpool took him away from Con-
cord for seven years, the last three spent on the Continent.
His shyness and Mr. Emerson's preoccupation prevented their
frequent meetings, though each was glad of the other's neigh-
borhood.
At about this time Mr. Emerson added to his small farm
four acres for pasture and tillage on the south side of the Mill
Brook which ran behind his garden.


294
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
tional: . . . Saadi and Æsop and Cervantes
and Ben Jonson had, I doubt not, the tinker
element and tinker experience which Miss Bacon
wishes to ward off from Shakspeare, but which
he must also have, as well as the courtly, which
she wishes to claim for him, yet a great poet
must be of the middle classes. See what is said
in Eckermann, vol. i, p. 210.
Napoleon was intellectual; valued things as they
were, and not after fear or favour. How few men
wish to know how the thing really stands, what is
the law of it, without reference to any persons !
Henry Thoreau's idea of the men he meets
is, that they are his old thoughts walking. It
is all affectation to make much of them, as if
he did not long since know them thoroughly.
(From GO)
Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum
Gratulor.!
OviD.
“Sit nulla fides augentibus omnia musis.”?
June 7.
We had a good walk, Channing and I, along
i Old things may give others joy, but happy am I that I
was not born till now.
2 Believe not that the Muses will aid in all things.


1852] A WALK. CHILDREN 295
the bank of the North Branch to the swamp,
and to the “ Harrington Estate.” Channing's
young dog scampered and dived and swam at
such a prodigal rate that one could not help
grudging the youth of the universe (the ani-
mals) their Heaven. They must think us poor
pedants in petticoats, as poet Cowper is painted
in the Westall Editions. How much more the
dog knows of nature than his master, though
his master were an Indian. The dog tastes,
snuffs, rubs, feels, tries, everything, everywhere,
through miles of bush, brush,grass, water, mud,
lilies, mountain, and sky.
At present, however, at night, I am haunted
by the lines —
“The stars are in the quiet sky,” etc.;
which I first heard sung under the mimick stars
of the Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky. But there
is a charm in the line for my ear and fancy, and
I must inquire for the song.
In our walk we came to Ellery's garden of
lupines, — a quarter of an acre covered over
with a wild bed of lupines, which, when the
sun shone, looked like saloons of beauties in
mousseline de laines.
Nature's best feat is enamouring the man of
сте с


296
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
these children, like kissing the knife that is to
cut his throat, - they sucking, fretting, morti-
fying, ruining him, and upsetting him at last,
because they want his chair, and he, dear old
donkey, well pleased to the end.
There is such an obvious accumulation of
dexterity in the use of tools in the old scholar
and thinker that it is not to be believed Nature
will be such a spendthrift as to sponge all this
out, like figures from a slate. Ellery replies,
that there is a great deal of self-importance, and
that the good Oriental who cuts such a figure
was bit by this Aly. Yes; but the key to the
world is to transfer all those conceits to the
gases of chemistry, and, though they have no
value from the point of view of the individual,
they have value as brute fact.
Men achieve a certain greatness, to their own
surprise, whilst they were striving to achieve
quite another conventional one.
ere
ve
Metonomy. Poetry seems to begin in the
slightest change of name, or, detecting identity
under variety of surface. Boys please them-
selves with crying to the coachman, “Put on
the string,” instead of lash. With calling a fire-
engine a tub; and the engine men Tigers. A


1852] WALK TO CONANTUM 297
boy's game of ball is called Four Old Cats.
Poetry calls a snake a worm. In a shipwreck,
the sea novel finds “cordilleras of water.” I can
never lose the ludicrous effect of using the word
tin for money.
June 13.
Yesterday a walk with Ellery to thc Lincoln
Mill Brook, to Nine-Acre Corner, and Conan-
tum. It was the first right day of summer. Air,
cloud, river, meadow, upland, mountain, all
were in their best. We took a swim at the out-
let of the little brook at Baker Farm. Ellery is
grown an accomplished Professor of the art of
Walking, and leads like an Indian. He likes
the comic surprise of his botanic information
which is so suddenly enlarged. Since he knew
Thoreau, he carries a little pocket - book, in
which he affects to write down the name of each
new plant or the first day on which he finds the
flower. He admires viburnum and cornel, and
despises door-yards with foreign shrubs. Mr.
Lee's farm at Nine-Acre Corner, he thinks the
best situated house in Concord; — southern ex-
posure, land rising behind close to the river,
which lies in front, crossed by the bridge, and
with wide outlook to the south and southwest.
The view of the river from the top of the


298
JOURNAL
AGE 49
CE
an-
hill (Mine Hill) we found lovely, and had much
to think of Mr. Gilpin' all the afternoon. The
river just filled its banks to the brim, a rare
sight.
Another fine picture from the top of Conan-
tum, where a view of Concord village has newly
been opened by cutting away the wood last
winter. The red sorrel gives the rich hue to the
pastures. At Conantum, we visited the “ Ar-
boretum,” where we found sassafras, bass, cor-
nel, viburnum, ash, oak, slippery elm in close
vicinity. Ellery has much to say of the abun-
dance and perfection of lemon-yellow in nature
which he finds in potentilla, ranunculus, cistus,
yellow star of Bethlehem, etc., and which chem-
istry cannot well produce. M. Bouvières (I be-
lieve it is) spent his life in producing a good
yellow pigment.
Miss B- , a mantuamaker in Concord, be-
came a “ Medium," and gave up her old trade
for this new one; and is to charge a pistareen
a spasm, and nine dollars for a fit. This is the
Rat-revelation, the gospel that comes by taps
in the wall, and thumps in the table-drawer.
1 William Gilpin, born 1724, author of works on English
Forest Scenery, Picturesque Tours, and Gardens.


1852) NEW HAMPSHIRE 299
The spirits make themselves of no reputation.
They are rats and mice of society. And one of
the demure disciples of the rat-tat-too, the other
day, remarked that “this, like every other com-
munication from the spiritual world, began very
low.”
What is the reason of the extremely bad
character of New Hampshire politics ? “We
ha'n't any honesty,” said Jeremiah Mason,
speaking of his compatriots of New Hampshire,
to Samuel Hoar.
Mr. Hoar thinks that the whole school of
New Hampshire public men, such as Levi
Woodbury, differ toto cælo from such men as
Judge Parsons, and his class, in Massachusetts.
He that commits a crime defeats the object
of his existence.
Trifles, Manners. 'Tis a narrow line that di-
vides an awkward act from the finish of grace-
fulness. Every man eats well alone. Let a
stranger come in, and he misses his mouth,
spills his butter boat, and fails of finding the
joint in carving, and that by so little. “Gold
teaspoons constrain us, if we are used to silver."


300
JOURNAL'
(AGE 49
July 6.
The head of Washington hangs in my dining-
room for a few days past, and I cannot keep
my eyes off of it. It has a certain Appalachian
strength, as if it were truly the first - fruits of
America, and expressed the Country. The
heavy, leaden eyes turn on you, as the eyes of
an ox in a pasture. And the mouth has a grav-
ity and depth of quiet, as if this man had ab-
sorbed all the serenity of America, and left none
for his restless, rickety, hysterical countrymen.
Noble, aristocratic head, with all kinds of eleva-
tion in it, that come out by turns. Such majes-
tical ironies, as he hears the day's politics, at
table. We imagine him hearing the letter of
General Cass, the letter of General Scott, the
letter of Mr. Pierce, the effronteries of Mr.
Webster recited. This man listens like a god
to these low conspirators.
Henry Thoreau rightly said, the other even-
ing, talking of lightning-rods, that the only rod
of safety was in the vertebræ of his own spine.'
Euripides, Æschylus, are again the well-
known pair of Beauty and Strength, which we
i Mr. Emerson used this speech of Thoreau in “ Wor-
ship" and in “ Aristocracy.'


es-
1852] WEBSTER'S DEFEAT 301
had in Raphael and Angelo, in Shakspeare
and Milton. What Æschylus will translate our
heaven-tempting politics into a warning Ode,
strophe and antistrophe? A slave, son of a mem-
ber of Congress, flees from the plantation-whip
to Boston, is snatched by the marshal, is res-
cued by the citizens; an excited population ; a
strong chain is stretched round the Court House.
Webster telegraphs from Washington urgent
orders to prosecute rigorously. Whig orators and
interests intervene. Whig wisdom of waiting to
be last devoured. Slave is caught, tried, marched
at midnight under guard of marshals and pike-
and sword - bearing police to Long Wharf and
embarked for Baltimore. “Thank-God-Choate"
thanks God five times in one speech; Boston
thanks God. Presidential election comes on,
Webster triumphant, Boston sends a thousand
rich men to Baltimore: convention meets; Web-
ster cannot get one vote from Baltimore to the
Gulf, - not one. The competitor is chosen. The
Washington wine sour, dinners disturbed. The
mob at Washington turns out, at night, to exult
in Scott's election. Goes to Webster's house
and raises an outcry for Webster to come out
and address them. He resists; the mob is vio-
lent, — will not be refused. He is obliged to


302
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
come in his night - shirt, and speak from his
window to the riff-raff of Washington in honor
of the election of Scott. Pleasant conversation
of the Boston delegation on their return home!
The cars unusually swift.
Webster (earlier in Bowdoin Square) ex-
horts the citizens to conquer their prejudices,
to put down agitation; it is treason to feed or
defend this young mulatto, — son of his friend,
the member of Congress, and who has escaped
to Boston, from his pursuers.
I think the piece should open by an eulogy of
Webster by an ardent youth, first scholar at Cam-
bridge, reciting the sentences he chiefly admires
from his speeches at Plymouth, at New Hamp-
shire Festival, at Congress, and Faneuil Hall.
are
Not sure about those English. We concede
great power and culture to them, but it is in
groups and classes. What extraordinary indi-
viduals, saw you, sir? Those whom you see here
are surely very trifling persons, with foolish-
sounding voices. Who was this mighty man,
unrivalable by Americans, whom you saw? Was
it Milnes? No. Macaulay? No. Disraeli? No.
Wilson? No. Wordsworth, Carlyle, Tennyson!
- but they are as exceptional and admired there


1852) MAN'S NEED OF MAN 303
as here. And Carlyle acknowledged, or rather
affirmed loudly, the mediocrity of his circle.
And I was struck with poverty and limitation
of their men.
ON
A man avails much to us, like a point of de-
parture to the seaman, or his stake and stones
to the surveyor. I am my own man more than
most men, yet the loss of a few persons would
be most impoverishing; — a few persons who
give flesh to what were, else, mere thoughts,
and which now I am not at liberty to slight, or
in any manner treat as fictions. It were too
much to say that the Platonic world I might
have learned to treat as cloud-land, had I not
known Alcott, who is a native of that country,
yet I will say that he makes it as solid as Mas-
sachusetts to me; and Thoreau gives me, in
flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief,
my own ethics. He is far more real, and daily
practically obeying them, than I; and fortifies
my memory at all times with an affirmative ex-
perience which refuses to be set aside.
I live a good while and acquire as much
skill in literature as an old carpenter does in
wood. It occurs, then, what pity! that now,
when you know something, have at least learned
eau


304
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
so much good omission, your organs should
fail you; your eyes, health, fire, and zeal of
work, should decay daily. Then I remember
that it is the mind of the world which is the
good carpenter, the good scholar, sailor, or
blacksmith, thousand-handed, versatile, all-ap-
plicable, in all these indifferent channels enter-
ing with wild vigor, excited by novelty in that
untried channel confined by dikes of pedantry.
[It is this which] works out the proper results
of that to the end, and surprises all with perfect
consent, alter et idem, to every other excellence;
lexicography or Aristotelian logic being found
consentaneous with music, with astronomy, with
roses, with love. In you, this rich soul has
peeped, despite your horny, muddy eyes, at
books and poetry. Well, it took you up, and
showed you something to the purpose; that there
was something there. Look, look, old mole!
there, straight up before you, is the magnificent
Sun. If only for the instant, you see it. Well,
in this way it educates the youth of the universe;
in this way warms, suns, refines every particle;
then it drops the little channel or canal, through
which the Life rolled beatific, like a fossil to the
ground, thus touched and educated, by a mo-
ment of sunshine, to be the fairer material for


1852] DIVINE LAWS. WOMAN 305
future channels and canals, through which the
old Glory shall dart again, in new directions, un-
til the Universe shall have been shot through
and through, tilled with light . . . Self-dispar-
agement ... is a human trick, but there re-
main unbroken by our defects the old laws,
upspringing like the arch of the sky, or like
sunlight, which all the wind in the universe
cannot blow away; high, old laws, round, unre-
moveable; self-executing; it is noble, it is
poetic, and makes poets, only to have seen
them, - to have computed their curve. Dwarves
may see the rainbow, as well as giants.
Tours de force. I have been told by women
that whatever work they perform by dint of
resolution, and without spontaneous flow of
spirits, they invariably expiate by a fit of sick-
ness (brute force of duty).
Everybody knows people who appear bed-
ridden,' ...
Lovejoy, the preacher, came to Concord, and
hoped Henry Thoreau would go to hear him.
“I have got a sermon on purpose for him.”
. 1 The rest of the passage is printed in “ Beauty” (Con-
duct of Life, p. 288).


306
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
“No," the aunts said, “we are afraid not.”
Then he wished to be introduced to him at the
house. So he was confronted. Then he put his
hand from behind on Henry, tapping his back,
and said, “Here's the chap who camped in
the woods.” Henry looked round, and said,
“And here's the chap who camps in a pulpit.”
Lovejoy looked disconcerted, and said no more
COLE
Margaret Swan.” “The thoughts that rushed
upon me were unutterable: they seemed like
the sound – I say sound - of a cataract of
light. Ask me not what they were; I should
perish in trying to give language to them,” said
this new Pythoness. “ Thoughts that fill my
mind are like consuming flames, and I am
obliged to interpose a strong human will between
myself and them, to sheathe my mind, as it were,
against them, and admit them slowly, little by
little.” “Words,” she added, “are the embroid-
ered curtain which then veils for me the Holy
of Holies. . . . After the burning thoughts not
to be uttered” (again an awe-struck look), “my
mind seems a shower of words in all languages :
they sail through it like little boats of light.”
1 A clairvoyant, of Medford, said these things to Miss
Osgood.


man
rc
1852] THOREAU. WINTHROP 307
The two Newmans in England are distin-
guished, one as Papist, and one, extreme lib-
eralist. The two junior Quincys in Boston
are, one, Hunker, and the other, Abolitionist.
These cases remind me of two brothers, one
of whom, being a gardener, and suffering every
year from the bugs, the other resolved to be
entomologist, so that, the worse the case was
for the garden, the better might his museum
thrive.
July 18.
Henry Thoreau makes himself characteris-
tically the admirer of the common weeds which
have been hoed at by a million farmers all
spring and summer and yet have prevailed, and
just now come out triumphant over all lands,
lanes, pastures, fields, and gardens, such is their
pluck and vigor. We have insulted them with
low names, too, pig-weed, smart-weed, red-root,
lousewort, chickweed. He says that they have
fine names, — amaranth, ambrosia.
Mr. Winthrop is a strong example of the in-
sufficiency of any and all outward advantages to
resist public opinion in this country. He has
good birth, rare as a gem with us, and his face
still presents a striking resemblance to the pic-


308
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
ture of his ancestor, the first governor of Mas-
sachusetts, in the Historical Society's chambers.
His name has been well marked by public es-
teem, by some scientific and other reputation,
by wealth and fashion, ever since the Pilgrim
era. He has himself had the best education and
the best introduction to public life. Of blame-
less morals, elegant tastes, popular manners, he
came early into distinction, the popular repre-
sentative of Boston in Congress. He has en-
joyed the rare honour, for a Northern man, of
being elected Speaker of the House. He has
added the complimentary distinction of being
himself the head of one section of the Whig
party in this state, — not merely the permanent
inferiority of Mr. Choate's position. One would
say, if ability and position availed, Mr. Win-
throp, of all men, would be justified in a manly
independence. But such saying betrays a beau-
tiful ignorance of the habits and exigencies of
our happy land. The handsome oration pro-
nounced to the Alumni of the College, on
Thursday, will dissipate to the discerning this
romancing.
Mr. Winthrop introduced his discourse with
much ease and beauty, and the audience had a
moment's leave to indulge the hope that states-


1852] WINTHROP'S ORATION 309
men and senators were as glad as others to throw
off the harness and treat themselves to a pure
dipping or two in the Castalian pools. But if
audiences forget themselves, statesmen do not.
We were presently offered the old, well-known
paragraph about religion, in which Mr. Web-
ster, Mr. Choate, and other eminent moralists
have so successfully employed their histrionic
eloquence.
Boston immediately took outits handkerchief
to the accustomed tenderness. The power of
the written and spoken letter and the immense
advantage the orator enjoys in the reporting and
publication over empires were well stated: then
the power of private as the source of public
opinion was seriously indicated. Here, it may
be said, Mr. Winthrop not said, but allowed to
transpire, the only serious thing in his oration
to this effect,
I am, as you see, a man virtuously inclined,
and only corrupted by my profession of poli-
tics.' ...
Having made this manifesto, Mr. Winthrop
proceeded with his work much in the tone and
i For the rest of this long paragraph, see “ The Fugitive
Slave Law,” delivered in New York, March 7, 1854 (Mis-
cellanies, pp. 242, 243).
ma


310
JOURNAL [Ace 49
spirit with which Lord Bacon prosecuted his bene-
factor, the Earl of Essex. The whole of the dis-
course was therefore a profusion of bows to Bos-
ton, to the supposed Boston, though now and
then a slight mistake we noticed in the guess of
the orator as to what the true Boston believed.
Of course not one clear statement of opinion,
but every statement qualified with a considered
recommendation to mercy, - death, with rec-
ommendation to mercy.
Kossuth was praised because he was eloquent,
and blamed because he was eloquent, and blamed
because he meant sincerely. ... The newspapers
were roasted for their sectionalism and slander,
and applauded for their patriotism and power.
Mr. Clay was safely praised; all literary men,
if we rightly understood, were soundly whipped
as very naughty ; Mr. Webster properly praised,
and Mr. Everett.
“The purified soul will fear nothing,” said
Plotinus.
Saadi says, The trees were in blossom when
he begun his Gulistan; before the fruit was ripe
on them, he had ended.
Whiggery has found for itself a new formula


1852] WHIG VIEW. SOULS 311
in Boston, this, namely, that, when we go to
drive, the breeching is as indispensable as the
traces. Its claim is that it blocks the wheels;
that the Democratic party goes with a rush for
Cuban Invasion, Mexico, Canada, and all: that
the Whig party resists these; assuming, however,
that the total population is bad, and means
badly. ... But all this despair comes of inca-
pacity; their eyes being only on money, they
do not conceive hope or faith. They are the
shop-till party.
Souls with a certain quantity of light are in
excess, and irrevocably belong to the moral
class, - what animal force they may retain, to
the contrary, notwithstanding. Souls with less
light, it is chemically impossible that they be
moral, — what talent or good they have, to the
contrary, notwithstanding; and these belong to
the world of Fate, or animal good: the youth
of the universe; not yet twenty-one; not yet
voter; not yet robed in the toga virilis.
Nor is it permitted to any soul, of the free or
of the apprentice class, that is, to the free, or
to the fated, to cast a vote for the other. The
world wants so much alum, and so much sac-
charine; so much iron, and so much hemp; so


312
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
much paper, and so much mahogany: nor could
any rebellion or arbitrament be suffered in its
atoms, without chaos: if a particle of lead were
to prefer to mask its properties, and exert the
energies of cork or of vitriol; if coal should
undertake to be a lemon; or feathers, turpen-
tine; we should have a pretty ruin, to be sure.
But the laws use azote, oxygen, carbon, lime,
magnesia, and so forth, as their means; and
these very excesses and defects in you, these
determinations to the moral or the animal, are
the very means by which high Nature works,
and cannot afford to want. Be her footmen, her
Fates, her couriers, muses, and angels.
men a
Statesmen are the superficiality of surface.
For, if slavery is a good, then is lying, theft,
arson, incest, homicide, each and all goods, and
to be maintained by Union Societies.
Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail ?
He wrote on nature's grandest brow, For Sale.
August 1.
Nobody knows what he shall see by going
to a brookside or to a ball. At the Saw-mill-
Brook he might see to-day, as I saw, a profu-
sion of handsome flowers, among which the Or-


1852] BURNS. TRUE ELOQUENCE 313
chis fimbriata, the stately stemmed Eupatorium
and the perfoliate, the Noli - me - tangere, the
Mimulus, the Thalictrum, the Lobelia cardina-
lis, the Lysimachia, and some of the mints are
conspicuous. The oldest naturalist sees some-
thing new in every walk.
It is the praise of Burns that he made a lan-
guage classical.
Eloquence. Who could convince X' of any
truth which he does not see (and what truth does
he see?) must be a master of his art. And elo-
quence is the power to translate a truth into
language perfectly intelligible to the persons to
whom you speak. Is this a vulgar power ? Dec-
lamation is common; but such possession of
thought as is here required, such practical chem-
istry as the conversion of a truth written in
God's language, into a truth in X's language, is
one of the most beautiful and cogent weapons
ever forged in the shop of the Divine artificer.
The charm of the conversation of the old
man (who is Odin disguised), who talks with
King Olaf in his bed, is well described. —
THORPE, vol. i, p. 160.
1 A Unitarian clergyman.


314
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
How delicate, difficult, unattainable the
golden mean which Nature yet knows how to
attain of temperament and culture in a young
girl's carriage and manners. Here are girls beau-
tiful without beauty, and ugly with it. ...
Birth has much to do with it and condition
much, and society very much ; and wealth, and
beauty, and tradition, and connection, are all
elements; but no rules can be given, and the
hazards are so great that the status and métier
of a young girl, from fourteen to twenty-five,
are beforehand pathetically perilous.' ...
On her theory of the authorship of the
“plays,” my correspondent, Miss Bacon, says,
and says excellently well, “You see yourself
how much this idea of the authorship controls
our appreciation of the works themselves; and
what new worlds such an authorship would en-
able us to see in them.”,
“What, in such a tide of time as that, could
i The omitted sentences are found in “ Behaviour" (Con-
duct of Life, p. 197).
2 Compare, in “ Quotation and Originality," the passage
beginning, “The bold theory of Delia Bacon that Shak-
speare's plays were written by a society of wits," etc. (Letters
and Social Aims, pp. 197, 198.)


1852) DELIA BACON'S BELIEF 315
Bacon do? He had made one attempt to be
noble to himself, and the consequence was, that,
without gaining anything for himself or others,
he had brought, for a time, into mortal peril the
life hopes so infinitely sweet to him. And
thenceforth he took to himself other weapons
than truth and eloquence: uncompromising sub-
mission, indefatigable perseverance, patience
that knew no limit, sycophancy, or rather, a
secret mockery of it, smiling to itself, sacrifices
of all kinds, were henceforth the instruments
of this lifelong warfare. ...
“In all this there was a perpetual mental res-
ervation, and according to my theory, by means
of his 'ingenious instrument,' a solemn protest
also perpetually set down by shining Ariels on
margins that will yet give out their colours.
Through all this, there was something that still
sat within, in purple, crowned, unbending, that
never stooped or wavered, smiling to see its
high charms work.'”
Good Neighborbood. Neighborhood is of great
importance, and you buy much with given
prices that is not rightly rendered in the bill.
You pay nominally for one thing. You buy
really something worth incomparably more.


316
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
Also, every man who plants an estate must buy
good tenants, as well as good land; buy a tutor,
or other respectability, to dine with; buy com-
panions for his children, and avoid misfits.
I waked at night, and bemoaned myself, be-
cause I had not thrown myself into this deplor-
able question of Slavery, which seems to want
nothing so much as a few assured voices. But
then, in hours of sanity, I recover myself, and
say, “God must govern his own world, and
knows his way out of this pit, without my de-
sertion of my post, which has none to guard it
but me. I have quite other slaves to free than
those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, im-
prisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man,
— far retired in the heaven of invention, and
which, important to the republic of Man, have
no watchman, or lover, or defender, but I.”
In July, Mr. Alcott went to Connecticut to
his native town of Wolcott; found his father's
farm in possession of a stranger; found many
of his cousins still poor farmers in the town ;
the town itself unchanged since his childhood,
whilst all the country round has been changed
by manufactures and railroads: Wolcott, which


1852] ALCOTT'S OLD HOME 317
is a mountain, remains as it was, or with a still
less population (ten thousand dollars, he said,
would buy the whole town, and all the men in
it) and now tributary entirely to the neigh-
boring town of Waterbury, which is a thriving
factory village. Alcott went about and invited
all the people, his relatives and friends, to meet
him at five o'clock at the school-house, where he
had once learned, on Sunday evening. Thither
they all came, and he sat at the desk, and gave
them the story of his life. Some of the audience
went away discontented, because they had not
heard a sermon, as they hoped.
I read England as it Is, by Johnston, with in-
terest. It is acute, learned, informed. What is
said of England, -every particular,—we Amer-
icans read with a secret interest, even when
Americans are expressly and, it may seem, on
good grounds, affronted and disparaged; for we
know that we are the heir, that not he who is
meant to be praised is the Englishman; but we,
we are the Englishman, by gravitation, by des-
tiny, and laws of the universe. The good he
praises is devolving to us, and our keen sym-
pathy in every trait he draws is the best certifi-
cate that we are the lawful son:-
TS


318
[AGE 49
JOURNAL
“ Percy is but the factor, good my lord.”
Yet, I think, the final lesson taught by the
book is, that, outside of all the plausibilities
collected by the writer and Wordsworth and
Coleridge and Burke and the total Aristippism
of the world in behalf of the Church and State
of England, we must rally to the stoical banner,
to the geometric, astronomic morals.
August 18.
Horatio Greenough,' lately returned from
Italy, came here and spent the day, - an ex-
traordinary man, a man of sense, of virtue, and
of rare elevation of thought and carriage. One
thought of heroes, — of Alfieri, of Michael An-
gelo, of Leonardo da Vinci. How old ? “ Forty-
seven years of joy I have lived ” was his an-
swer. He makes many of my accustomed stars
pale by his clear light. His magnanimity, his
idea of a great man, his courage, and cheer, and
self-reliance, and depth, and self-derived know-
ledge, charmed and invigorated me, as none has,
who has gone by, these many months. I told
him I would fife in his regiment. The grandest
of democrats. His democracy is very deep, and
i The following is a composite from two accounts of this
visit, written by Mr. Emerson.


1852) HORATIO GREENOUGH 319
for the most part free from crotchets, — not
quite, — and philosophical. Hefinds everybody
believer in two gods, believer in the devil: he
is not.
Again, everything is generative, and every-
thing connected. If you take chastity apart, and
make chastity a virtue, you create that sink of
obscenity, a monk. The old ages, seeing that
circumstances pinched them, and they got no
divine man, tried to lift up one of their number
out of the press, and so gain a right man. But
it turned out that the new development really
obtained was abnormal ; they got a bloated belly.
Then they tried to take twenty or fifty out, and,
see if they could do better so. But no, instead
of one huge kingly paunch, they got twenty or
fifty with a round belly.
The whole theory has been out of a pros-
trate humanity, as out of a bank and magazine
- to draw the materials for culture to a class.
All a lie, and had the effect of a lie. Take re-
ligion out, and make religion separate. Still a
lie and ruin. T is all experimenting on nature.
Whenever there is a wrong, the response is
pain. The rowdy eyes that glare on you from
the mob say plainly that they feel that you are
doing them to death; you, you, have got the
me
natur


320
JOURNAL
[AGE 49
chain somewhere round their limbs, and, though
they know not how,— War, internecine war, to
the knife, is between us and you. Your six per
cent is as deadly a weapon as the old knife and
tomahawk.
In the old Egyptian, and in the middle age
architecture, he sees only “cost to the con-
stituency,” prodigious toil of prostrate human-
ity. In the Greek alone, beauty.
His idea of beauty is, (1) the true prophet
of function, and, just as far as function is pre-
paring, beauty will appear; then, (2) in action,
the preserved function, the whole is resolved,
into (3) character, the record of function. But
everything of beauty for beauty's sake is em-
bellishment, non-functional embellishment: that
is false, childless, and moribund.
He complains of England, that it never did
or can look at Art otherwise than as a com-
modity it can buy. Of England, he thinks ill,
- its tactics is to live au jour à la journée,-
perpetual makeshifts.
Sa
(From DO)
August.
Our four powerful men in the virtuous class
in this country are Horace Greeley, Theodore


1852] ENGLISH RELIGION 321
Parker, Henry Ward Beecher, and Horace
Mann. We have our three of four Horatii,
Horace Greeley, Horace Mann, Horace Bush-
nell, Horatio Greenough.
The English nation never flowered into their
own religion, but borrowed this Hebraism.
They don't know where he got it, but [the]
King set it finely into them and they are as
happy as [sentence unfinished]. English tran-
sitional; Greek, Oriental, full of fate.
I find that the Americans have no passions,
they have appetites.
Poetry is the only verity. Wordsworth said
of his Ode it was poetry, but he did not know
it was the only truth.
Poet sees the stars, because he makes them.
Perception makes. We can only see what we
make, all our desires are procreant. Perception
has a destiny. I notice that all poetry comes, or
all becomes poetry, when we look from within
and are using all as if the mind made it.
0
C
It is cheap and easy to destroy. There is not
a joyful boy or an innocent girl, buoyant with


322
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
fine purposes of duty, in all this street of rosy
faces, but a cynic can dull and dishearten.'...
(From GO)
In Sir Philip Sidney's time, it was held as
great a disgrace for a young gentleman to be
seen riding in the streets in a coach as it would
now to be seen in a petticoat.— AUBREY, iii, 554.
Modern criticism is plainly coming to look
on literature and arts as parts of history, that is,
as growths. But Hume looked steadily at the
chronicle of the reigning family, and called it the
History of England: did not look at the British
mythology, poetry, philosophy; did not see
what was agreeable to the British mind, and
what was disgusting to it.
But now calico has come to be an element
of English history, calico; when the elder Peel
spoke in Parliament they considered, this man
employs 15,000 men, and pays £40,000 to the
excise, on printed goods. The life of Peel con-
tains very appropriately, in the first pages, a
picture of the spinning-jenny, as a life of a Plan-
tagenet would a battleaxe, or Downing's, a
loaded pear tree.
i The whole passage is printed in “Success” (Society and
Solitude, pp. 310, 311).


1852) PEDANTRY. COURTESY 323
In Peel's life the trait is dulness, and the re-
sult is that England resolves itself best nowa-
days into a dull man. Good man, rich man,
creditable speaker, well - educated, — all these
indispensable, but no genius. I believe, a dou-
ble-first at Oxford ?
“ Aliens in language, religion, and blood,"
was Lord Lyndhurst's unfortunate phrase con-
cerning the Irish, which made the strength of
the Repeal Association.
Pedantry. Don't ride because Montaigne
rode; nor fish because Walton fished; nor build
because Ward told you how fine it was; nor col-
lect books after reading Dibdin, nor coins and
antiques after Winckelmann, nor let your gar-
dening grow from Evelyn's Acetaria.'
Let your elevation make you courteous, else
your courtesy is paint and varnish. The Demo-
crats are good-humoured; the Whigs are angry;
because the Democrat has really the safeand broad
ground. Let your zeal for freedom proceed from
grounds of character and insight, and you can
afford a courtesy which Webster cannot afford.
I Acetaria, or Discourse on Sallets, Miscellaneous Writings.


324
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
CU
Say nothing, and your greeting and shaking
of hands impress your occurrent with just your
weight and quality. But what you say, if artifi-
cially got up for the moment, weakens your
impression.
Let the superlative come from depth of
thought, and all is right. Material greatness
captivates the vulgar; and egotists live in ner-
vous exaggeration; as when a man sits under
the dentist, he fancies his teeth have some acres
of extent. But to show, in that thing he happens
to be doing, grandeur, by acting simply, newly,
and beautifully, and setting that act high in
men's imaginations, is the right superlative.
“Molière, the implacable enemy of all exag-
geration.” — Cousin.
Club. Of Thomas Hobbes, Aubrey says: “I
have heard him say that, in my lord's house in
Derbyshire, there was a good library, and books
enough for him, and his lordship stored the li-
brary with what books he thought fit to be
bought: but, he said, the want of good conver-
sation was a very great inconvenience, and that,
though he conceived he could order his think-
ing as well as another, yet he found a great de-


1852] THE LIE. ELIZABETHANS 325
fect. Methinks, in the country, in long time,
for want of good conversation, one's understand-
ing and invention grow mouldy.” Vol. iii,
p. 610.
If you take in a lie, you must take in all that
belongs to it. England takes in this neat na-
tional Church, and it glazes their eyes, and
bloats the flesh, and deforms and debilitates,
and translates the nervous young England so
far into false, magisterial old Polonius.
My Westminster man on Hakluyt thinks
the English of Elizabeth's time were truly rep-
resented in the noble portraits of Shakspeare.
The silence on Shakspeare of the same com-
munity that was so marked in its admiring re-
ception of Bacon is unexplained, except by the
English idolatry of rank.
[Here follow many interesting quotations
from Fuller's Wortbies of England.]
Truth of English names. Buckingham, from
Buccen (Saxon for beeches); Exeter, Ex castra ;
Wilton, Willey River; Ashwell, a fountain
among the trees.


326
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
Trade. “A lapidary to be rich must buy of
those who go to be executed, and sell to those
who go to be married.”
October.
Mr. S. S. Prentiss, of New Orleans, first
established a new doctrine in Western courts,
this, namely, that the party attacked, in a per-
sonal conflict, only knows how formidable the
assault is, and what extreme means he is justi-
fied in using. Also (if I rightly understood Mr.
Williams, of St. Louis), even before any blow
has been struck, and whilst the assaulting party
is only uttering injurious words.
English brag. I have found that Englishmen
have such a good opinion of England that the
ordinary phrases of postponing or disparaging
one's own things, in talking to a stranger, are
quite seriously mistaken by them for the inev-
itable praise of their country. In compliment
to them the other day, I spoke of Baring as a
great merchant; they answered, “O yes, Bates
was nobody”; and of Russell Sturgis, when I
spoke, they said, “What a lucky thing for him
the going to London,” etc. Use such words as
“not such as England,” “in our young coun-
try,” “poor country,” or the like, — 'tis all lost


1852) TEACHING BEHIND LAW 327
on them, they hear it all as homage to Eng-
land, and sympathize with you as really un-
happy about it.
The laws find their root in the credence of
the people. A two-foot stone wall guards my
fine pears and melons, all summer long, from
droves of hungry boys and poor men and
women. If one of these people should question
my right and pluck my fruit, I should set the
cumbrous machinery of the law slowly in mo-
tion, and by good luck of evidence and counsel,
I might get my right asserted, and that partic-
ular offender daunted. But if every passenger
should make the like attempt, though the law
were perfect, my house would not be worth liv-
ing in, nor my fields worth planting. It is the
education of these people into the ideas and
laws of property, and their loyalty, that makes
those stones in the low wall so virtuous.
October.
As sings the pine tree in the wind
So sings in the wind a sprig of the pine ;
The strength and joy of laughing France
Are shed into its wine.'
I « Nature in Leasts” (Poems, p. 297). This quatrain
evidently written in later.


328
[AGE 49
JOURNAL
Wealth and Labour. What earldoms of Gui-
enne, Champagne, Bourgogne, in a grapestone !
What populations, cities, states, arts, arms, col-
leges, patriotisms, wars, laws, treaties; what
haughty manners, tragedies, pride, and poetry !
What not less in a cotton-seed for Carolina; and
a sugar-cane for Mississippi ; tobacco for Vir-
ginia; rice-grain for Georgia; peachstone for
Jersey. In Massachusetts, every twelfth man is
a shoemaker; tea-plant for China; oranges for
Spain; coal for England; wheat for Canada.
What in the unctuous quadruped that drags his
larded sides like modest prosperity through the
city of Cincinnati !
Then the equalizations. Fate which appears
in statistics exalts races by a cellule in their brain,
that makes certain families miners, and others
hunters, and levies her own tariffs by making
dreadful boundaries of her own. To these fam-
ilies, forts and violence and hatred of foreign-
ers, inborn dislike of other families white, red,
and olive. Others need no weapon but the
sword of their climate, to drive off competitors.
Others have magnificent fields and watercourses,
and sunshine, but a limit in the limestone in the
waters, which kills every fourth man with ague,
cholera, or the stone.


1852] MASTERY. PANTHEIST 329
We tell our children and ourselves not to
regard other people's opinion, but to respect
themselves, and we send them to school or to
company, and they meet (as we have so often
met) some animosus infans, some companion
rammed with life, whose manners tyrannize over
them. They have no weapon of defence against
this weapon. A pound will weigh down an
ounce in spite of all precepts. A quality of a
different kind is yet a counterpoise.
са
“ Pantheism,” to be sure ! Do you suppose
the pale scholar who says, “ You do not know
causes, or the cause of causes, any better for often
repeating your stupid noun," deceives him-
self about his own powers ? Does not he live
in care, and suffer by trifles? ... Has he not
notes to pay ? — and is he likely to overesti-
mate his powers of getting johnnycake for his
breakfast, because he perceives that you use
words without meaning ?
ceiv
use
A Mr. Schaud, who printed an orthodox pam-
phlet lately at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, says that
“ Mr. Emerson is a pantheist 'by intuition,
rather than by argument.” So it seems our intui-
tions are mistaken. Who, then, can get us right?


330
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
Samuel Hoar
With beams December planets dart,
His cold eyes truth and conduct scanned ;
July was in his sunny heart,
October in his liberal hand.
The shoemakers and fishermen say in their
shops, “ Damn learning ! it spoils the boy; as
soon as he gets a little, he won't work.” “Yes,”
answers Lemuel, “but there is learning some-
where, and somebody will have it, and who has
it will have the power, and will rule you: know-
ledge is power. Why not, then, let your son
get it, as well as another?”
If I have a message to send, I prefer the tele-
graph to the wheelbarrow.
n
Certain doctrines appear to be offensive to
men, in every age, the metamorphosis or pass-
age of souls. Englishmen hate it. It vexes the
common sense : gross materialism not nearly so
much.
“Nescio quid, certe est quod me tibi tem-
peret astrum.". - PERSIUS.
1 Some star, I know nor which, surely softens me towards
thee.


1852]
· PLYMOUTH
331
October 25.
At Plymouth. I saw the beach under a fine
splashing surf. A boy told me he shot all kinds
of fowl there, and last night "old squaws,” but
there was such a sea on that he could not, half
the time, see the birds.
Each of the fishing boats is about seventy
tons and worth five or six thousand dollars, and
is manned by eight men. Seventy-four of these
vessels go out from Plymouth. Once they went
out, every man on his own hook, carrying his
own provisions, a little flour, pork, molasses
and rum, and living on fish, and having three
fourths of all he caught,-one fourth being for
the ship. Now they are paid from twelve to
thirty dollars a month, and manned every year
by young men coming down from New Hamp-
shire and Vermont for the green hands, and, for
the old ones, by men that make shoes all winter,
and want to recruit, by going to sea in the
spring.
[Here follow several pages which would seem
to be mostly notes of Horatio Greenough's
conversation with Mr. Emerson, of which only
a few sentences are here given.]
✓ In England, they will not let science be free,
sea


332
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
- not geology, without bringing its nose down
to their church.
The Puritans would not allow anything his-
trionic, but the light would come into their
square houses. The modern England has no-
thing else but vice, but the light has got ex-
cluded.
Obedience is worship. . .
As soon as a deviation for the sake of a va-
riety, for a luxurious variety, is allowed, it is
easy to see that the whole race of depravation
will be run. Therefore Greenough will not allow
so much as a supporter to a porch to be varied
by a parabola instead of a straight line.
The adherence of the Greeks to the osseous
fabric and to all the geometric necessities en-
abled them, as soon as plastic ornament was to
be attempted, to do it, and to carry into that
also geometric truth.
In the Elgin marbles, by representing a pro-
cession of horsemen, in which, though each part
is fixed, yet all the attitudes of the horse are
given, the one figure supplies the defects of the
other, and you have seen a horse put through all
his motions, so that motion is enjoyed and you
can almost see the dust. There is no surface
finish.


1852] SCHOOL GIRLS. POLITICS 333
The duties of man are to be measured by the
powers of the instrument.
Greenough would stop commerce, if he could;
would insulate the American, to stop the for-
eign influence, that denationalizes him.
He thought, the old artists taught each other,
made each other.
I suppose that genius always has humility in
the presence of genius,' but as Mrs. Lowell
said to me of her girls of fashion, “ those who
give themselves airs on no grounds whatever
cannot be taught.”
Fate. Politics. It is easy to see that what is
done in this country in state and in trade is the
result of the character and condition of the peo-
ple, and that the difference of the two parties,
Whig and Democrat, on the matter, is trifling;
one party pushing forward, and the other hold-
ing back, - but both irresistibly carried on, as
by the planet itself. It is the difference of two
i Here Mr. Emerson begins again. Mrs. Charles Russell
Lowell (Anna Jackson), a woman of nobility and refinement,
had a private school in Cambridge. She was mother of General
Charles Russell Lowell and Lieutenant James Lowell, both
killed in battle during the Civil War.


334
JOURNAL (AGE 49
runners in the same course, one of whom affects
to hold his head back, and the other affects to
throw his head forward, whilst both are at their
speed.
On European influence, we might treat the
evil of expensiveness. A man values himself on
what he can buy, and, if you have a house, he
buys two, three; if you have a horse, he buys
ten; dogs, deer, preserves, liveries; and will
not speak to you, because you have only one
horse. His expense is not his own, but a far-off
copy.' ...
The church is there for check of trade. But
on examination all the deacons, ministers, and
saints of this church are steering with all their
sermons and prayers in the direction of the
Trade. If the city says, “Freedom and no tax,"
they say so, and hunt up plenty of texts. But
if the city says, “Freedom is a humbug. We
prefer a strong government,” the pulpit says the
same, and finds a new set of applicable texts.
But presently Trade says,“ Slavery too has been
misunderstood: it is not so bad; nay, it is good;
on the whole, it is the best possible thing." The
i The rest of the passage is found in “ Fortune of the
Republic” (Miscellanies, p. 534).


S
01
over a
new
1852] TEXTS. WEBSTER'S DEATH 335
dear pulpit and deacons must turn over a new
leaf, and find a new string of texts, which they
are forward to do. And s- R- , and
0— D— , and M- S- , and Park
Street, and Andover, will get up the new march
of the Hypocrites to pudding for the occasion.
Giants — Napoleons, Cannings, Websters,
Kossuths, Burkes— are the inevitable patriots
until they too wane and their defects and gout
and palsy and money warp their politics.
e
Last Sunday I was at Plymouth on the beach,
and looked across the hazy water — whose spray
was blowing on to the hills and orchards — to
Marshfield. I supposed Webster must have
passed, as indeed he had died at three in the
morning. The sea, the rocks, the woods, gave
no sign that America and the world had lost the
completest man. Nature had not in our days,
or not since Napoleon, cut out such a master-
piece. He brought the strength of a savage into
the height of culture. He was a man in equilibrio;
a man within and without, the strong and per-
fect body of the first ages, with the civility and
thought of the last. “Os, oculosque Jovi par.”
And what he brought, he kept. Cities had not
hurt him; he held undiminished the power and
wer


336
[Age 49
JOURNAL
terror of his strength, the majesty of his de-
meanour.
He had a counsel in his breast. He was a
statesman, and not the semblance of one. Most
of our statesmen are in their places by luck and
vulpine skill, not by any fitness. Webster was
there for cause: the reality; the final person, who
had to answer the questions of all the fainéants,
and who had an answer.
But alas ! he was the victim of his ambition;
to please the South betrayed the North, and was
thrown out by both.
Webster has been the teacher of the legis-
lators of the country in style and eloquence.
Webster, Clay, Everett were imitable models,
and have been chosen respectively by each
young adventurer according to his own quality.
We are under great obligations to Webster for
raising the tone of popular addresses out of rant
and out of declamation to history and good sense.
Mr. Foster' says that N. Borden, of Fall
River, told him, that Mr. Fowler quoted
1 Daniel Foster, for a short time a preacher in the Uni-
versalist Church in Concord, was a brave anti-slavery speaker
who had suffered for his convictions. The Editors have heard
that he was captain of a company during the Civil War.


1852] ENGLAND'S LACK. SLAVE 337
J. C. Calhoun as saying, that “Mr. Webster's
Seventh of March Speech was perfectly satis-
factory, only that it was too late.” Mr. Calhoun
had taken the Liberator for eighteen years.
England cannot receive Oken, but nibbles,
gnaws, accommodates, by Owen and Chambers;
cannot receive Goethe's botany; cannot receive
geology without bringing down its nose to their
church. What mean criticism they brought to
bear on Goethe in Edinburgh Review and
Blackwood; could not heartily receive Words-
worth or Coleridge; England has no music;
England has no art, but buys for pride ; England
cannot make a pattern for a pitcher.
Previous Question. “ Now you may just as
well know what the previous question’ means.
It is, that the whole House says, 'All these
things are very true, and we have no answer to
make, and therefore the less that's said about
the matter the better.'” – MR. CREEVEY.
Abolition. The argument of the slave-holder
is one and simple: he pleads Fate; here is an
inferior race requiring wardship, - it is senti-
mentality to deny it. The argument of the


338
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
'CO
Abolitionist is, It is inhuman to treat a man
thus.
Then, for the Fugitive Slave Bill, we say:
I do not wish to hold, nor to help you to hold
them. If you cannot keep them without my
help, let them go.
Such provisions as you find in the Consti-
tution for your behoof, make the most of. You
could not recover a load of hay, a barrel of po-
tatoes, by such law. The Constitution has ex-
pressly guaranteed your barrel of potatoes. No,
the Courts would say, it has not named them.
If it especially and signally wished by compro-
mise to protect your potato crop, it would have
said so. Laws are to be strictly interpreted, and
laws of all things are understood to say exactly
what they mean. But how, then, can you
maintain such an incredible and damnable pre-
tension as to steal a man on these loose innuen-
does of the law that would not allow you to
steal his shoes? How, but that all our North-
ern Judges have made a cowardly interpretation
of the law, in favor of the crime, and not of
the right. The leaning should be, should it
not? to the right against the crime. The leaning
has been invariably against the slave for the
master.


1852] THOUGHT. OMENS 339
But Thoreau remarks that the cause of Free-
dom advances, for all the able debaters now are
freesoilers, Sumner, Mann, Giddings, Hale,
Seward, Burlingame.
The power of generalizing differences men,
and it shows the rudeness of our Metaphysics,
that this is not down in the books. The num-
ber of successive saltations this nimble thought
can make measures the difference between the
highest and the lowest of mankind.
To write a history of Massachusetts, I con-
fess, is not inviting to an expansive thinker. i ..
Since, from 1790 to 1820, there was not a book,
a speech, a conversation, or a thought, in the
State. About 1820, the Channing, Webster, and
Everett era begun, and we have been bookish
and poetical and cogitative since.
Edwards on the Will was printed in 1754.
Omen and coincidence only show the sym-
metry or rhythmical structure of the man; just
as his eye and hand work exactly together, and,
to hit the mark with a stone, he has only to fas-
ten his eye firmly on the mark, and his arm
will swing true;—so the main ambition and


340
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
genius being bestowed in one direction, many
lesser spirits and involuntary aids within his
sphere will follow.
I do not think the fame of Pitt very honour-
able to English mind; neither Pitt nor Peel.
Pitt is a mediocre man, is only explained
by the commanding superiority which a good
debater in a town meeting has, and there is not
a quotable phrase or word from him, or measure.
Nothing for man. Mere parliamentary plausi-
bility and dexterity, and the right external con-
ditions, namely, of name, birth, breeding, and
relation to persons and parties. Pitt is nothing
without his victory. Burke, on the other side, who
had no victory, and nothing but defeat and dis-
paragement, is an ornament of the human race;
and Fox had essential manliness. His speeches
show a man, brave, generous, and sufficient,
always on the right side.
Virility. Agassiz. The Democrats carry the
country, because they have more virility : just
as certain of my neighbors rule our little town,
quite legitimately, by having more courage and
animal force than those whom they overbear. It
is a kind of victory like that of gravitation over


1852] AGASSIZ. INVENTORS : 341
all upraised bodies, sure, though it lie in wait for
ages for them.
I saw in the cars a broad-featured, unctuous
man, fat and plenteous as some successful poli-
tician, and pretty soon divined it must be the
foreign Professor, who has had so marked a
success in all our scientific and social circles,
having established unquestionable leadership
in them all; — and it was Agassiz.
Uriah Boyden' obtains, by his hydraulic in-
ventions, ninety-six per cent of the power of a
waterfall. The French had only obtained seventy
per cent, the English, before that, only sixty.
Lowell mills at one time paid him thirty thou-
sand dollars for the use of his turbines. America
exceeds all nations in hydraulic improvements.
Ingenuity against cheap labor is our reliance.
America lives by its wits. Englishman cannot
travel out of his road. Erastus B. Bigelow is
paid by Crossley of Halifax, England, four (?)
cents on every yard of carpet woven on his
looms and in this country Clinton Company
draws one cent, and Bigelow three cents on every
yard woven on his looms throughout America.
1 The introducer of the turbine wheel into the United
States, with improvements.
S


342
JOURNAL. (AGE 49
There is no literature - none in England,
none in America — which serves us. The “Dif-
fusion” literature describes the habits of kanga-
roos, and the English writes novels of society,
and plenty of critical journals; but who gives
high counsels to these twin nations? Who points
their duties, admonishes, animates, and holds
them up to their highest aim? Wordsworth
spoke, Milton-like, to their soul. Carlyle by
jerks and screams scolded, and sneered. But
what high, equal, calm soul held them to their
aim?
We entreat you not to believe that anything
is yet attained. All is in the gristle and prepa-
ration. Your commerce is but a costly comfort,
- ease of life, - no more; it belts the world for
raisins, and oranges, and oil and wine, and gums,
and drugs, and hides, and silk; but what for
thought ? and what for humanity? Out of five
hundred ships, perhaps Herschel, or a botanist,
or a philologist buys or begs a cheap charitable
passage in one, which goes for quite other de-
signs, and he is reckoned a loafer, perhaps a
Jonah.
And, as we do not want a sentimental or King
René era, perhaps it is safest so. But is science
and the heart always to be merely endured, and
ed
OI


1852] IDEALS FOR NATIONS 343
tolerated and never to walk to the quarterdeck
and take the command? Are the politics better?
And are these legislatures convened, with the
upheaving of all the peace of nations, in the
canvass and fury of elections, to any noble, hu-
mane purpose? No, but to the most frivolous
and selfish and paltry.
Will not nations one day soberly insist that
justice shall be done, — justice, which satisfies
everybody, - and that grave and adequate ends
be prosecuted by their money and their talent?
Are we always to be the victims of the mean-
est of mankind, who kill off as sentimental and
visionary every generous and just design?
England never stands for the cause of free-
dom on the Continent, but always for her trade.
... Few and poor chances for European eman-
cipation : the disarming, the army, and the army
of office-holders are the triple wall of monarchy.
Then consider that the people don't want lib-
erty, - they want bread; and, though republic
canism would give them more bread after a
year or two, it would not until then, and they
want bread every day. Louis Napoleon says,
“I will give you work,” and they believed him.
In America, we hold out the same bribe,“ roast
beef, and two dollars a day.” And our people


344
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
will not go for liberty of other people, no, nor
for their own, but for annexation of territory, or
a tariff, or whatever promises new chances for
young men, more money to men, of business.
In either country, they want great men, and
the cause of right can only succeed against all
this gravitation or materialism by means of im-
mense personalities. But Webster, Calhoun,
Clay, Benton are not found to be philanthro-
pists, but attorneys of great and gross interests.
November.
The Saxons good combiners; and, though
an idealist always prefers to trace a discovery or
a success home to one mind, yet we must ac-
quiesce in Nineteenth Century civilization, and
accept the age of combined working, or joint-
stock companies. I liked to hear that Mr.
Samuel Lawrence invented the Bay State shawl,
which saved the so-called mills when all other
manufacturing companies failed. But no, Mr.
Lawrence gave the grand project — we must
make a shawl — and even brought a pattern
shawl to his designer. The designer, named Ed-
ward Everett, not of Cambridge, but of Lowell,
prepared designs. They had an excellent dyer,
who could give them fast colors and rich. They


1852) NATIONS CULMINATE 345
had looms, which they could and did adapt to
this fabric. But the twisting the fringes would
cost thirty cents a shawl :- 'tis too much. So
Mr. — invented a machine to twist fringes;
and putting all these advantages together, they
succeeded.
Sphinx. 'Tis said that the age ends with the
poet or successful man who knots up into him-
self the genius or idea of his nation; and that
when the Jews have at last flowered perfectly
into Jesus, there is the end of the nation. When
Greece is complete in Plato, Phidias, Pericles,
the race is spent and rapidly takes itself away.
When Rome has arrived at Cæsar and Cicero,
it has no more that it can do, and retreats.
When Italy has got out Dante, all the rest will
be rubbish. So that we ought rather to be thank-
ful that our hero or poet does not hasten to be
born in America, but still allows us others to
live a little and warm ourselves at the fire of the
sun, for, when he comes, we others must pack
our petty trunks and be gone.
But I say Saxondom is tough and many-
headed, and does not so readily admit of absorp-
tion and being sucked and vampyrized by a
Representative as fluider races. For have not


346
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
the English stood Chaucer? stood Shakspeare?
and Milton? and Newton? and survived unto
this day with more diffusion of ability, with a
larger number of able gentlemen in all depart-
ments of work than any nation ever had? Sam
Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Nelson, Wel-
lington had high abilities, and even Byron and
Scott showed vivacity. They made these mas-
culine locomotives and spinning-mules; or will
you say that the old poets were Norman and
Catholic; and that Watt, Fulton, Arkwright,
Stephenson, Brunel, Chadwick, and Paxton were
the flowering of the Saxon section of this double-
headed race?
ere
England and America. The English and
the Americans cant beyond all other nations.
The French relinquish all that nonsense to
them.
“ The only way to deal with a humbugger is
to humbug him.” — Moore's Diary.
It is the distinction of Uncle Tom's Cabin
that it is read equally in the parlour and the
kitchen and the nursery of every house. What
the lady read in the drawing-room in a few hours
is retailed to her in the kitchen by the cook and


1852] NAPOLEON III. BOUCHER 347
the chambermaid, week by week; they master
one scene and character after another.'
A crown once worn cleareth all defects of
title. Napoleon III is bent on his pleasures, and
scorneth the opinion of the people. The for-
mula of society is, that you shall respect the
decencies; but he knows they respect self-will
more than they do decencies, and he outrages
these last. The Compiègne story gives reality,
at least, to this fellow, and really brings him
nearer to Roman and Plutarchian characters.
He has taste for realities.
m
Here follow many anecdotes taken from
Arsène Houssaye, of which but a few are here
given.]
Rivarol said, “This Mirabeau is capable of
anything for money, —even of a good action.”
Boucher found Raphael insipid, Michel An-
gelo an artist of deformity, and Nature want-
ing in harmony and attractiveness, — “ too
green, badly managed as to light.” He threw
the Academy into the shade, he resigned him-
i Printed in “ Success,” but the book and authoress are
not named there. (Society and Solitude, p. 286.)


348
JOURNAL (AGE 49
self to marriage, though he said, “marriage was
not habitual to him.”
“If the soul is immortal,” Lantara must have
thought,“ mine cannot run any risk of being in
a worse place. The taverns and landscapes of
the other world will be curious to examine."
Fontenelle said, “ There are three things in
the world which I have loved very much, with-
out knowing anything about them, music, paint-
ing, and women.”
December (?).
You cannot well know the genius, unless you
also know the fool of the family. For the last
possesses the dregs of that very quality, by the
elixir of which the first achieved his success.
Many successes are won by help of insanities.
Politicians note this. I remember Tracy told
me he had known men obtain a great career in
politics by some foible or insanity they had.
And Governor Reynolds, of Illinois, said to
me that, if a man knew anything, he would go
hide his head in a corner : but, as he does not,
he blusters about, and thinks he can move the
world, and really manages to do wonders.'
1 The substance of the two last sentences is used in Eng-
lish Traits (p. 148), but without the names.


1852] ENGLAND'S MEASURE 349
Feats. Sydney Smith really did the feat of
causing the State of Pennsylvania to pay its
bonds. He flooded the State with his ridicule.
Nobody could dodge it. His letters were re-
printed all over the state. The jokes were in
everybody's mouth. The stiffest repudiators
laughed till they split, and, at last, no man dared
to go to the legislature until he was prepared to
provide for the payment.
We must measure England, not by its cen-
sus or money, but by its ability to stand the
glance of a wise man, such as passes by perhaps
only once in two ages. In one age, it might have
satisfied Lycurgus; in another age, Franklin.
Would it at any time have contented Socrates ?
No; but the right measures are the men it actu-
ally yielded. Roger Bacon was its monk, sump-
tuous as the monastic piles that grew with him:
but he was born in them, as the weevil is born
in the wheat, to destroy them, and bring in a
higher era. Wykeham was an English Pericles.
Chaucer was the fruit of the soil. Nothing more
genuine in flavor, more sound in health, did it
ever bear. The note of each bird is not more
proper to its kind than the genius of Chaucer
is the right music of Britain. Could its church


350
JOURNAL (AGE 49
stand the glances of the realist? Could its science
have satisfied him with some admirable benefit?
Did they then, as now, blunder into the ad-
mirable inventions? Could the social arts and
customs have invited him to leave his solitude
without self-reproach? Were the Californias of
that age found by fugitives or by geologists ?
There was never anything more excellent came
from a human brain than the plays of Shak-
speare; bating only that they were plays. The
Greek has a real advantage of them, in the de-
gree in which his dramas had a religious office.
Could the priest look him in the face without
blenching? Oh, yes, the fagot was lighted. Yes,
the priest translated the Vulgate and translated
the sanctities of old hagiology into English vir-
tues on English ground. George Fox and An-
thony Parsons and John Bunyan and Prynne.
0
Dr. Kirkland and Professor Brazer' mutually
resolved one day to break off smoking for six
months. Soon after they met at a dinner party
at Colonel P.'s, where all the appointments were
excellent. Cigars were offered, and Brazer de-
1 Respectively the President of Harvard College, 1810-
1828, and the Latin Professor, and later, Overseer.


1852]
THE CLERGY. FATE
351
clined them. Dr. Kirkland lighted one, and af-
ter smoking with much content for a time, he
said to nobody in particular, as he puffed away
the smoke, “ It is doubtful whether we show
more want of self-control in breaking good
resolutions, or self-conceit in keeping them.”
Dr. Channing asked Dr. Hare, of Philadel-
phia, why he did not go to church. “Because,”
answered the Doctor, “the ministers take too
much for granted.”
Philadelphia boys. Mr. William Wistar met
a youth at a dinner party, who took a cigar.
“ How old are you?” said Mr. W. “Sixteen
years.” “You are at school, are you not?” “I
am at the university.” “You are just about as
old as my boy; - do you know him?” “Yes,”
answered the youth, “and I am damned glad
to find the breed has improved.”
Fate. “The classes and the races too weak
to master the new conditions of life must give
way.”. – Karl Marx.
į See Mr. Emerson's use of this in the Poems (Appendix,
P. 357).
With the key of the secret he marches faster
From strength to strength, and for night brings day;
While classes or tribes too weak to master
The flowing conditions of life give way.


352
JOURNAL (AGE 49
Walk with Ellery to Lincoln. Benzoin lau-
rus, rich, beautiful shrub on this dried-up coun-
try ; parti-coloured warbler. Ellery laughed at
Nuttall's description of birds, “ On the top of
a high tree the bird pours all day the lays of
affection,” etc. Affection! Why, what is it? A
few feathers, with a hole at one end, and a point
at the other, and a pair of wings : affection!
why, just as much affection as there is in that
lump of peat. Thoreau at home; why, he has
got to maximize the minimum; that will take
him some days.
We went to Bear Hill and had a fine outlook.
Descending, Ellery got sight of some labourers
in the field below. “Look at them,” he said,
" those four! four demoniacs scratching in their
cell of pain ! Live for the hour. Just as much
as any man has done, or laid up, in any way,
unfits him for conversation. He has done some-
thing, makes him good for boys, but spoils him
for the hour. That's the good of Thoreau, that
he puts his whole sublunary capital into the last
quarter of an hour; carries his whole stock
under his arm.”
At home, I found Henry himself, who com-
plained of Clough or somebody that he or they
recited to every one at table the paragraph just


1852] TRUE BARD. J. Q. ADAMS 353
read by him and by them in the last newspaper
and studiously avoided everything private. I
should think he was complaining of one H.D.T.
(From DO)
The Countess of Pembroke“ had forecast and
aftercast,” said Bishop Rainbow.
The high poetry is the subduing men to order
and virtue. He is the right Orpheus who writes
his poetry not with syllables but with men; and
Shakspeare's poetry must suffer that deduction
that it is an exhibition and amusement, and is
not expected to be eaten and drunk as the bread
of life by the people. But Ossian's and Tali-
essin's and Regnar's and Isaiah's is.
John Quincy Adams was asked the results of
his experience for the preservation of his health
and faculties in old age. He said he owed every-
thing to three rules, — (1) Regularity; (2) Regu-
larity; (3) Regularity.
English University men are thoroughbred
scholars, full readers, by no means idlers : hy-
percritical, no error can pass under their notice.
Learning — accurate, armed good sense — is


354
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
cheap. Hence the excellence of their paragraphs,
leaders, and review articles, and the no-wonder
that follows.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Carlyle,
and Macaulay cannot be matched in America.
Judge of the splendor of a nation by the insig-
nificance of great individuals in it; and see what
culture [appears in] the article on architecture
in North British (Edinburgh) Review and the
Garbett book.
ice
“The heavy blue chain (of the sea) didst
thou, O just man, endure.”—Taliessin.
LIESSIN.
At St. Louis they say that there is no differ-
ence between a boy and a man. As soon as a
boy is “that high,” high as the table, he con-
tradicts his father. At Oxford they lock up the
young men every night.
AUTHORS OR Books QUOTED OR REFERRED TO
IN JOURNAL FOR 1852
Lycurgus; Æsop; Æschylus ; Euripides ;
Socrates;
Ovid; Martial, Epigrams; Persius, Satires;
Tacitus, Germania ; Plotinus; Porphyry; Clau-


sor
1852)
READING
355
dian; Sidonius Apollinaris, apud Kemble, Saxons
in England;
Ossian; Taliessin, apud Davies; Roger Ba-
con; Saadi;
Cervantes; Edward, Lord Herbert of Cher-
bury; Izaak Walton; Descartes; William Prynne;
Madeleine de Scudéry; Thomas Fuller, Wortbies
of England;
Evelyn, Acetaria, or Discourse on Sallets; An-
thony Parsons; George Fox; John Bunyan;
Aubrey;
Newton; Fontenelle; Cowper;
Franklin; Jonathan Edwards, On the Will;
Hume; Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations ; Nie-
buhr; Jacobi ; Bossu, Nouveaux voyages dans
l'Amérique septentrionale;
Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe; Ri-
varol, Grétry, Florian, apud Houssaye; Burns;
William Cobbett; Canning, The Rovers; Syd-
ney Smith; John Wilson; Fourier;
Oersted, Mechanical Physics; Oken; Thomas
Moore, Diary; Webster; Levi Woodbury;
Joshua R. Giddings; Theophilus Parsons; Hor-
ace Mann; Sir Robert Peel; Hayden; Michelet;
Cousin; Balzac, Théorie de la démarche; Alcott;
Rufus Choate;
Macaulay; Robert Chambers, Vestiges of


356
JOURNAL [Age 49
Creation ; Richard Owen; Horace Bushnell;
W. H. Seward; Kossuth; General Daumas
(from Abd-el-Kader), Les Chevaux du Sabara;
Disraeli;
John P. Hale; J. S. Mill; Johnston, England
as it Is; John M. Kemble, Saxons' in England;
Benjamin Thorpe, Northern Mythology; Knox,
Artistic Anatomy; Tennyson; Milnes;
Margaret Fuller; Henry James ; Horace
Greeley; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's
Cabin ; Sylvester Judd; Jones Very; Arsène
Houssaye, Histoire de la peinture flamande et
bollandaise; Charlotte Brontë, Villette ; Tho-
reau ; W. E. Channing;
A. H. Clough; Delia S. Bacon ; Karl Marx;
Smith, The Divine Drama of Civilization; Anson
S. Burlingame; Charles Astor Bristed, Three
Years in an English University.


JOURNAL
WESTERN LECTURES
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
NEW YORK
LENOX AND CAPE COD
HORATIO GREENOUGH'S DEATH
NOTES ON ENGLISH
AND FRENCH
MADAM EMERSON'S DEATH





RNAL XLIV
1853
(From Journals VS, DO, and HO)
[DURING the first week in January Mr. Emer-
son gave a course on the Conduct of Life before
the Mercantile Library Association in New
York, then lectured in the leading cities of Ohio
and Illinois, and gave a course in St. Louis.
“The Anglo-American” was one of the lectures.
The rest of January was occupied with lectures
in Philadelphia and in western towns ; — see
an amusing account of these experiences in his
letter to Carlyle (Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 218).]
(From VS)
“Puisque je suis laid, je veux être bien hardi,” said
Duguesclin.
January.
English Poetry. Yet it is fair (is it not?) to
say that the ideal of any people is in their best
writers, sculptors, painters, and builders, in their
greatest heroes and creators in any and every
kind. In Hamlet, in Othello, in Coriolanus, in


360
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
Troilus and Cressida, we shall pick up the
scattered bones of the English Osiris, as they
haunted the mind of the greatest poet of the
world; and he was English. But we pause ex-
pectant before the genius of Shakspeare as if
his biography were not yet written and cannot
be written until the problem of the whole Eng-
lish race is solved.
The English genius never parts with its ma-
terialistic tendency, and even in its inspirations
is materialistic. Milton, Shakspeare, Chaucer,
Spenser, Herbert, who have carried it to its
greatest height, are bound to satisfy the senses
and the understanding, as well as the Reason.
If the question is asked whether the English
repudiate thought, we remember there is always
a minority in England who entertain whatever
speculations the highest muse has attempted.
No brain has dallied with finer imaginings than
Shakspeare (yet with mathematical accuracy), no
richer thoughted man than Bacon, no holier
than Milton or Herbert. We have found Eng-
lish for Behmen,—and English for Swedenborg
and readers for both.
Yet when I think of the robust Greek mytho-
logy and what a cosmic imagination — I wish to
say astronomic imagination—they had, a power,


1853] GREEK FABLE. POETRY 361
I mean, of expressing in graceful fable the laws
of the world, so that the mythology is beautiful
poetry on one side, at any moment convertible
into severe science on the other, - then, the
English verse looks poor and purposeless, as if
written for hire, and not obeying the grandeur
of Ideas.
I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of
the vast in the Welsh and Bardic fragments of
Taliessin and his school, than in a good many
volumes of British Classics.
It is curious that Thomas Taylor, the Pla-
tonist, is really a better man of imagination, a
better poet, than any writer between Milton and
Wordsworth. He was a poet with a poet's life
and aims.
For poetry, Ossian had superiorities over
Dryden and Pope, but though seizing the po-
etry of storms and of the rude British landscape
and the sentiment as they had never seen it,
yet wanting every other gift, wanting their know-
ledge of the world, their understanding, their
wit, their literature, he made no figure but a
ridiculous one in the hands of men of letters.
Results. If, at this moment, a question is
asked, who answers it? England. If telegraphs,


362
JOURNAL (AGE 49
if trade, if geology, if mesmeric rappings, if sea-
serpents, if Paine's light, if Ericsson's caloric
engine, if the balloon, if a Pauper System, if
gold and silver currency must have their ques-
tion answered, which way do men look, – to
Paris, to New York, or to London, for the final
reply? Where is Faraday? Where is Owen?
Where is Hume? Where is Stephenson? and
Brunel, and Wheatstone, and Gray, and Ricardo,
and Paxton?. Where are the Barings and Roths-
child?
Stand by your order. We must sympathize,
over all our cavils at their faults or vices, with
Jeffrey, with Macaulay, with Dickens, and the
whole class of wits. We understand their means
and success; they are the same with our own.
Their cause is ours: and, from Plato, Shakspeare,
and Bacon, down to the last writer of a leader
in the London Times, whenever the intellect
tells on the public and is recognized as a power
in the world, all the scholars in the world share
the benefit.
It is a bitter satire on our social order, just at
present, ... for example the plight of Mr. Al-
cott, the most refined and the most advanced


1853] PROBLEM OF ALCOTT 363
soul we have had in New England, who makes
all other souls appear slow and cheap and me-
chanical; a man of such a courtesy and great-
ness, that (in conversation) all others, even the
intellectual, seem sharp and fighting for victory,
and angry; – he has the unalterable sweetness
of a muse, - yet because he cannot earn money
by his pen or his talk, or by school-keeping or
book-keeping or editing or any kind of mean-
ness, — nay, for this very cause, that he is ahead
of his contemporaries, – is higher than they, .
- and keeps himself out of the shop-conde-
scensions and smug arts which they stoop to,
or, unhappily, need not stoop to, but find them-
selves, as it were, born to,—therefore, it is the
unanimous opinion of New England judges that
this man must die, — we shall all hear of his
death with pleasure, and feel relieved that his
board and clothes are saved! We do not ad-
judge him to hemlock, or to garroting, — we
are much too hypocritical for that, - but we
not the less surely doom him, by refusing to
protect against this doom, or combine to save
him, and to set him on employments fit for him
and salutary to the State, or to the Senate of
fine Souls, which is the heart of the state.
In Boston is no company for a fine wit.


364 JOURNAL [Age 49
There is a certain poor-smell in all the streets,
in Beacon Street and Park and Mt. Vernon, as
well as in the lawyers' offices, and the wharves,
the same meanness and sterility, and leave-all-
bope-bebind, as one finds in a boot manufactur-
er's premises, or a bonnet-factory; vamps, paste-
board, millinette, and an eye to profit.
The want of elevation, the absence of ideas,
the sovereignty of the abdomen, reduces all to
the same poorness. One fancies that in the
houses of the rich, as the temptation to ser-
vility is removed, there may chance to be gen-
erosity and elevation; but no; we send them
to Congress, and they originate nothing and,
on whatever question, they instantly exhibit
the vulgarity of the lowest populace, an ab-
sence of all perception and natural equity.
They have no opinions, and cringe to their
own attorney, when he tells the opinion of the
Insurance offices.
But you can never have high aristocracy,
without real elevation of ideas somewhere; other-
wise, as in Boston, it turns out punk and cheat
at last.
I wrote that England goes for trade, not for
liberty:- goes against Hungary, against Schles-
wig-Holstein, against French Republic.
e


1853] LECTURES. STATESMEN 365
Yes, that is the stern Edict of Providence,
that liberty shall be no hasty fruit.'...
Certainly I go for culture, and not for mul-
titudes. ...
: 'Tis very costly this thinking for the market
in books or lectures : as soon as any one turns
the conversation on my “Representative Men,”
for instance, I am instantly sensible that there
is nothing there for conversation, that the argu-
ment is all pinched and illiberal and popular.
Only what is private, and yours, and essential,
should ever be printed or spoken. I will buy the
suppressed part of the author's mind, — you are
welcome to all he published.
England yields men and opportunities of gran-
deur. The tone of Napoleons, of Charlemagne,
of Charles V, of absolute power reaching to in-
terests of vast masses of men, when it falls into
the hands of good sense and good will, is emi-
nently humane. And the English system, which
forces great merit up into great place, and re-
lieves it of all nonsense on the way, by searching
1 The rest of the passage is printed in « The Fugitive
Slave Law” delivered the next year in New York on the
7th of March.


366
JOURNAL (AGE 49
school of parliament and parties and armed in-
terests that will not be trified with, when it meets
with a good natural statesman, enables him eas-
ily to take this right royal tone. Both the Pitts
were of an imperial nature ; Fox and Burke had
severally great abilities. Mr. Canning is on the
whole the best example of manly attitude, or of
a nearly absolute power wielded by hands able
to hold it.
Peel, again, of heavy parts, by slow growth
and with the mediocrity of a dull boy reached
at last a certain grandeur by honesty, courage,
and industry. And Wellington by his native sa-
gacity, and the unwearied application of his logic
alike to large and small things, and his veracity
and honour, came to be the pillar on which for
the time English institutions rested.
[Here follow quotations from Canning and
Lord Brougham and from Napoleon.]
The sea-serpent may have an instinct to re-
tire into the depths of the sea when about to die,
and so leave no bones on the shore for natural-
ists. The sea-serpent is afraid of Mr. Owen;
but his heart sunk within him when, at last, he
heard that Barnum was born.


1853] OLD POEMS. SHAKSPEARE 367
The Saxon and Norse poetry are warm with
the faith and sentiment of the time; and the
verbs are solid as church-walls. The religion, to
be sure, wrote the Chronicles, but the people be-
lieved the religion, which was alive, and served
them, freed the serf, defended women, and al-
lowed a mediation and poor-man's-friend in the
ecclesiastic power. The poetry is imaginative,
and the churches are great and poetic. Look at
theirs, and look at ours.
“God himself cannot procure good for the
wicked.” — Welsh Triad, DAVIES.
Troilus and Cressida contains many of those
sentences which have procured a fame for Shaks-
peare quite independent of his dramatic genius :
and which, in their clear and disengaged sen-
tences, their universal aptness, imply the widest
knowledge of men, and one would say such ex-
perience and such easy command as only courts
and intimate knowledge of affairs and habits of
command could bestow. It requires the habits
of Leicester and Essex, of Burleigh and Buck-
ingham, to speak the expressed essence of life in
so large and so easy a phrase.


368
(AGE 49
JOURNAL
It is Wellington's merit that he feels his per-
sonal superiority from the first; sees good-hu-
mouredly and patiently all the attacks and even
the victories of the enemy, in the firm assurance,
that the enemy proceeds on a lower principle
than himself. He sees the French military sci-
ence to be vain and ostentatious, sees their ob-
ject to be egotistic, and therefore their whole
tactic unsteady and heartless, and sure to fall into
some error somewhere, by which they will cer-
tainly become his prey.
Wellington traces his success at Assaye to
his perception, in spite of the assertions of his
guides, that, where two towns lay exactly oppo-
site each other, on a river, there must be a ferry
or a ford, probably the ford. He pushed for the
river, and found one, and marched his army
across.
[February?]
The merit claimed for the Anglican Church
is, that if you let it alone, it will let you alone.
It moves through a Zodiack of feasts, and has
dearly coupled itself with the almanac.
At Candlemas Day
Half your roots and half your hay.
Hence its strength in the agricultural districts.


. 1853] ANGLICANS. NORTH SEA 369
; “The Established Clergy have long been as
they contrive to be the principal bulwark against
barbarism, and the link which unites the seques-
tered peasants with the intellectual advancement
of the age.” — WORDSWORTH.
The power of the Established Church con-
sists in its disconnexion from all other coun-
tries.
'Tis said that the discovery of Milton's Ari-
anism in this rigid generation has already im-
paired the sale of Paradise Lost — HALLAM.
: “This sea is so slow that it is almost im-
moveable, and thought of many to be the
bounds which compass in the whole world,
because the sun continueth so clear and bright
from the setting unto the rising, that it darken-
eth the stars: and some are persuaded that the
sound of the sun is there heard, as he riseth out
of the sea, and that the beams of his head are
there seen ; as also, many shapes of Gods ; and
that there was the end of nature and the world.”
- VERSTEGAN, p. 34, translation from Tacitus,
De Moribus Germaniae.
“Noah begat Japhet; Japhet begat Gomer ;
Gomer begat Assenez or Ascena ; Ascena begat


370
JOURNAL (AGE 49
Tuisco, the father and conductor of the Tuytsh
or Germans out of Asia into Europe.” —VER-
STEGAN, p. 9.
The English have always been rich, but their
immense power is recent. It is only just now
that the old oak has blossomed out into such
immoderate growth as we see. It is one of the
maxims of political economy that all the wealth
that exists was created within the last twelve
months. But England, working long on the
problem of her mines and her textile arts, at
length produced her Marquis of Worcester, her
Watt, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton,
and by means of steam gave the immense ex-
pansion to her arts. 'Tis wonderful how new all
is. The iron plough was new in the eighteenth
century; the cast iron plough in the nineteenth.
Two centuries ago, all sawing of timber was
done by hand, and hence the extreme cost of
building with wood. Steam gave the whole
value to the force pumps and the power looms.
as
America. One of the East India Company's
vessels is a year and a half in making the voy-
age out to Calcutta and home, which an Ameri-
can performs in nine months . . . and it costs
can
One 1


1853]
BEDFORD
371
the company just twice as much to export a
cargo of coffee from Mocha to the Mediter-
ranean as it does an American merchant, -
namely, £30,000 vs. £15,000. — SPENCE.
[End of May?]
Yesterday a ride to Bedford with Ellery,
along the “ Bedford Levels ” and walked all
over the premises of the Old Mill, — King
Philip's Mill, — on the Shawsheen River ; —
old mill, with sundry nondescript wooden an-
tiquities, — Boys with bare legs were fishing on
the little islet in the stream ; we crossed and
recrossed, saw the fine stumps of trees, rocks,
and grove, and many Callot' views of the bare
legs. Beautiful pastoral country, but needs sun-
shine. There were millions of light today, —
so all went well, - (all but the dismal tidings
which knelled a funeral-bell through the whole
afternoon, in the death of Susan Sturgis.)
Rich democratic land of Massachusetts ; in
every house well - dressed women with air of
town-ladies : in every house a clavecin and a
copy of the Spectator ; and some young lady a
Jacques Callot, the admirable French engraver of the early
17th century. He did figures with much spirit and in skilful
grouping.
recro


372
JOURNAL
(AGE 49
reader of Willis. Lantara' did not like the land-
scape; too many leaves, – one leaf is like an-
other leaf, – and apt to be agitated by east
wind.
On the other hand, “Professor” (Ellery's
dog) did; he strode gravely as a bear through
all the sentimental parts, and fitted equally well
the grave and the gay scenes. He has a stroke
of humour in his eye, as if he enjoyed his mas-
ter's jokes.
Ellery thinks “England a flash in the pan”;
as English people, in 1848, had agreed that
“Egypt was humbug.” I am to put down
among the monomaniacs the English agricul-
turist who only knows one revolution in politi-
cal history, the rape-culture. But, as we rode,
one thing was clear, as oft before, that it is
favorable to sanity, – the occasional change of
landscape. If a girl is mad to marry, let her
take a ride of ten miles, and see meadows and
mountains she never saw before; two villages,
and an old mansion house ; and the odds are,
it will change all her resolutions. World is full
Simon Mathurin Lantara, a gifted but eccentric French
landscape painter, born in 1729. What is said of him and
much that follows is evidently a fragmentary report of Chan-
ning's whimsical conversation.


1853] CHANNING'S HUMOURS 373
of fools who get a-going and never stop: set
them off on another tack, and they are half
cured. From Shawsheen we went to Burling-
ton; and Ellery reiterated his conviction, that
the only art in the world is landscape-painting.
The boys held up their fish to us from far; a
broad new placard on the walls announced to
us that the Shawsheen Mill was for sale: but
we bought neither the fish nor the mill.
Channing told Mr. Edmund Hosmer “that
he did not see but trouble was as good as any-
thing else, if you only have enough of it.”
Swedenborg taught “ that the evil spirits in
the hells have all the enjoyment of which they
are capable.”
Sea. Alcuin called the sea, the road of the
bold; the hostelry of the rivers; and the source
of the rains.
The sea was the road of the bold;
Frontier of the wheat-sown plains;
The pit wherein all rivers rolled,
And fountain of the rains.
Of the ship. She looked into a port, and seeing
nothing there, went on.


374
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
June 14.
I went to McKay's shipyard, and saw the
King of the Clippers on the stocks: length of the
keel, 285 feet, breadth of the beam 50 feet, car-
ries 1500 tons more than the Sovereign of the
Seas. Will be finished in August.
onor
In political economy, all capital is new, the
fruit of the last year or two. Waste England,
waste France, Belgium ; raze every city and
town; in a year or two, there is just as much
wheat and hay, as many animals, tools, barns,
cloths, coaches, palaces, and ice-cream, as much
revenue as before.
Counterpart of statement above; three or four
days of rain reduce hundreds to starvation in
London.
English race must be a mean or mixture, for
everything in that island is. And this result
which constitutes so much of the joy of life of
agreeable relief or contrast in the colors, sounds,
savors, and forms, is never so magnificent in
effect, as in the marriage of complementary
qualities of mind and character in individuals,
wherein the powers of one family are reinforced
by the addition of a new class of powers from


1853] THOREAU. CLOUGH 375
another. Nature has a chemistry of her own, by
which she can mix as well as make.
Henry'is military. He seemed stubborn and
implacable; always manly and wise, but rarely
sweet. One would say that, as Webster could
never speak without an antagonist, so Henry
does not feel himself except in opposition. He
wants a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory,
requires a little sense of victory, a roll of the
drums, to call his powers into full exercise.»
[Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet and scholar,
probably encouraged by Mr. Emerson in his pur-
pose of finding a field for his proper work, and
i Thoreau.
2 This was the way he appeared to his friend, older than
he by fourteen years, for whom he had a high regard and rev-
erence, as appears in his letters, in which, however, he allowed
himself to be more human than in face to face speech. It is
possible that he was on his guard not to be over-influenced.
Women found Thoreau courteous and kind, and to children
he was a delightful friend and companion, yet always with a
sincere directness. Farmers, mechanics, and labourers found
him manly, simple and companionable if they were upright
and direct. To all of this, from personal acquaintance for
twenty-one years and much talk with Thoreau's acquaintances
in all walks of life, I unhesitatingly testify.
E. W. E.


376
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
even a home, here, landed in America in the late
autumn of 1852. He was cordially welcomed in
Concord, in Boston, and in Cambridge where he
went into lodgings, and tutored youth, lectured,
or wrote for the North American and Putnam's
Magazine, as opportunity offered. A few days
after landing he wrote, “Emerson carries me off
to Concord,”and next day (Sunday, Nov. 14), —
“Loads of talk with Emerson all morning ...
walk with him to a wood with a prettyish pool
[Walden]. ..6.30, tea and Mr. Thoreau; and
presently Mrs. Ellery Channing (sister of Mar-
garet Fuller] and others. . .. I had Abolition
pretty well out with Emerson, with whom one can
talk with pleasure on the subject. His view is in
the direction of purchasing emancipation.” Again,
November 21, “Emerson gave a grand dinner
in honour of my poor self apparently, at the
Tremont House, where were Longfellow, Haw-
thorne, Greenough the Sculptor, Charles Sumner,
Theodore Parker, Ellery Channing, Lowell, and
v five others — a very swell dinner, I assure you."']
See Poems and Prose Remains of Artbur Hugb Clough,
edited by his wife, vol. 1.
The editors desire to express here their obligation to Messrs.
Macmillan & Co. for their courtesy in allowing them to quote
a few passages from the above work.


1853] A NATIONAL WILL 377
Clough thinks that there is a stream of tradi-
tion in families and in men in England, that you
can draw more from than from people in a new
country. It does not come out at once. They
are slow to speak, and when they speak, it
means something, stands for a great deal that
has been done. When you talk with people in
this country, the climate stimulates them to talk,
but you soon come to the end of all they know.
In Belgium and other countries, I have seen
reports of model farms; they begun with downs
or running sands,- it makes no difference what
bottom, mere land to lay their basket of loam
down upon;— then, they proceed from beach
grass, or whatever, and rye and clover, manur-
ing all the time, until they formed a soil fourteen
inches deep. Well, so I conceive, it is in na-
tional genericulture, as in agriculture. You must
manage to set up a national will ... you must
find a land like England, where temperate and
sharp northern breezes blow, to keep that will
alive and alert; markets on every possible side,
because it is an island; the people tasked and
kept at the top of their condition by the contin-
ual activity of seafaring and the exciting nature
of sea-risks, and the deep stimulus of gain: the


378
JOURNAL [AGE 50
IS
land not large enough, the population not large
enough, to glut the market and depress one
another; but so proportioned is it to the size
of Europe and of the world, that it keeps itself
healthy and bright, and, like an immense man-
ufactory, it yields, with perfect security and ease,
incredible results.
Many things conduce to this. Over them all
works a sort of Anima mundi or soul of the
island, — the aggregation by time, experience,
and demand and supply, of a great many per-
sonalities, – which fits them to each other, and
enables them to keep step and time, coöperate
as harmoniously and punctually as the parts of
a human body.
Thierry's History of the Norman Conquest is
written, I suspect, for the sake of blazoning its
motto; and, in some manner, avenging the field
of Waterloo, and the other humblings of France
before England. The conclusion of the book
certainly warrants this suspicion; and, I observe,
that, in the chapter referring to Henry V's wars,
Poitiers and Agincourt are not even named ;
whilst the battle of Castillon is exactly specified
(p. 257).
The motto with which the book begins and


1853) THIERRY. SYLVAN 379
ends is from Robert of Gloucester, as fol-
lows:-
“... the folc of Normandie,
That among us woneth yet and schulleth evermo!
Of the Normannes beth thys hey men, that beth of thys
lond,
And the lowe men of Saxons. ..."
He delighted in finding the Normans called
Franci in old documents “Sworn to by all the
French and all the English called villains,
villani, -"
Sylvan could go wherever woods and waters
were, and no man was asked for leave – once
or twice the farmer withstood, but it was to no
purpose, - he could as easily prevent the spar-
rows or tortoises. It was their land before it
was his, and their title was precedent. Sylvan
knew what was on their land, and they did not;
and he sometimes brought them ostentatious
gifts of flowers or fruits or shrubs which they
would gladly have paid great prices for, and did
not tell them that he took them from their own
woods.
Moreover the very time at which he used
their land and water (for his boat glided like a
trout everywhere unseen,) was in hours when


380
JOURNAL
[AGE 50
they were sound asleep. Long before they were
awake he went up and down to survey like a
sovereign his possessions, and he passed on-
ward, and left them before the farmer came out
of doors. Indeed, it was the common opinion
of the day that Mr. Thoreau made Concord.'
Ellery affirms that Adams, the cabinet-maker,
has a true artistic eye; for he is always measur-
ing with his eye the man he talks with for his
coffin.
At Nahant, the eternal play of the sea seems
the anti-clock, or destroyer of the memory of
time, and reminds me of what I have once
heard, that the sea perpetually invading inch
by inch the continents, rising, say, on the east-
ern shore of each continent, an inch in a cen-
tury, wears off and consumes all the monuments
of civility and of man.
All day the waves assailed the rock,
I heard no church bells chime ;
The sea-beat scorns the minster clock
And breaks the glass of Time.
Magnae virtutes nec minora vitia. I knew
The last sentence takes off Sylvan's mask.
2 Poems, Appendix, p. 345.


1853) ASSER. ENGLISH TALENT 381
well the indigence of Nature, which usually
starves one faculty, when another is to be en-
riched. It is the too well known poesy of the
best natures, these compensatory glories.
Alfred. There is a passage in Asser's Life
[p. 76] giving a certain emphasis to a single
sentence which was read or said to Alfred by
Asser, and this sentence and others like it
were to be written, - which exhibits the right
instinct of education ; the feeling of joy and
hope that in certain moments enshrines a
thought and draws a whole Pantheon out of
it.
English talent is working talent: it is like oak
and pine among fancy trees; and like iron among
the metals bismuth, nickel, iridium, seen only
in laboratories.
A better model of a steamboat or a clipper,
a new channel of trade, a new engine, a bounty
to fish, a law that abolishes tolls and fees at a
port, changes the navigation of the world, and
upsets a nobility and a nation. A new article of
commerce like guano, a ship canal, leaves Am-
sterdams and Londons to rot with the Tyres and
Sidons and Venices of the past.
S
a


382
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
I admire answers to which no answer can be
made.
“ The masters of slaves seem generally anx-
ious to prove that they are not of a race su-
perior in any noble quality to the meanest of
their bondmen.” – MACKINTOSH, History of
England, i, p. 321.
Conduct of Intellect. Archimedes and Newton
and other stark thinkers stretched and breathed
themselves by a matchless feat of thinking, now
and then, and left it so. They did not go repeat-
ing the particular problem they had solved, and
applying it to everything, but went on to some-
thing else.
The game of intellect seems the perception
in lucid moments that whatever befalls or can
be stated is a universal proposition; and, con-
trariwise, that every general statement is poeti-
cal again by being particularized or imperson-
ated.
Freedom, yes, but that is a thing of degrees.
Is one of the slaveholders free? Not one. See
the snakes wriggle and wind. Is a man free
whose conscience accuses him of thefts and lies
e
ccuses


1853) ENGLAND'S STRONG MEN 383
and indulgences without number? No. Is he
free whom I see, when my eyes are anointed, to
be always egotistical, and blinded by his prefer-
ence of himself? A humble man can see, but a
proud man and a vain man are patients for the
oculist.
England. The English government is gentle-
manlike. If any national benefit has been ren-
dered, if the arts have been advanced, if science
has been served, the government may be relied
on to be just and generous to the man who has
served them, as Paxton, Fellowes, Stephenson,
Franklin, Rowland Hill. I believe that it is far
better than the American government, in this
point, where the venality of Congress [sentence
unfinished].
The English are like a family to which a pro-
mise has been given that a male heir shall never
be wanting. They have always a wealth of men
to fill important posts, and the concentrated at-
tention on such posts ensures the selection of a
competent person. The public service must not
suffer. Too much property is at stake. The
younger Pitt was a jockey to hold the reins of
power, neither stiff nor slack; otherwise not a


384
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
man of notable ability. Thurlows and Can-
nings and Foxes and Grenvilles abound in Lon-
don.
The whole civility and polity are rude and
initial. It is only custom and ignorance which
flatter it with superlatives. The giddy absurd-
ity of tying up a nation and untying a badly ed-
ucated, stubborn boy, because disqualified by
his education as a prince; letting loose his folly
and passion (which should be confined to a pen-
itentiary) on the interests of a nation of men;
and padlock progress and keep at a standstill
all that has been gained, shows the extreme rude-
ness of Europe.
W biggery. The insufferable folly of keeping
the weal of millions at risk and every interest
of science, of charity, of morals, and of human-
ity, at a halt, on so despicable a chance as the
will of a single Russian gentleman, will not long
impose on the common sense of mankind. Some
third way will be thought of between anarchy
and this puerile makeshift of an irresponsible
rogue. Monarchy stands on the timidity of prop-
erty: property must not be disturbed. It can
better pay blackmail to one king than run the
risk of revolution.


1853] NEWTON'S PIPPINS 385
“ Lord Thurlow, when chancellor, asked me
if I did not think that a wooden machine might
be invented to draw bills and answers in chan-
cery ? ” — Eldon, i, p. 167.
Agricultural. Cattle-show.'
The Newtown Pippins, gentlemen, are they
not the Newton Pippins or, is not this the very
pippin that demonstrated to Sir Isaac Newton
the fall of the world, not the fall of Adam, but
of the moon to the earth, and universal gravity?
Well, here they are, a barrel of them; every one
of them good to show gravitation, and good to
i Such, at first, was the title of the County Fairs estab-
lished about the middle of the 19th century under the auspices
of the Agricultural Societies in Massachusetts and held in the
fine September days. Horses, cattle, sheep, swine and poultry
were shown, and the whole countryside came and had a de-
lightful holiday. In the building was a beautiful and varied
exhibition. The farmer brought his corn, vegetables, and fruit ;
from the orchards and gardens of the town came wonderful
apples, pears, plums, quinces and melons ; the farmer's wife
showed her bread, butter, cheese, and quilts ; her daughters
their sewing, flowers, and even drawings. Small boys could
get in free by bringing some crook-neck squashes of their
own raising. There were ploughing and spading matches.
Finally came the dinner and address. Mr. Emerson's essay
“ Farming " was given as such in 1858.


386
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
eat; every one as sound as the moon. What will
you give me for a barrel of moons ?
July.
Short way with slaveholders. I read last night
a letter from L— T— to L- F-
stating that he had learned from a scientific per-
son that sulphate of copper, commonly called
blue vitriol, used in small quantities in the man-
ufacture of wheat flour, had important effects in
increasing the docility of the people who eat it;
and he proposed to introduce such manufacture
on a large scale into the Southern States, with a
view to reduce the stubbornness of the popula-
tion, to the end of an easier removal of Slavery.
He therefore asks Mr. F— at what price he
can supply him with 240 tons of this article, in
the autumn, with a prospect of a much larger
purchase hereafter. He proceeds to say that
great caution must be used in the introduction
of this article, and that a number of bakers must
be sent with instructions to use it, and that the
project should be confidential. Would like also
to have Mr. F take the opinions of Abbott
Lawrence, and Senator Everett, and others, who
may have information as to the use of this arti-
cle in Europe.
Mr. F- sent the letter to Dr. Charles T.


1853] SCHOLAR'S ISOLATION 387
Jackson,' who replied, that the use of the article
is an outrageous fraud, and is forbidden on high
penalties in England and France, as it is rank
poison.
July.
It is a great loss to lose the confidence of a
class; yet the scholar, the thinker goes on losing
the ear and love of class after class who once
sustained him.
The scholar isolates himself by the sweet
opium which he has learned to chew, and which
he calls Muses, and memory, and philosophy.
Now and then, he meets another scholar, and
then says, “See, I am rewarded for my truth to
myself and calling, by the perfect sympathy I
here find.” But, meantime, he is left out more
and more, and at last utterly, by society, and
his faculties languish for want of invitation, and
objective work; until he becomes that very thing
which they taunt him with being, a self-indulg-
ent dreamer. In an intellectual community, he
would be steeled and sharpened and burnished
to a strong Archimedes or Newton. Society
makes him the imbecile it accuses him of
being.
The eminent chemist and geologist, Mrs. Emerson's bro.
ther.


388
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
On the rocks of Nahant the chemical texture
of the world appeared, and statistics is also a
rock-of-Nahant to show that the world is a crys-
tal and God a chemist.
ISSU
[To the regret of Mr. Emerson, Mr. Nor-
ton, and his many friends in New England,
Clough had suddenly returned to England in
July, having been offered a place in the Educa-
tion Office, which, with its assured salary, would
allow of his marriage.
He had frequently spent Sundays in Mr.
Emerson's home, where he was most welcome
to the elders and the children.
Carlyle, writing to Mr. Emerson in early au-
tumn, said, “Clough is settled in his office
... I think he is now likely to continue here;
and here, too, he may do us some good. Of
America, at least of New England, I can per-
ceive he has brought away an altogether kindly,
almost filial impression, especially of a certain
man who lives in that section of the Earth. More
power to his elbow!”]
PS
IN
England. My belief is that nobody landed on
this island with impunity ; that the popular fable
of spellbound homes of enchanters was fact in


1853] MALTHUS OR POET? 389
England; the climate and conditions, labor and
rough weather, transformed every adventurer
into a laborer, and each vagabond that arrived
submitted his neck to the yoke of avarice and
ambition, or found the air too tense for him to
exist in.
The race avails much, but the genius of the
place also is despotic and will not have any friv- .
olous person.
Malthus is the right organ of English pro-
prietors. But we shall never understand politi-
cal economy until we get Béranger or Burns
or some poet to teach it in songs; and they
won't teach Malthuism.
And there is no subject that does not belong
to the Poet; manufactures and stock brokerage,
as much as sunsets and souls; only the things
placed in their true order are poetry; but dis-
placed, or put in kitchen-order, they are un-
poetic.
(From DO)
'Tis curious that Christianity, which is ideal-
ism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and
steadily attacked by the idealists.
Horatio Greenough. [Greenough had been
cut off in his prime by brain fever, December


390
JOURNAL [AGE 50
18, 1852. At the time he was delivering a course
of lectures on Art in Boston. It is said that
he left sketches for the work of the next twenty
years. A “ Memorial ” of him containing his
papers on Art and other subjects, and preceded
by a life of the artist by H. T. Tuckerman,
was published in 1853.
In a letter to Carlyle Mr. Emerson said, -
“Our few fine persons are apt to die. Horatio
Greenough, a sculptor, but whose tongue was
far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve,
and who inspired great hopes, died two months
ago at forty-seven years ” (Correspondence, vol.
ii, p. 219).]
(From VS)
I do not think of any American in the cen-
tury who would make so good a subject for a
lecture as Greenough. But oh to hear again his
own eloquent and abounding discourse! - but
he passed away suddenly like the brightest of
mornings.
I account that man, one product of American
soil (born in Boston), as one of the best proofs
of the capability of this country —
We have one memorial of him always before
us. He gave the model of the Bunker Hill


1853] ENGLISHMEN. FATE 391
Monument. He said, “An obelisk savs but
one word, Here! but it speaks very loud.”
There is a kind of retardation in the English
youth. Every man is a possible lord. But they
have so many men that they are obliged to
keep back the vast majority by checking, and in
the state of neuters, as candidates for place as
soon as any accident happens to the queen or
great officers.
“Par une conséquence nécessaire de sa forte
nature, le peuple Anglais est incompatible avec
tout ce qui n'est pas lui. Son génie est exclusif. Il
ne comprend pas qu'on puisse vivre, penser, et
agir autrement que luimême.” – LÉONCE DE LA-
VERGNE.
(From DO)
July 21.
Fate and Instinct. Fatalism the right for-
mula to be holden: but by a clever person
who knows to allow the living instinct. For,
though that force be infinitely small, infini-
tesimal against the Universal Chemistry, it is
of that subtlety that it homeopathically doses
the system.
All Hanover Street was abroad; mountains
of ordinary women; firm bounds of brass and


392
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
puddingstone set to every one of them; and
liquidity or flowing power nowhere.
e
Abolition. If you can get Russian tactics into
your political representation, so as to ensure the
fidelity of your representative to the sentiment
of the constituency, by making him more afraid
of his constituents than he is of his opponents,
you will get your will done.
August.
At Lenox,' Miss — congratulated herself
that — had settled down into sensible opin-
ions and practices, like her neighbors. I asked
her if she thought her two sisters, who had
complied with sensible notions and practices,
had quite succeeded; that I perhaps did not
think quite as respectfully as she did of Boston
and New York; that what she called a success
seemed to me a poor thing, and, as those exam-
ples betrayed, a mere fetch, or a dose of brandy
to drown thought; but only the more degrad-
ing those who succeeded. Had New York suc-
ceeded? Were the gentlemen of New York en-
1 Mr. Emerson was visiting valued friends, the Tappans
and Sedgwicks, in Lenox, when during this year his eldest
daughter, Ellen, had been attending the excellent school of
Mrs. Sedgwick.


1853] NEW YORK. THACKERAY 393
tirely satisfied with their manly performance? As
far as I am informed, they are ruled by some rowdy
aldermen who are notorious rogues and black-
legs. They must feel very clean in going down
Wall Street, whilst Mr. Rhynders cows them.
Is their political conscience sweet and serene, as
they find themselves represented at Albany and
at Washington ? As for these people, they have
miserably failed, and 't is very fine for them to
put on airs. The veriest monk in a college is
better than they. As to — I was far from
thinking she had ended her experiments. It is
her glory that she takes her life in her hand,
and is ready for a new world.
In New York, Henry James quoted Thack-
eray's speeches in society, “He liked to go to
Westminster Abbey to say his prayers,” etc.
“ It gave him the comfort, - blest feeling.”...
He thought Thackeray could not see beyond
his eyes, and has no ideas, and merely is a sound-
ing-board against which his experiences thump
and resound: he is the merest boy.'
1 In a letter to Carlyle written August 10, Mr. Emerson
says, “I was in New York lately for a few days, and fell into
some traces of Thackeray, who has made a good mark in this
country by a certain manly blurting out of his opinion in va-


394
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
These New Yorkers and Lenox people think
much of New York; little of Boston. The
Bostonians are stiff, dress badly, never can speak
French with good accent: the New Yorkers have
exquisite millinery, tournure, great expense, and,
on being presented, the men look at you, and
instantly see whether your dress and style is up
to their mark; if not (and expense is great part
of the thing) they never notice you. “These
girls — any one of them ” (said Thackeray at
a party, to a German prince in New York)
“has more diamonds on her back than are in
all your principality.” And C. said, that it was
difficult to go into any society in New York-
without you were in condition to give parties
too. The artists, she said, were very worldly,
and will not go anywhere unless they are to
have suppers and champagne, She told H
she had heard more about money from him and
them than ever before.
Henry James found all these artists poor
things, vain, conceited nobodies; and E. H.
finds in Boston the question of society is that
of who gives dinners?
nn
rious companies where so much honesty was rare and use-
ful. I am sorry never to have been in the same town with
him while he was here."


1853) NEWCOMB'S LETTERS 395
The Boston women spend a great deal of
money on rich and rare dresses, and have no
milliner of taste who can say, “ This stuff, this
color, this trimming, this ensemble does not suit
you.” In New York the milliners have this
skill. Mrs. Perkins, at the Opera, heard a dress-
maker say, “How dowdy all the Boston ladies
are! Mrs. Perkins is dowdy."
Cheering amidst all this trifle was the read-
ing of Charles Newcomb's letters: the golden
age came again, the true youth, the true hero-
ism, the future, the ideal. I could hardly sit to
read them out. I was penitent for having ever
mistrusted him, for having chided his impa-
tience; and resolved at once to write him, and
assure him of my loyalty. Swedenborg rose
too, and all the gods out of earth and air and
ocean, - if only they would reconcile the two
worlds, and make us fit for and contented
with either. Only of Charles I would give
much to know how it all lies in his mind; I
would know his inmost sincerity; know what
reserves he makes when he talks divinely. I
would rather know his real mind than any
other person's I have ever met. For it is still
true that each makes one immense exception
in his love and homage to the canon of nature,


396
JOURNAL [Age 50
-one reserve, — namely, of all his own rights
and possibilities.
I told Alcott that I should describe him as
a man with a divination or good instinct for the
quality and character of wholes : as a man who
looked at things in a little larger angle than
most other persons; and as one who had a cer-
tain power of transition from thought to thought,
as by secret passages, which it would tax the ce-
lerity and subtlety of good metaphysicians to
follow. But he has the least shop value of any
man. He were a very bad Englishman. He has
no wares, he has not wrought his fine clay into
vases, nor his gold dust into ingots. All the
great masters finish their works to the eye and
hand, as well as to the Divine Reason: to the
shop, as well as to the gods.
But he is an inestimable companion, because
he has no obligations to old or new; but is free
as if new born. But he is not careful to under-
stand you. If he get a half meaning that serves
his purpose, 't is enough.
Henry Thoreau'sturdily pushes his economy
1 Thoreau was then living at Staten Island as private tutor
to the eldest son of Mr. Emerson's brother William.



CHARLES KING NEWCOMB





1853] THOREAU. GIRLS' SCHOOLS 397
into houses and thinks it the false mark of the gen-
tleman that he is to pay much for his food. He
ought to pay little for his food. Ice, — he must
have ice! And it is true, that, for each artificial
want that can be invented and added to the pon-
derous expense, there is new clapping of hands
of newspaper editors and the donkey public.
To put one more rock to be lifted betwixt a
man and his true ends. If Socrates were here,
we could go and talk with him; but Longfellow,
we cannot go and talk with ; there is a palace,
and servants, and a row of bottles of different
coloured wines, and wine glasses, and fine coats.
Thought is nothing but the circulations made
luminous. There's no solitary flower, and no
solitary thought.
Send your girls to boarding-schools, to Ma-
dame Hicks, or to French ladies in New York,
to learn address; that they may surmount the
platform of these female bullies who make thewo-
men of fashion, and be quite able to confront them
ever after, as possessed of their secret also. It will
save an impressionable child many mortifica-
tions, and need not make a fashionist of her.'
This advice in somewhat differing form is found in
• Behavior” (Conduct of Life, pp. 170, 171).


398
[AGE 50
JOURNAL
The Americans have the underdose. I find
them not spiced with a quality. What poor
mots, — what poor speeches, they make! 'T is
all like Miss Joanna's stories, wherein all the
meaning has to be imputed. “O, if you could
only have heard him say it!” “ Say what?”
- “Why, he said 'Yes,' but with so much in-
telligence !” Well, John Adams said, “Inde-
pendence forever !” and Sam Adams said, “O,
what a glorious morning is this !” and Daniel
Webster said, “I still live,” and Edward Everett
will say, when he comes to die, “ O dear!” and
General Cushing will say,“O my!” (And Gen-
eral Butler will say, “Damn!"),' and however
brilliant, in the first and second telling, these
speeches may be, they somehow lack the Plu-
tarch virility.
[Mr. Emerson was glad to take excursions
from home during the months of August and
September, for, with his growing family and fre-
quent guests, the time had come to enlarge the
upper storey of his house by building a spacious
chamber for his wife and himself over the par-
lor, sunny and with pleasant outlooks towards
the village and Walden woods; also he had a
· This was an interpolation of many years later.


1853)
CAPE COD
399
concealed “den” in the garret to secure ab-
solute privacy for himself in stress of writing, or
perhaps afford refuge to a fugitive slave.]
APE
CAPE Cod, September 5.
Went to Yarmouth Sunday, 5th; to Orleans
Monday, 6th; to Nauset Light on the back
side of Cape Cod. Collins, the keeper, told us
he found obstinate resistance on Cape Cod to
the project of building a lighthouse on this coast,
as it would injure the wrecking business. He
had to go to Boston, and obtain the strong re-
commendation of the Port Society. From the
high hill in the rear of Higgins's, in Orleans, I
had a good view of the whole Cape and the sea
on both sides. The Cape looks like one of the
Newfoundland Banks just emerged, a huge tract
of sand half-covered with poverty grass and
beach grass, and for trees, abele and locust and
plantations of pitch pine. Some good oak, and
in Dennis and Brewster were lately good trees
for ship lumber, and they still are well wooded
on the east side. But the view I speak of looked
like emaciated Orkneys, — Mull, Islay, and so
forth,—made of salt dust, gravel, and fish bones.
They say the wind makes the roads, and, as at
Nantucket, a large part of the real estate was


400
JOURNAL
[AGE 50
freely moving back and forth in the air. I heard
much of the coming railroad which is about to
reach Yarmouth and Hyannis, and they hope
will come to Provincetown. I fancied the people
were only waiting for the railroad to reach them
in order to evacuate the country. For the stark
nakedness of the country could not be exag-
gerated. But no; nothing was less true. They
are all attached to what they call the soil. Mr.
Collins had been as far as Indiana; but, he said,
hill on hill, - he felt stified, and “longed for
the Cape, where he could see out.” And whilst
I was fancying that they would gladly give away
land to anybody that would come and live there,
and be a neighbor: no, they said, all real estate
had risen, all over the Cape, and you could
not buy land at less than fifty dollars per acre.
And, in Provincetown, a lot on the Front Street
of forty feet square would cost five or six hun-
dred dollars.
Still, I saw at the Cape, as at Nantucket, they
are a little tender about your good opinion : for
if a gentleman at breakfast says he don't like
Yarmouth, all real estate seems to them at once
depreciated two or three per cent.
They are very careful to give you directions
what road you shall take from town to town;


1853] LION. WOMEN, ROUSSEL 401
but, as the country has the shape of a piece of
tape, it is not easy to lose your way. For the
same reason it behooves everybody who goes
on to the Cape to behave well, as he must stop
on his return at all the same houses, unless he
takes the packet at Provincetown for Boston,
six hours in good weather, and a week in bad.
The sand grinds the glass at Nauset Light, and
soon makes it unfit for use. The sand grinds
the tires of the wheels of the stage-coach. I found
at Yarmouth the Deerberry, Vaccinium stami-
neum; and at Dennis, the Chrysopsis.
The Arabs say that the lion's roar says, I, and
the son of the woman, — Abna, ou el ben mera.
“Nature, which could not foresee our civil
arrangements, contented herself with making
women aimables et légères, but with a certain
facility, and lighthearted, because that sufficed
to her views. The same interest which has wished
that there should be a constant association be-
tween the sexes has also exacted of them senti-
ments more stable than those which Nature had
given them. Be it as it may, it is on this totter-
ing base that the edifice of society reposes; and
it is not doubtful that we ought to give them


402
[AGE 50
JOURNAL
credit for the virtue or the address with which
they sustain it.” — Roussel, apud Grimm, part
3, vol. i.
The one thing not to be forgiven to intellect-
ual persons is that they believe in the ideas of
others.' . ..
“On ne se dégage pas des voies où les siècles
vous ont engagés.” (De Noailles.) You cannot
free yourself from your times.
“Pendant que l'Angleterre passait à la liberté
avec un front sévère, la France courait au despot-
isme en riant.” — CHATEAUBRIAND.
People value thoughts, not truths; truth, not
until it has passed through the mould of some
man's mind, and so is a curiosity, and an individ-
ualism! But ideas as powers, they are not up to
valuing.
It occurred in the crowd of beauties on the
pavé of Broadway that we grow so experienced
that we are dreadfully quick-sighted, and in the
youngest face detect the wrinkles that shall be,
See “Fugitive Slave Law,” Concord Address (Miscella-
nies, p. 217).


1853] · PASSIONAL ZOÖLOGY 403
and the grey that hastens to discolour these me-
teor tresses. We cannot afford, then, to live long,
or Nature, which lives by illusions, will have dis-
enchanted us too far for happiness.
(From HO)
[Here follow many quotations from Tous-
senel's Passional Zoölogy, of which a few are
given.]
September 8. -
“ The Rhodian (the double) rose solved
Malthus's problem, — since it had said that a
flower which becomes double is a flower that
transforms its stamens into petals, and which,
consequently, becomes barren by exuberance of
sap and richness."
“Fecundity is curbed by surrounding all
women with the delights of luxury, comprising
the incentives to attractive labor.”
“No public establishment in Paris possesses
a hall vast enough to contain the crowds of both
sexes that would be drawn by the mere an-
nouncement of a course of passional chemistry,
physics, or astronomy. I ask only Lamartine's
gift of speech, with the right of opening a course
on passional botany. They would come from
Naples and Stockholm to hear me.”
con
10€
surro


404
JOURNAL
[AGE 50
Nature is a mistress of conversation. She
does not preach through pumpkin stalks dis-
courses on the value of clothing, but contents
herself with sending a cold day, and putting
down a buffalo or an angola goat, a few sheep,
and a few cotton plants, within sight.
ue
Horses. Bayard, horse of Renaud de Mont-
auban, which Roland, nephew of Charlemagne,
tried to obtain, understood his master's speech
as if he had been his son,beat the earth with
his forefeet as if it had been a harp; ran away
from Charlemagne, and still in the forest of
Ardennes neighs loud and clear, to be heard all
over France on St. John's Day. How Bayard
mystified the Emperor Charlemagne, see Revue
des Deux Mondes (tome v, p. 312).
Arnaud de Gascoigne's horse could at the age
of one hundred years make one hundred leagues
in a day without stopping and without blowing.
On the whole, in the stories of the Round Table,
the horses show rather more good sense and
conduct than their riders.
The horse Marco Polo, of Raphael Fabretti,
the antiquary, stood still and pointed when he
came near an antiquity.' See his master's life by
1 In the Life of Meissonier is given a story, vouched for by


1853) MAN AND HIS PORTION 405
Visconti, in Biographie Universelle. Hallam,
iv, 69.
Being once present at the Creation, I saw that,
from each man as he was formed, a piece of the
clay of which he was made was taken, and set
apart for him as goods or property; and it was
allowed him to receive this in whatever form he
desired, whether as wife, friend, son, daughter,
or as house, land, warehouses, merchandizes,
horses, libraries, gardens, ships. Also he might
have it now in one of these forms, and at his
will it was converted into another. But because
it was one and the same lump out of which all
these were fashioned, and as that was the clay of
his own body, all these things had one and the
same taste and quality to him, and he died at
last of ennui.
What a rich and extraordinary genius is Lord
Clarendon, the historian, yet he is obscure in the
crowd of English writers.
What Englishman has idealism enough to
lift the horizon of brass which shuts down like
the painter himself, of his horse's recognizing the picturesque
in places.


406
JOURNAL [AGE 50
an umbrella close around his body.' When did
he ever pierce his fogs to see the awful spinners
and weavers that spin and weave and cut so
short his web of rank and money and politics,
and interrogate the vital powers that make him
man. Since Shakspeare, never one; and Shak-
speare only for amusement of the play house.
The power of Fate, the dynastic oppression
of Submind.
Natúre shows everything once without need
of microscope or anatomical dissection. It does
not need barometer to find the height of moun-
tains. The line of snow is surer than the baro-
meter; and the zones of plants, as the savin, the
pine, the laureole odorante, vernal gentian, aconi-
tum napellus, geum, Linnæa borealis, and the va-
rious lichens and grasses, are all thermometers
which cannot be deceived, and will not lie. They
are instruments by the best maker. She shows the
pila in mullein; the spirals in hyacinth; the vesi-
cles in a chara; chromate in the “splendid sage.”
She shows every function once in great bodies.”
1 A similar sentence and several that are here omitted are
found in the chapter « Literature" in English Traits (pp.
254, 255).
2 A passage to the same purpose as the above is in “ Coun-
try Life" (Natural History of Intellect, p. 160).


1853) FREEDOM. ENGLISH MIND 407
Once I wished I might rehearse
Freedom's pæan in my verse,
That the slave who caught the strain
Should throb until he snapt his chain.
But the Spirit said, Not so;'...
ine
The English mind flowered in every faculty.
In the age when Europe awoke like a giant
refreshed by sleep, when the Gothic nations
brought the robust brain of unsunned barbarism
into the warm regions of the vine and olive of
Roman method and rule, the two forces of Ju-
daism and of Greek genius were poured like sun-
light and heat into it.The tables of their brain
were like plates of iodine long kept in the dark
[several pages torn out].
Nature is admirable, and exists for the pre-
sent hour, as well as for the immense cycle; and,
whilst man is for eternity, for poetry, for love,
In the Journal the first trials for the poem - Freedom"
and its final form are given at this place and fix its date. It
should be said, however, that the two lines preceding the
last line in the Poems are not found here, and that the last
line differs thus : -
Right thou feelest, rashly do.
2 Compare a passage to the same purpose, but less pictur-
esquely expressed, in English Traits (p. 235).


408
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
yet he has a Greek, an English, an American
career, which masks effectually the ulterior pur-
pose from ordinary eyes.
All the authors are enchanted men; intox-
icated, plainly, with that stray drop of nectar of
idealism they have imbibed; Bacon, rich with
lustres and powers stolen somehow from the
upper world, and inevitably wonderful to men;
but he has this plunder of ideas, or this degree
of fine madness, to no purpose : he does nothing
with it: it leads him nowhere; he is a poor mean
fellow all the while; and in fine examples, - in
Milton, - it is not much better. It is not yet
blood, - this drop of ichor that tingles in them,
and cannot lift the whole man to the digestion
and function of ichor, — that is, of godlike ac-
tion.'...
Ifa divine physician could come and say, “Ah,
you are hurt, — you are bleeding to death, -
not out of your body, but, far worse, out of
your mind. You that are reckoned the pink of
amiable and discreet men,- you are in a rag-
ing typhoid, already comatose, blind, and deaf.
1 This sentence and the rest of the paragraph are essen-
tially given in “ Poetry and Imagination” (Letters and Social
Aims, pp. 73, 74).


1853] RANGE. CREATION'S LOGIC 409
All the worse that you do not know it. Men
run away from the smallpox. But see the small-
pox of small society, — the vermin, the tape-
worm of politics, and of trilling city life, is
eating your vitals. — Save yourself. I call you
to renunciation of trifles, of display, of custom.
I lead you to an upright and simple friend who
knows what truth means. See that one noble
person dwarfs a nation of underlings, makes
the day beautiful, and himself venerable, and
you shall not fear to wake in the morning."
Men have a greater range than we think; if
a man knows a hundred men, he treats each ac-
cording to each's nature, and renders dust to
dust, and miracle to miracle. Ebba Hubbard is
as sensible of the difference between Wheeler
and Channing, as of the difference between
apple and turnip, and this quite irrespective of
their clothes or money.
We want a higher logic to put us in train-
ing for the laws of creation. How does the step
forward from one species to a higher species of
an existing genus take place? The ass is not the
parent of the horse ; no fish begets a bird. But
the concurrence of new conditions necessitates
V


410
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
a new object in which those conditions meet
and flower. When the hour is struck in onward
nature, announcing that all is ready for the birth
of higher form and nobler function, not one
pair of parents, but the whole consenting sys-
tem thrills, yearns, and produces. It is a favor.
able aspect of planets and of elements.
I think it wonderful, the beauty of the Greeks
as contrasted with the unbeautiful English nurs-
ery-stories, which, though now and then rarely
admitting in their fable a natural fact, as of frost,
or effects of spring, to gleam through, yet in the
main are childish and insignificant, like Blue
Beard or Jack Giant-killer, whilst every word of
the Greek is at once beautiful and also science.
I think no man is insensible to the figures
that adorn the pages of the Almanac, — Aries,
Taurus, Gemini, etc., from the Greek mytho-
logy.
Rest on your humanity, and it will supply
you with strength and hope and vision for the
day. Solitude and the country, books, and
openness, will feed you ; but go into the city-
I am afraid there is no morning in Chestnut
Street, it is full of rememberers, they shun each
10


1853] CÆSAR IN BRITAIN 411
other's eyes, they are all wrinkled with memory
of the tricks they have played, or mean to play,
each other, of petty arts and aims all contract-
ing and lowering their aspect and character.
They have great need of fine clothes. I advise
they must buy richer laces yet, if they wish to
hide their deformities. Don't spare money.
Cæsar offered to Venus on his return to
Rome a corslet of British pearls. The Romans
sent to England no mean man, but him in whom
the power of that empire culminated, — and he
found in Britain a man in natural power as good
as himself, though not so well equipped and
seconded.
The Britons of that day ran with painted
bodies into swamps up to their necks, and had
a receipt of temperance, long since lost in the
island, of holding a morsel in their teeth for
days, to resist hunger, no bigger than a bean.
Daguesseau was reading one day with the
learned Boivin I know not what Greek poem;
“ Hâtons nous," he cried, — “si nous allions
mourir avant d'avoir achevé ! ”
Power, new power, is the talisman and load-
stone which only a soul seeks. It cares not if


412
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
it do not yet appear in a talent, or it likes it
better if it have no talent. New power suggests
vast hopes native to the mind. It sets it on ex-
perimenting, it brings it into creative moods.
It does not promise to pay bills or build my
house or barn, but it assures new expansions to
Religion, Philosophy, Science, and Poetry.
The university wholly retrospective. Milton,
Juvenal, Homer and the rest are old cups of
which one cannot drink without some loss and
degradation. The happy youth drinks at the
Fountain..
A creator Columbus is, and Newton, and
the astronomers, and McKay with his clipper.
So is Bull” with his new grape, and Shak-
speare. But now seldom or never it comes of
good college education or having the grammar
at the tongue's end.
Nature made nothing in vain, neither poisons
nor passions; and crimes are not absolute, but
circumstantial and related to a higher harmony.
1 Ephraim Bull, a neighbor of Mr. Emerson's, who by
his intelligent efforts developed the Concord grape from the
wild (Labrusca) species in a few generations, - a great gift
to the nation, but he died poor.


1853] ALCOTT'S EXPANSION 413
Alcott was here, a baker who bakes a half
a dozen worlds as easily as the cook so many
loaves: the most obstinate unitarian that ever
existed. He only believes in unity. Plato is
dualist to him. Preëxistence is as familiar and
essential in his mind as hydrogen or sulphur
in a chemist's laboratory. Metachemistry, his
philosophy might be called with some show of
truth. He believes in cause and effect and
comes out of such vast caverns up to the sur-
face of conversation that he has to rub his eyes
and look about him not to break the proprie-
ties of this trifling world.
He relies on Nature forever— wise, omnific,
thousand-handed Nature, equal to every emer-
gency, which can do very well without colleges,
and if the Latin and Greek and Algebra and
Art were in the parents, is sure it will be in the
children without being pasted on the outside.'
i Mr. Emerson, through the long years of their acquaint-
ance, always said that he found more stimulus and elevation
in private talk with Mr. Alcott than with any other man. In
his public “ Conversations” — mainly monologue — Mr.
Alcott was less surely at his best, especially if a disputatious
and unsympathetic person were present, for he was a seer and
not a dialectician. This paragraph, without reference to
Alcott, however, is printed in “ Celebration of Intellect "
(Natural History of Intellect, p. 128).


414
JOURNAL'
(AGE 50
Superlative. A head or face magnified loses
its expression.
Alcott tells me that Mr. Hedge is to write
an essay on the importance of a liturgy - I
propose to add an essay on the importance of
a rattle in the throat.
Women. How difficult to deal with them.
You must interfere continually to steer their
talk or they will be sure, if they meet a button
or a thimble, to run against it and forget all
in the too powerful associations of the work-
table and the pantry. Can't keep it impersonal.
Can't keep it afloat in the stream.
m
.
Mother wit. Dr. Johnson, Milton, Chaucer,
and Burns had it. Unless we had Boswell,
we should hardly know how to account for
Johnson's fame, his wit is so muffled and
choked in his scholastic style. Yet it animates
that, and makes his opinions real.
Aunt Mary has it, and can write scrap letters.
Who has it, need never write anything but
scraps.
Henry Thoreau has it.
In this kingdom of illusion life is a dream, in


1853] THOREAU. QUOTATION 415
the language of the ancient, — we change only
from bed to bed.'....
Henry Thoreau says he values only the man
who goes directly to his needs; who, wanting
wood, goes to the woods and brings it home; or
to the river, and collects the drift, and brings it
in his boat to his door, and burns it: not him who
keeps shop, that he may buy wood. One is pleas-
ing to reason and imagination; the other not.
[Here follows much that is printed in “Quo-
tation and Originality” (Letters and Social Aims,
p. 197).]
Quotation. Admirable mimicks have nothing
of their own. And in every kind of parasite, when
Nature has finished an excellent sucking-pipe
to tap another animal, the self-supplying organs
wither and dwindle as being superfluous : “et
quand ils cessent d'être le personnage qu'ils ont
choisi, et qui vous amuse tant, ils deviennent insip-
ides et tristes, parce qu'ils ne sont plus qu'eux.”
— Grimm, part 2, vol. i, p. 434.
i I often need the device of ascribing my sen-
tence to another, in order to give it weight. Car-
lyle does so with Teufelsdröckh.
1 See “ Illusions " (Conduct of Life, p. 322).


416
JOURNAL [ACE 50
“God save the King,' it seems, has been, at
last, ascertained to have been composed by a man
of the name of John Bull in the time of James I.”
- Moore's Diary, vol. iv, p. 148.
The English despair of the heart; Thackeray
does; seems to think God has made no allowance
for it in his universe; so he renounces ideals and
accepts London;—so thought Elizabeth Hoar,
or the like of this.
But I thought, how these antagonistic, bornés,
japanning English, as they build Birmingham
everywhere, as they trample on nationalities to
reproduce London and the Londoner in Europe,
in Asia, in America, so they feel and resent the
hostility of ideas, of poetry, of religion,' ...
The Englishman sits there full of his own af-
fairs. He has an oppressive personality and with
the best faith in the world, speaking or silent,
puts upon the company with the importance of
his things. If you could open his eyes to the
insignificance of Oxford and London, Peel and
Paxton, Rothschild and Manchester, on any true
scale, you would shock him to the point of jeop-
ardizing his human spirits and efficiency.
i For the rest of the paragraph, see English Traits (p. 160).


1853) POETRY'S DECLINE. FACT 417
English personality. I wonder what is that
chemical element which so differences the Eng-
lishman from the Yankee. It sculptures his large
head and bust, and gives the firm lines of strength
and the repose of felt superiority.
But the triumph of culture is to overpower na-
tionality, by importing the flower of each coun-
try's genius into the humanity of a gentleman.
Poetry. What is called the Revival of Letters,
or the letting-in of Hebrew and of Greek mind
on the Gothic brain, wrought this miracle, and
produced the English inspiration, which culmi-
nated in Shakspeare. For two centuries England
was philosophic, religious, poetic: as that influ-
ence declined, it cooled common sense into ma-
terialism again, and lost the fine power of transi-
tion, of imagination, and unity; lost profoundness
and connection. And a mind with this endow-
ment, like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Swedenborg,
is not only ungenial, but unintelligible. Shak-
speare's transcendences are only pardoned for his
perfect objectiveness.
The English mind now is superstitious before
facts, facts, they make a great ado about a truth.
The oldest, mustiest formularies we expect from
them, and find; no deep aperçu, no all-binding


418
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
theory, no glimpse of distant relations, and the
quoddam vinculum. There is poor-smell, and
learned trifling, and Locke instead of Berkeley.'
Books. Resources for a rainy day. Read Dry-
den's Aurungzebe (see Moore, Diary, iv, 306).
Sir Fulke Greville's Life of Sir P. Sidney. Pre-
sident Hénault, Abrégé chronologique de l'histoire
de France. Galiani: Dialogues sur le commerce des
blés.
The meaning of the famous saying of Jacobiº
(and of Mr. Dean) is the fact that the poet
sprains or strains himself by attempting too
much; he tries to reach the people, instead of
contenting himself with the temperate expression
of what he knows. Sing he must and should, but
not ballads; sing, but for gods or demigods. He
need not transform himself into Punch and Judy.
A man must not be a proletary or breeder, but
only by mere superfluity of his strength he be-
gets Messiahs. He relieves himself, and makes a
world.
i Some sentences of the above entry are found in a different
connection in English Traits (p. 235).
2 “When a man has fully expressed his thought he has
somewhat less possession of it." - FRIEDRICH HEINRICH JACOBI.


1853) SUNSET. ALGEBRAIC X 419
Solitude of mind endangered in America by
too much demonstration.
Look at the sunset when you are distant half
a mile from the village, and I fear you will for-
get your engagement to the tea-party. That tint
has a dispersive power not only of memory, but
of duty. But the city lives by remembering.
The main question of any person whatever
is, Does he respect himself? Then I have no op-
tion. The Universe will respect him. Mirabeau
said of Robespierre, “That man will go far, he
believes what he says.”
Wn
A hypothesis, or algebraic x, or unknown
quantity, must be signified until the truth can
be arrived at. We are made logical, and are sure
the missing link is there, though latent. We use
semblances of logic,' . . . Expansion, warmth,
power, belong to every truth. The poet knows
the missing link at once, as the lapidary knows
the true stone from glass and paste.
I call those persons who can make a general
remark, provided also they have an equal spirit,
I See “ Poetry and Imagination” (Letters and Social
Aims, p. 10).


420
* JOURNAL [AGE 50
aristocrats. All the rest, in palaces or in lanes,
are snobs, to use the vulgar phrase.
Thus Picard, who knows how to measure a de-
gree on the earth's surface; Vauban, who knows
how to make a river and the rain avail to make
fountains at Versailles; Cuvier, who sees his
thought classify the creation anew; Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire, Laplace, Napoleon, I call nobles.
All the grands seigneurs who prate after them
are rabble. I call these fellows nobles because
they know something originally of the world.
If the sun were extinguished and the solar sys-
tem deranged, they could begin to replace it.
The town is the unit of the Republic. The
New England States found their constitutions
on towns, and not on committees, which district-
ing leads to and is. And thus are politics the
school of the people, the game which every one
of them learns to play. And therefore they are
all skilful in California, or on Robinson Crusoe's
Island, instantly to erect a working government,
as French and Germans are not. In the West-
ern States and in New York and Pennsylvania,
the town system is not the base, and therefore
the expenditure of the legislature is not economi-
cal, but prodigal. By district, or whatever throws


1853) SAXON AND LATIN. IDEAS 42 1
the election into hands of committees, men are
elected, who could not get the votes of those to
whom they are best known.
I neglected to set down among the antagon-
isms of England, that of the Language, which
composes out of its Saxon and Latin threads a
perpetual harmony. In all English rhetoric we
use alternately a Saxon and a Roman word;
often, two Saxon, but never willingly or wisely
two Roman: e.g. “A popular body of four
hundred men.” “ A correct and manly debater."
Mystic or theist never scared by any start-
ling materialism. He knows the laws of gravi-
tation and of repulsion are deaf to French talkers,
be they never so witty. And it is characteristic
of the Teutonic mind to prefer the idea to the
phenomenon, and of the Celtic, to prefer the
phenomenon to the idea.
Higher yet, shall I say, is it to prefer the
idea or power to the thought that is, to the
i Because this love of Saxon words was so strong in Mr.
Emerson this passage is given, although the substance, quite
differently expressed, is printed. He would never allow his
children to use the word " commence” wbich they brought
home from school. (See English Traits, p. 235.)


422
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
idea once individualized or domesticated in one
man's mind, as Shakspeare or Plato.
Malthus existed to say, Population outruns
food: Owen existed to say, “ Given the circum-
stance, the man is given. I can educate a tiger”:
Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond :
Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to
the attractions ; Bentham, The greatest good of
the greatest number. But what do you exist to
say?
INICI
WC
We can do nothing without the shadow. The
sun were insipid if the universe was not
opaque.' ...
There's more memory in the world than we
allow for; other things remember, as well as
you. Gold always remembers how it was got,
and curses or blesses according to the 'manner
of its coming.
Ca
I like to hear of any strength, and, as soon
as they speak of the malignity of Swift, we prick
up our ears. I fear there is not strength enough
in America that any body can be qualified as
1 For the rest of the paragraph, see « Considerations by the
Way” (Conduct of Life, p. 255).


1853] A DISCIPLE'S PRAISE 423
malignant. Pâles filles du nord, vous n'êtes pas mes
sæurs.' Seems to me, the plant man has more
vigor, more means, in Europe, and permits
more absolute action.
Excellent X, if I could write a comedy, should
be the hero. He came with German enthusiasm
sparkling out of his black eyes, and Miss Some-
what of Georgia wrote that, if ever angel spoke
in man, it was he. He came up country and
Mrs. S. and Miss W. were at his feet. J. was
so affected by his eloquence that she could not
speak to him. He complained and scolded to
Mrs. S. that J. would not be acquainted with
him, that he could not be acquainted with her.
Well, at last they got acquainted, and he told
J. that she was his ideal of woman, and came
daily there. She made him cakes and dinners
and warmed his feet, and sat up nights, and
stayed at home Sundays to make his shirts, and
make him fine. One day he came home to
Concord, delighted with the notice of his lec-
ture in the Transcript, showing it to all ; fancied
i It does not appear whence comes this line, but it is evi-
dently the source, in « The Romany Girl," of
Pale Northern girls, you scorn our race.
(Poems, p. 227.)


424
JOURNAL (AGE 50
that Mr. R. or Miss P. or even L. [in Boston
or Cambridge] might have done it. Could J.
have any possible idea who had written it?
“Why, yes,” said the happy J., “I have some
idea, — for I wrote it myself." X was aghast.
“Never breathe that you wrote it,” he gasped
out with passionate solemnity, being infinitely
mortified that no distinguished town-body had
been found to trumpet his fame.
was
Wendell Holmes, when I offered to go to his
lecture on Wordsworth, said, “I entreat you not
to go. I am forced to study effects. You and
others may be able to combine popular effect
with the exhibition of truths. I cannot. I am
compelled to study effects.” The other day,
Henry Thoreau was speaking to me about my
lecture on the Anglo-American, and regretting
that whatever was written for a lecture, or what-
ever succeeded with the audience was bad, etc.
I said, I am ambitious to write something which
all can read, like Robinson Crusoe. And when
I have written a paper or a book, I see with
regret that it is not solid, with a right material-
istic treatment, which delights everybody. Henry
objected, of course, and vaunted the better lec-
tures which only reached a few persons. Well,


1853) THOREAU POSED. WOMEN 425
yesterday, he came here, and at supper Edith,
understanding that he was to lecture at the Ly-
ceum, sharply asked him, “ Whether his lecture
would be a nice interesting story, such as she
wanted to hear, or whether it was of those old
philosophical things that she did not care about?"
Henry instantly turned to her, and bethought
himself, and I saw was trying to believe that he
had matter that might fit Edith and Edward,
who were to sit up and go to the lecture, if it
was a good one for them.
When some one offered Agassiz a glass of
water, he said that he did not know whether he
had ever drank a glass of that liquid before he
came to this country.
Women teach us how much! We wish to
please them, and say something they will like
to hear, and not weary them: and by often
meeting them we gain practice and skill in
this.
vernm
“Such is the nature of modern governments
that money is at once the most dangerous wea-
pon and the strongest curb of despotism. The
expenses of States exceeding always their reve-


426
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
nues, they have a constant need of credit, which,
subject itself to opinion, puts the potentate into
dependence on those whom he rules. When
money is wanted, it must be borrowed. But it is
confidence which lends; force can do nothing,
for money can hide: thus credit favors disorder;
disorder kills credit; the same causes operate
to make the people never so happy nor so un-
happy as they should be.” — FRIEDRICH MEL-
CHIOR GRIMM.
The sciolist oration. The young sciolist learns
to say, What is true in this is not new, and what
is new is not true; and of Spanish literature, that
the only good book is that which shows the
worthlessness of all the rest.
English results. England an island famous for
immortal laws and for sentiments of freedom
which none can forget.
“Hume's History could be entitled, The
History of English Passions, By the Human
Reason.” — CERUTTI.
“The poet wounded,” says Firdousi, “writes
a satire, and it remains to the day of the Re-
surrection."


1853) MADAM EMERSON'S DEATH 427
Fate makes, say the Turks, that a man should
not believe his own eyes.
[On the 16th of November, Mr. Emerson's
mother — Madam Emerson, as she was usually
called - died; a lady of character and dignity, .
combined with sweetness and piety. She had been
forty-two years a widow, and had brought up her
five sons who survived their infancy in such a
manner as always to keep their devoted love
and reverence.
In a letter to Rev. William H. Furness, dated
December 18, 1853, Mr. Emerson wrote:-
You speak of my Mother. I cannot tell you
how much my house has suffered by the loss
of that one more room, one more home in it
for me and each of us. Mamma was made to
live, and her death at eighty-five years took us
by surprise, and my wife mourns so many un-
done things. There was something majestic in
one of those old strong frames built to live so
tranquilly, usefully, and kindly. The later gen-
eration seem to me to spend faster. But one .
of these days we too shall be better than now.
Then, now, and ever,
Your affectionate
WALDO EMERSON.
urns SO


428
[AGE 50
JOURNAL
To Carlyle he wrote: “My Mother died in
my house, in November, who had lived with
me all my life and kept her heart and mind
clear, and her own until the end. It is very ne-
cessary that we should have Mothers, - we that
read and write, - to keep us from becoming pa-
per. I had found that age did not make that
she should die without causing me pain. In my
journeying lately, when I think of home my
heart is taken out.”]
(From DO)
Elizabeth Hoar said, the reason why Mother's
chamber was always radiant was that the pure
in heart shall see God: and she wished so much
to show this fact to the frivolous little woman
who pretended sympathy when she died.
Dr. Frothingham told me that the Latin verse
which he appended to his obituary notice of my
mother was one which he had read on the tomb
of the wife of Charlemagne, in a chapel at May-
ence, and it struck him as very tender. He had
never seen it elsewhere:-
Spiritus hæres sit patriæ quæ tristia nescit.'
The poet cannot make his thought available
1 May her soul inherit the land which knows no sorrow.


1853] THE POET. MAJORITIES 429
for a law in the statute-book, much less for a
practical end in farming or trading. What then?
-every thought is practical at last. Let him com-
fort himself that this respects a larger legislation
and larger economy than now obtain, and that,
if he is faithful to it, it will introduce him to that
better world of which it is the sure announcement.
The Majority. Alas for the majority! that old
inevitable dupe and victim. What a dreary
Iliad of woes it goes wailing and mad withal.
Some dog of a Cleon or Robespierre or Doug-
las or Butler' is always riding it to ruin.
(From HO)
[Mr. Emerson was writing for his course of
the next winter a lecture called “France, or Ur-
banity.” A great many quotations from French
statesmen or authors follow, but a few of which
are given.]
[December.]
France. God will have life to be real, we will
be damned but it shall be theatrical.
Mirabeau wrote to Lafayette, “Vos grandes
qualités ont besoin de mon impulsion; mon im-
This last name is pencilled in later.


430
JOURNAL (AGE 50
pulsion a besoin de vos grandes qualités ... et
vous ne voyez pas qu'il faut que vous m'épousiez,
et me croyiez en raison de ce que vos stupides par-
tisans m'ont plus décrié. Ab! vous forfaites à
votre destinée."
At court, said Mirabeau, they wish to find
for their service, “ des êtres amphibies, qui, avec
le talent d'un homme, eussent l'âme d'un laquais.
Ce qui les perdra irrémédiablement, c'est d'avoir
peur des hommes, et de transporter toujours les
petites repugnances et les frèles attraits d'un autre
ordre des choses dans celui où ce qu'il y a de plus
fort ne l'est pas encore assez."
Mirabeau's father described him as having
derived from his fathers the gift of command, and
of adding to it that terrible gift of familiarity.
“Eb quoi !” said Mirabeau, “en nul pays du
monde la balle ne viendra-t-elle donc au joueur!”
The last billet of Mirabeau to the Comte de
la Marche, nine days before his death, ends with
these words,“ O légère et trois fois légère nation!”
Notes for French Lecture.
Nationality.
True respect for learning and talent.
Napoleon inexhaustible as Plutarch's heroes.
Every new book or trait or mot interesting.


eve
1853] NOTES ON FRANCE 431
French inconsequent, English logical.
I find a secondary tone in everything written
in the French journals. The national vanity ap-
pears. England is never out of mind.
Napoleon's devouring eye, before which no-
thing but reality could stand.
French have gained so much. Before the re-
volution women were harnessed in the team with
animals, and felt the whip. (Dumont apud De
Quincey.)
The hopeless exclusion of the lower class, per-
mitted only to offer their money on their knees,
permitted only to die in the army; had no law,
but chicane. Now they have a code, and a French
lawyer can tell what the statute is.
Rien en relief, was Madame de Geoffrin's
motto. Voilà qui est bien.
Grimm“ déteste la méthode. C'est la pédanterie
des lettres ; ceux qui ne savent qu'arranger feraient
aussi bien de rester en repos,” etc.
“It is natural, the language of the most social
people in the world; the language of the nation
which speaks more than it thinks; a nation
which needs to speak in order to think, and
which thinks only to speak, ought to be the
most dialoguing language. ...
“I observe that the dominant character of


432
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
the French still pierces. They are talkers, rea-
soners, jokers, by essence ; a bad picture gives
rise to a good pamphlet. Thus you shall speak
better of the arts than you shall ever do in them.
It will be found, at the end of the reckoning in
some ages, that you will have reasoned best and
best discussed what all other nations shall have
best done. Cherish, then, printing; it is your
lot in the world.” — GALIANI.
All Europe was like a park to Balzac where
to meet his friends and admirers, — Poland,
Bohemia, Russia, Italy, Spain, Sweden.
“Il y a dans la puissance des Français, il y a
dans leur caractère, il y a dans leur langue surtout,
une certaine force, prosélytique, qui passe l'imagi-
nation. La nation entière n'est qu'une vaste pro-
pagande.” – DE MAISTRE.
France. Rabelais, Montaigne, Pascal, La Fon-
taine, Fénelon, Molière, Montesquieu, Sand,
Béranger, De Staël.
“ Tout est spectacle pour une telle ville, — même
sa propre bumiliation.” — LAMARTINE, Paris, 31
Mars, 1814.
“Une question d'égalité, en un mot : c'est sur
ce conflit infiniment plus que sur la liberté à ja-


1853] FRANCE AND ENGLAND 433
mais inintelligible pour les Français, qu'a porté et
que reposera jusqu'à la fin, la révolution.” —
MALLET DU PAN.
Would you send a youth to learn Christianity
or ethics or heroism in France ?
In England, they spend for comfort; in France,
for pleasure; and the lighter-minded English go
to France, or establish a little France in England;
and the soberer French, the Huguenot or Hu-
guenotish, make a little England around them in
France.
I find the French awakening to alarm on the
manifest decay of the Latin nations, before the
prodigious growth of the Saxon race. Bonaparte
said, “In twenty-five years the United States will
write the treaties of Europe"; and Xavier Rai-
mond, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, tries to
rouse his countrymen to the fact that they have
lost the world.
Of Phillips, Garrison, and others I have al-
ways the feeling that they may wake up some
morning and find that they have made a capi-
tal mistake, and are not the persons they took
themselves for. Very dangerous is this thor-


434
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
oughly social and related life, whether antagon-
istic or coöperative. In a lonely world, or a world
with half a dozen inhabitants, these would find
nothing to do.
The first discovery I made of Phillips was,
that while I admired his eloquence, I had not the
faintest wish to meet the man. He had only a
platform-existence, and no personality. Mere
mouthpieces of a party ; take away the party and
they shrivel and vanish.
They are inestimable for workers on audi-
ences; but for a private conversation, one to one,
I much prefer to take my chance with that boy
in the corner.
The Liberator is a scold. A sibyl is quite
another thing.
1
The age has an engine, but no engineer.
[Lecturing meantime on“ the Anglo-Saxon”
and “the Anglo-American,” Mr. Emerson was,
as time served, preparing his English Traits,
which, however, was not published until 1856.
A great part of the Journals VS and HO
have been omitted as consisting of matter there
printed.]


1853]
READING
435
AUTHORS OR Books QUOTED OR REFERRED TO
IN JOURNAL FOR 1853
Simonides; Lucan, Pbarsalia; Tacitus, Ger-
mania;
Ossian; Taliessin, and Welsh Triad, apud
Davies; Llewarch Hen, apud Owen;
Alcuin; Asser, Life of King Alfred; Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle; Firdousi ; Sbab Nameb;
Snorri Sturlason, Younger Edda apud Laing;
Giraldus Cambrensis apud Camden, Britannia;
Henry of Huntingdon, Chronicle ; Six Old Eng-
lisb Chronicles (Bohn); Froissart, Cbronicle;
Copernicus; Sir Thomas More; Sir Fulke
Greville, Life of Sidney; John Bolland, Acta
Sanctorum;
Sir Kenelm Digby, Bodies and Soules ; Claren-
don; Jean Picard ; La Fontaine ; Pascal;
Dryden, Aurungzebe; Leeuwenhoek; Locke;
Vauban; Richard Verstegan, Restauration des
notions erronées concernant la tres noble et tres
renommée nation Anglaise; Thomas Ryme,
Fædera;
Defoe; Montesquieu, Causeries ; Spence,
Anecdotes ;
Lord Mansfield; Hume; Diderot; William
Shenstone apud Mirabeau ; Malesherbes; Fried-


436
[AGE 50
JOURNAL
rich Melchior Grimm, Correspondance littéraire,
etc. ; William Gilpin, Forest Scenery and Western
Tour; Mallet, Northern Antiquities; Cerutti,
Mémoire pour le peuple français ; Sir Philip
Francis (Junius?); Paley;Mirabeau, Correspond-
ence with La Marck; Abbé Galiani ; Laplace;
Lord Eldon, Letters, apud Twiss; Sir Na-
thaniel William Wraxall, Our Own Times ;
Thomas Taylor ; Burns; André Chenier ; Sam-
uel Laing, Heimskringla; Mackintosh, History
of England;
Malthus; Chateaubriand ; Saint-Just, Esprit
de la Révolution ; Canning; Cuvier; Fourier ;
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire ; Jeffrey;
Luttrel, apud Moore ; Hallam; Brougham;
Béranger; Moore, Diary; William Spence; Jean
Bonald; Guizot; De Quincey; Palmerston ;
Peel; Haydon;
Lamartine; Thierry, Norman Conquest; Lyell;
Michelet, Histoire de France; Balzac; Dr.
Henry MacCormac; J. J. Ampère; Henry
Taylor, Notes from Life ; De Noailles, Histoire
de Madame de Maintenon ; Sir Joseph Whit-
worth; Richard Owen ;
William Lloyd Garrison; Frederick H.
Hedge; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi;
Horatio Greenough, Memorial of ; J. S. Mill,
arris


ommerce
1953)
READING
437
Political Economy ; Abd-el-Kader, apud Daumas,
Les Chevaux du Sabara; Guyot, Earth and Man;
Hénault, Abrégé chronologique de l'histoire de
France ; Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des
blés;
! Benjamin Thorpe, Northern Mythology;
Twiss, Life and Correspondence of Lord Eldon ;
Mauvel, Life of Wellington ; Dickens ;
Dr. Charles T. Jackson ; Wendell Phillips;
A. J. Downing, On Gardening ; Toussenel, Pas-
sional Zoology; Clough ; Seaman, Progress of Na.
tions; Ernest Renan.





JOURNAL
LECTURES FAR AND NEAR
SEVENTH OF MARCH
ADDRESS ON FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW
NEOPLATONISTS
ENGLAND, HER WRITERS, JUDGES
AND STATESMEN
WILLIAMSTOWN COLLEGE
ADDRESS
KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL





JOURNAL XLV
1854
(From. Journals HO, DO and 10)
[MR. EMERSON seems to have given no course
of lectures in Boston in this year, but in Janu-
ary gave five lectures in Philadelphia; I,“ Norse-
man, or English Influence in Civilization ”;
II (?); III, “Poetry and English Poetry”
(much of this printed later as “Poetry and Im-
agination ” in Letters and Social Aims); IV,
“Manners ” (?) or “Behavior”; V,“ France,
or Urbanity.” An abstract of the last is given
by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, vol. ii, Appendix
F, pp. 755-757. In the same month he lectured
in New York City and in many towns in that
state and in New Jersey, and last in Detroit.
February ist found him in Michigan, whence
he went to lecture in Chicago and its neighbor-
hood, also in Milwaukee and Beloit, and, on his
homeward way, in towns in New York.]
(From HO)
January, 1854.
At Jackson, Michigan, Mr. Davis, I believe,
a lawyer of Detroit, said to me, on coming out


442
JOURNAL [AGE 50
of the lecture-room, “Mr. Emerson, I see that
you never learned to write from any book.”
Mem. In autobiography, to write Dr. Gam-
aliel Bradford's lines written at the bottom of
my school-boy poem on “ Solitude," Dr. Brad-
ford being then usher in the Latin School.'
There is nobody in Washington who can ex-
plain this Nebraska business ’ to the people, —
i Mr. Emerson set down in a special notebook the dates of
the leading events of his life and that of his family, and also
copied into it entries made during the years in the Journals
(most of them included in these volumes) that bore on his
character and life's experiences. These were usually from his
own point of view, sometimes from that of others. The pas-
sage he alludes to is as follows: “When I had written my
poem on · Solitude' for the annual Exhibition at the Boston
Latin School, in August, 1816 or 1817, Dr. Gamaliel Brad-
ford, who was usher in the school, asked me to show it to
him. He wrote in pencil at the bottom these lines :-
Welcome to our sacred hill,
Drink freely of Apollo's rill,
And claim the right the god to Genius gave
To sip divine Castalia's consecrated wave."
2 In this month Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Sen-
ate Committee on territories, reported a bill for the organiza-
tion of two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. By this bill
the Missouri Compromise Bill prohibiting slavery north of lati-
tude 36° 30' was repealeds and the people of these new ter-
ritories were free to determine whether or not slavery should


ma
1854) NEBRASKA. WISCONSIN 443
nobody of weight. And nobody of any import-
ance on the bad side. It is only done by Doug-
las and his accomplices by calculation on the
brutal ignorance of the people, upon the wretched
masses of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Ken-
tucky, and so on, people who can't read or know
anything beyond what the village democrat tells
them. But what effrontery it required to fly in
the face of what was supposed settled law, and
how it shows that we have no guards whatever,
that there is no proposition whatever, that is too
audacious to be offered us by the Southerner.
I found, in Wisconsin, that the world was laid
down in large lots. The member of Congress
there said that, up in the pine country, the
trees were so large, and so many of them, that
a man could not walk in the forest, and it was
necessary to wade up the streams. Dr. Welsh
at La Salle told me that the prairie grass there
was over the tops of carriages, or higher than
be permitted there. Great excitement prevailed during this
year on this subject and the bill was finally passed. Of this
measure Mr. Emerson, writing to Carlyle, said, “ America
is growing furiously, town and state; new Kansas, new Ne-
braska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a
wretched destiny for them already at Washington. The poli-
ticians shall be sodden, the States escape, please God!”


444
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
the head of a man riding on horseback, so that
really a man not accustomed to the prairie could
easily get lost in the grass !
[Of this trip Mr. Emerson, in a letter to Car-
lyle, said, “I went out Northwest to great coun-
tries which I had not visited before ; rode one
day — fault of broken railroads — in a sleigh,
sixty-five miles through the snow, by Lake
Michigan (seeing how prairies and oak-openings
look in winter) to reach Milwaukee. “The world
there was done up in larger lots,' as a settler
told me. The farmer, as he is now a colonist
and has drawn from his local necessities great
stores of energy, is interesting and makes the
heroic age for Wisconsin. He lives on venison
and quails. I was made much of as the only
man of the pen within five hundred miles,
and by rarity worth more than venison and
quails."]
Metres. I amuse myself often, as I walk, with
humming the rhythm of the decasyllabic quat-
rain,... or other rhythms,'... I find a wonder-
ful charm, heroic, and especially deeply pathetic
or plaintive in cadences, and say to myself, Ah,
i See “ Poetry and Imagination” (Letters and Social
Aims, p. 46).


1854) KNOWLEDGE. REALISM 445
happy! if one could fill these small measures
with words approaching to the power of these
beats!
The man thinks he can know this or that, by
words and writing. It can only be known or
done organically. He must plunge into the uni-
verse, and live in its forms, - sink to rise.
None any work can frame
Unless himself become the same.
The first men saw heavens and earths, saw
noble instruments of noble souls; we see rail-
roads, banks, and mills. And we pity their pov-
erty. There was as much creative force then as
now, but it made globes instead of waterclosets.
Each sees what he makes.
Realism. We shall pass for what we are. Do
not fear to die because you have not done your
task. Whenever a noble soul comes, the audi-
ence awaits. And he is not judged by his perform-
ance, but by the spirit of his performance. ...
When you hide something we see that you
hide something and usually see what you hide.
There is always admittance for you to the
great, whispered the Muse, for the nobles wish
to be more noble.


446
LAGE 50
JOURNAL
There are no finalities in Nature. Everything
is streaming. The Torricellian tube was thought
to have made a vacuum ; but no; over the mer-
cury is the vapor of mercury, and the mysterious
ether too enters as readily through the pores of
glass as through chimney of a volcano.'
If I come to stoppages, it is I that am want-
ing. To the wise navigator, beyond even the
polar ice is the Polynia, or open water,-a vast
expanse.
Realism in literature. I have no fear but that
the reality I love will yet exist in literature. I do
not go to any pope or president for my list of
books. I read what I like. I learn what I do not
already know. Only those above me can give
me this. They also do as I, - read only such
as know more than they : Thus we all depend
at last on the few heads or the one head that is
nearest to the stars, nearest to the fountains of
all science, and knowledge runs steadily down
from class to class down to the lowest people,
from the highest, as water does.
The simplest forms of botany, as the lichens,
are alike all over the globe: the lichens of Sweden
and Brazil and Massachusetts are the same. So
i Compare “ Illusions” (Conduct of Life, p. 320).


1854) ENGLAND'S TWO NATIONS 447
is it with the simple and grand characters among
men, they do not hold of climate : and so of the
grand ideas of religion and morals; Viasa and
Swedenborg and Pythagoras see the same thing.
Would you know a man's thoughts, — look
at the circle of his friends, and you know all he
likes to think of. Well, is the life of the Boston
patrician so desirable, when you see the grace-
ful fools who make all his company?
'Tis certain, as so many writers agree, there
are two nations in England, but it is not the
Poor and the Rich, as Disraeli the Jew very
nationally thinks; nor Normans and Saxons, as
Turner believes. These are each always becom-
ing the other; but there the two complexions
or two styles of mind, one, the practical finality
class; and the other, the perceptive class with
minds open as the sea, apprehensive, faithful,
and always gathering and transmitting down to
the whole chain of inferior intelligences the
heavenly fluid.
[Mr. Emerson, at the call of the Anti-Slavery
Society of New York, made an address there on
the anniversary of Webster's Seventh of March
Speech in Congress in 1850 (in which he aban-


448
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
doned the Wilmot Proviso against the encroach-
ment of Slavery and justified the Fugitive Slave
Law), his “fall,” as the friends of Freedom in
their bitter sorrow called it. (See Miscellanies.
p. 215, and Whittier's poem “Ichabod.") After
his return to Concord he wrote to a friend, -
March 14th.
I came home near three weeks ago, with good
hope to write a plea for Freedom addressed to
my set; which, of course, like a Divinity Col-
legian's first sermon, was to exhaust the subject
and moral science generally; but I fared much
as these young gentlemen do, got no answer to
my passionate queries — nothing but the echo
of my own cries, and had to carry to New York
a makeshift instead of an oracle. Yet I am still
so foolish as to believe again that the thing I
wished can be done, and I shall not cease to try
- after a time.]
SWE
(From DO)
At New York Tabernacle, on the 7th March,
I saw the great audience with dismay, and told
the bragging secretary that I was most thank-
ful to those who stayed at home; every auditor
was a new affliction, and if all had stayed away,
S


1854) MAJORITY. WEALTH 449
by rain, or preoccupation, I had been best
pleased.
Majority. Alas for the majority, that old, in-
evitable dupe and victim. What a dreary Iliad
of woes it goes wailing and mad withal. Some
dog of a Cleon or Robespierre or Douglas is
always riding it to ruin.
Culture teaches to omit the unnecessary word
and to say the greatest things in the simplest
way. “ Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire.”
The lesson of these days is the vulgarity of
wealth. We know that wealth will vote for the
same thing which the worst and meanest of the
people vote for. Wealth will vote for rum, will
vote for tyranny, will vote for slavery, will vote
against the ballot, will vote against international
copyright, will vote against schools, colleges, or
any high direction of public money.
Plainly Boston does not wish liberty, and can
only be pushed and tricked into a rescue of a
slave. Its attitude as loving liberty is affected
and theatrical. Do not then force it to assume
a false position which it will not maintain. Rather
let the facts appear, and leave it to the natural


450
JOURNAL (AGE 50
aggressions and familiarities of the beast it loves,
until it gets well bitten and torn by the dear
wolf; perchance it may not be too late to turn
and kill its deceiver.
The invisible gas that we breathe in this room
we know, if pent, has an elasticity that will lift
the Appalachian Range as easily as a scrap of
down; and a thought carries nations of men and
ages of time on its shoulders.
Henry Thoreau charged Blake, if he could
not do hard tasks, to take the soft ones, and
when he liked anything, if it was only a picture
or a tune, to stay by it, find out what he liked,
and draw that sense or meaning out of it, and
do that: harden it, somehow, and make it his
own. Blake thought and thought on this, and
wrote afterwards to Henry, that he had got his
first glimpse of heaven. Henry was a good phy-
sician.
(From IO)
Ah yet, though all the world forsake,
Tho' fortune clip my wings,
I will not cramp my heart, nor take
Half-views of men and things.
Let Whig and Tory stir their blood,


1854) TENNYSON. PLOTINUS 451
There must be stormy weather ;
But for some true result of good
All parties work together.
This whole wide earth of light and shade
Comes out a perfect round.
· Tennyson.
Science. “In the government of states the
power of science makes part of the science of
power.” — NAPOLEON.
Plotinus did not hastily disclose to every one
the syllogistic necessities which were latent in
his discourse.
“I endeavored to show,” says Porphyry,
“that intellections are external to intellect.”
[The following sentences are all from Ploti-
nus.]
“ All the gods are venerable and beautiful,
and their beauty is immense.”
“Nothing that is truly beautiful externally, is
internally deformed.”
Of Intellect. “It is ours when we use it, but
not ours when we do not use it.”


452
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
“Necessity is in intellect, but persuasion in
soul.”
“ Intellect is not at all in want of another life,
or of other things.”
“God is not external to any one, but is pre-
sent with all things, though they are ignorant
that he is so.”
The existence of evil and malignant men does
not depend on themselves or on men; it indi-
cates the virulence that still remains uncured in
the universe, uncured and corrupting, and hurl-
ing out these pestilent rats and tigers, and men
rat-like and wolf-like.
• Synesius said, “The calamities of nations are
the banquets of evil dæmons.” They hurl out,
now a soldier, now a jesuit, and now an editor,
a glozing democrat, as an instrument of the evil
which they inflict on mankind.
To the rapping tables, I say, as Percy to his
Kate, —
I well believe
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,
And so far will I trust thee, gentle (wood).
an race
nea
The human race are a near-sighted people.
We can see well into the past; we can see well
see


453
1854)
TO-DAY. ART
into the Dark Ages ; we can guess shrewdly into
the future. Every man forms some probable
sketch of the politics and mechanics and morals
to which men tend. But that which is rolled up
and muffled in impenetrable folds is To-day.
See in Evelyn's Diary (vol. I, p. 147) the story
of the unquenchable lamp found in a sepulchre
in the time of Paul III.
“The true and mature spirit of the age al-
ways elects an advocate who does not look
backward with longing eyes, and who always,
as the world thinks, arises an hour too soon.”
- Wall.'
“ Nature herself is to be imitated, not an
artist,” said Eupompus to Lysippus. “Excel-
lence is thy aim.” (Quoted by Mr. Wall from
Vasari.)
Ut pictura, poesis. “ Painting is silent poetry;
poetry, speaking painting,” is ascribed to Si-
monides.
1 William Wall, of New Bedford, an artist often referred
to in Mr. Emerson's Journal of 1833 as a helpful friend in
Italy. He painted the copy of the Three Fates (then ascribed
to Michael Angelo) which hangs in Mr. Emerson's study.


454
JOURNAL (AGE 50
don
Hallam. Hallam leaves out all those writers
I read. His Latimer is not the good bishop,
but I know not what writer of Latin. Giordano
Bruno, Behmen, Van Helmont, Digby, Lord
Herbert, George Herbert, Henry More, Swe-
denborg, - in vain you look in his pages for
adequate mention of these men, for whose sake
I want a history of literature: all these he
passes, or names them for something else than
their real merit, namely, their originality and
faithful striving to write a line of the real his-
tory of the world."
The Englishman is with difficulty ideal.'...
Shakspeare even is so exact, and surrendered on
the whole to the tastes of an audience, and so
far from the world-building freedom and sim-
plicity of the Oriental sages. William Law deals
with English method, tries to make the wild
inspirations of Behmen grind a barrel organ.
Thomas Taylor masquerades as Alexandrian
Greek. Greaves and Lane: tried hard to be spir-
I A few pages later there is a more favorable account of
Hallam. Compare also what is said of him in English Traits,
p. 245.
2 Compare English Traits, p. 252.
3 Mr. Alcott's admirers and friends, referred to in earlier
Journals.


1854) BROWNING. TENNYSON 455
itualists, but the English coat was too strait for
them.
Browning is ingenious. Tennyson is the more
public soul, walks on the ecliptic road, the path
of gods and souls, and what he says is the ex-
pression of his contemporaries. Like Burke, or
Mirabeau, he says better than all men think.
Like these men, he is content to think and
speak a sort of King's speech, embodying the
sense of well-bred successful men, and by no
means of the best and highest men : he speaks
the sense of the day, and not the sense of
grand men, the sense of the first class, identical
in all ages. But for poetic expression, it is
plain that now and then a man hits, by the
health of his sensibility, the right key, and so
speaks that every body around him or after
him, aiming to talk of and to the times, is forced
to quote him, or falls inevitably into his manner
and phrase. It is like Mr. Whitworth's famous
dividing-machine, which can divide or mark off a
metallic bar with mathematical precision to the
millionth of an inch.
means
DUS
Sir Christopher Wren said, “ Bernini showed
me on five little pieces of paper his façade of
the Louvre. I would have given my skin for a


456
JOURNAL (AGE 50
copy of it.” Louis XIV, however, did not build
it, but accepted another plan.
Shall we judge the country by the majority
or by the minority ? Certainly, by the minor-
ity. The mass are animal, in state of pupilage,
and nearer the chimpanzee. We are used as
brute atoms, until we think. Then we instantly
use self-control, and control others.
In astronomy, vast distance; but we never
go into a foreign system.'...
Of reading. I once interpreted the law of
Adrastia,“ that he who had any truth should be
safe from harm until another period,” as pro-
nounced of originators. But I have discovered
that the profound satisfactions — which I take
to be the sentence of Adrastia itself, - belong
to the truth received from another soul; come
to us in reading, as well as in thinking.
'Tis curious that one should owe such fine
things to Bonaparte. But there has been no bet-
ter critic - even literary critic — in these days,
and Carlyle must measure his pretensions not
i The passage is printed in Natural History of Intellect,
p. 7.


1854) NAPOLEON AS CRITIC 457
by Jeffrey or Mackintosh, not even by Cole-
ridge or Goethe, but by Bonaparte. The best
example I think of, at this moment, of Bona-
parte's is contained in Causeries du Lundi, vol.
8, p. 310.
“ Benjamin Constant a fait une tragédie et une
poétique. Ces gens-là veulent écrire, et n'ont pas
fait les premières études de littérature. Qu'il lise
les poétiques, celle d' Aristote. Ce n'est pas arbi-
trairement que la tragédie borne l'action à vingt
quatre beures; c'est qu'elle prend les passions à
leur maximum, à leur plus baut degré d'intensité,
à ce point où il ne leur est possible ni de souffrir
de distraction, ni de supporter une plus longue
durée. Il veut qu'on mange dans l'action : il
s'agit bien de pareilles choses: quand l'action com-
mence, les acteurs sont en émoi; au troisième acte,
ils sont en sueur, tout en nage au dernier.”
Man is as his credence. Swedenborg saw grav-
itation to be only an external of the irresistible
attractions of affection and faith.
Realism. I never take them as theists, or as
spiritualists, because they say they are; but the
frame of their thought is determined by their
credence: and, if you listen wisely, you will hear


458
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
in their very oration on Deity the confession of
a stiff and indigent anthropomorphism. What
they say about spiritualism is all copyslip piety.
Those who stay away from the election think
that one vote will do no good: 'tis but one step
more to think one vote will do no harm.' ...
Do you say that to man on horseback it makes
no difference whether he believes that body
makes soul, or, that soul makes body. O, but
the difference is vast: in the better case, he be-
lieves that man and horse and nature exist to
the highest end, to the highest use only, and not
to foppery at all.
The believer always feels himself held up by
certain eternal threads which spin and hold from
Deity down, whilst the skeptic class is always
peeping after his underpinning.
Drink, hear my counsel, my son, that the world fret
thee not.
Though the heart bleed, let thy lips laugh, like the
wine cup;
Is thy soul hurt, yet dance with the viol-strings :
i See « Fortune of the Republic” (Miscellanies, p. 523).


1854) HAFIZ. PUBLIC OPINION 459
Thou learnest no secret, until thou knowest friend-
ship,
Since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge comes.
Hafiz, ii, 71.
What's the use of telegraph ? what of news-
papers ? (What of waiting to know what the
convention in Ohio, what that in Michigan, is
ready to do?) To know how men feel in Wis-
consin, in Illinois, in Minnesota, I wait for no
mails, I read no telegraphs. I ask my own heart.
If those men are made as I am, if they breathe
the same air, eat the same wheat- or corn-bread,
have wives and children, I know their resent-
ment will boil at this legislation. I know it will
boil until this wrong is righted. The interest of
labor, the self-respect of mankind, that engages
man not to be to man a wolf, secures their ever-
lasting hostility to this shame.
“It is one of the traits of a noble citizen, to
be able to see one layer of public opinion through
another; or, if he do not see it, to trust in God
that it must be there, and act accordingly.” —
LIEBER.
England. The women have no vanity.
The English wish that none but opulent men
should represent them.


460
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
Dumont contrasts the reserve approaching
timidity of the Englishman with the self-confi-
dence of the French. If a hundred persons were
stopped in the streets at London, and as many at
Paris, and each individual invited to undertake
the government, ninety-nine would accept the
offer at Paris, and ninety-nine refuse it at London.
[Mr. Emerson enjoyed the following anec-
dote of an encounter between the President of
the Fitchburg Railroad and an Irish tracklayer
whom he tried to correct.]
Whittemore. You must dig these sleepers out
so and so.
Paddy. I shall do no such thing.
W bittemore. But you must and shall.
Paddy. Who the devil are you?
W bittemore. I am Mr. Whittemore, the
President of this Road.
Paddy. You Mr. Whittemore! You go to
hell !
Wbittemore. My friend, that's the last place
I wish to go to.
Paddy. And it's the last place you will go to.
Hallam is a proof of the English prowess


oevo
CO
1854] HALLAM'S HISTORY 461
to-day. A good mathematician, the historian
of the Middle Ages, and of English liberty, he
has written this History of European Literature
for three centuries. A vast performance attempt-
ing a judgment of every book. He has not
genius, but has a candid mind : the Englishman
is too apparent, the judgments are all dated
from London, and that expansive element which
creates literature is steadily denied. Plato is re-
sisted, and Giordano Bruno, Behmen, Sweden-
borg, Donne. The Quakers or whosoever con-
tains the seed of liberty, power, and truth is
under ban. Yet he lifts himself to own better
than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare ;
and he shows so much more power of appreciat-
ing Milton than Johnson, and shows such true
gentlemanlike and loving esteem for good books,
that I respect him. Shall I say that I often find
a nearer coincidence, and find my own opinions
and criticisms anticipated ?
But at last,“ talis cum sis, utinam noster esses,"
I regret to have all this learning and worth
throw a Birmingham ballot, - to see England
go as by gravitation in her best and noblest sons
always for materialism. Mackintosh, Jeffrey,
Southey, Hallam -- the last the best - vote in-
evitably for Church and State.
ZA


462
JOURNAL
(AGE 50
“Is truth ever barren? ” Then do not ques-
tion the utility of the lovers of ethical or meta-
physical laws.
What a notable green-grocer was spoiled to
make Macaulay !
Solitude. Now and then a man exquisitely
made can and must live alone; but coop up
most men, and you undo them. The King lived
and eat in hall, with men, and understood men,
said Selden.
In democratia, tot possunt esse Nerones quot
sunt oratores qui populo adulantur. Simul plures
sunt in democratia, et quotidie novi suboriuntur. -
Hobbes.
“ Sans la sécurité, il n'y a point de liberté.”
“ Le Premier Consul n'a en besoin que de
ministres qui l'entendissent, jamais de ministres
qui le suppléassent.
“Il n'est pas un bomme de quelque mérite qui
ne préférât, près de Bonaparte l'emploi qui oc-
cupe sous ces yeux, à la grandeur qui en éloigne;
et qui, pour prix d'un long et pénible travail, ne
se sentit mieux récompensé par un travail nouveau,
que par le plus bonorable loisir.” — ROEDERER.
SOUS


1854) CARLYLE. CONTINUITY 463
Bonaparte said, “J'ai plus d'esprit. Et que me
fait votre esprit ? C'est l'esprit de la chose, qu'il
me faut. ...
“Moi, je sais toujours ma position. J'ai toujours
présents mes états de situation. Je n'ai pas de
mémoire pour retenir un vers alexandrin, mais je
n'oublie pas une syllable de mes états de situation.
Je sais toujours la position de mes troupes.”
England makes what a step from Dr. John-
son to Carlyle ! what wealth of thought and sci-
ence, what expansion of views and profounder
resources does the genius and performance of
this last imply! If she can make another step
as large, what new ages open!
May.
If Minerva offered me a gift and an option,
I would say give me continuity. I am tired of
scraps. I do not wish to be a literary or in-
tellectual chiffonier. Away with this Jew's rag-
bag of ends and tufts of brocade, velvet, and
cloth-of-gold; let me spin some yards or miles
of helpful twine, a clew to lead to one kingly
truth, a cord to bind wholesome and belonging
facts.
The Asmodæan feat be mine
To spin my sand heaps into twine.


464
JOURNAL [AGE 50
Change your front. England does not wish re-
volution or to befriend radicals. Therefore you
say, England must fall, because its moderate,
mixed aristocratico-liberal or finality politics will
putitin antagonism with the republicanism when
that comes in. Yes, but England has many
moods, a war-class as well as nobles and mer-
chants. It begun with poverty and piracy and
trade, and has always those elements latent, as
well as gold coaches and heraldry.
It has only to let its fops and bankers succumb
for a time, and its sailors, ploughmen, and bullies
fall to the front. It will prove a stout buccaneer
again, and weather the storm.
England can only fall by suicide. English, the
best of actual nations, and so you see the poor
best you have yet got.
The reason why you visit England, is, as the
epitome of modern times, and the Rome of to-
day.
I think the English have a certain solidarity ;
not an unaccountable sprinkling of great men
here in the midst of a population of dunces, not
a talent for this or that thing, as an idiot is skil-
ful sometimes in bees or in herbs, but what they


1854) ENGLISH THOUGHT 465
have learned they record and incorporate, and
have multitudes sufficiently taught to keep and
use it. What Newton knew is now possessed
by the corps of astronomers at Greenwich and
Slough and Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Hutton, Herschel, Harvey, Hooke, Dalton,
Hunter, Hobbes, Burke, Berkeley, Bentham
were men of ideas.
[Here follow passages on English “ Solidar-
ity” printed in English Traits, and, as illustra-
tions, anecdotes and sayings of Nelson drawn
probably from Southey's biography.]
My Englishman said, “O, it is very healthy
there. They have quantities of children, and all
that sort of thing."
I read that, in the gardens of heaven, when
the children came, the beds of flowers assumed
an unusual splendor, — “at their entrance
seemed to express joy by their increasing
splendor.”
[Here follow lines later used in “May-Day"
(see Poems, pp. 173, 174).]


466
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
As if Time brought a new relay
Of shining maidens every May,
And summer came to ripen maids
To a beauty that not fades.
Those who painted angels and nativities and
descents from the cross, were also writing bio-
graphies and satires, though they knew it not.
U nor
We affirm and affirm, but neither you nor I
know the value of what we say.
The history of humanity is no hopping squib,
, but all its discoveries in science, religion, and art
are consecutive and correlated, - every discov-
ery leading to a new discovery.
Good out of evil.
He that roars for liberty
Faster binds the tyrant's power;
And the tyrant's cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour.
Fill the can, and fill the cup,
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
TENNYSON.


1854) THOREAU. GOLD. VIRGIN 467
The truth that Aies the flowing can
Will haunt the vacant cup.
Tennyson.
Thoreau thinks 't is immoral to dig gold in
California ; immoral to leave creating value, and
go to augmenting the representative of value,
and so altering and diminishing real value, and,
that, of course, the fraud will appear.
I conceive that work to be as innocent as
any other speculating. Every man should do
what he can; and he was created to augment
some real value, and not for a speculator. When
he leaves or postpones (as most men do) his
proper work, and adopts some short or cun- -
ning method, as of watching markets, or farm-
ing in any manner the ignorance of people, as,
in buying by the acre to sell by the foot, he is
fraudulent, he is malefactor, so far; and is bring-
ing society to bankruptcy. But Nature watches
over all this, too, and turns this malfaisance to
some good.'....
The world is divided on the fame of the Virgin
Mary. The Catholics call her“ Mother of God,”
the skeptics think her the natural mother of an
1 The rest of the paragraph is found in “ Considerations
by the Way” (Conduct of Life), pp. 255, 256.


468
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
admirable child. But the last agree with the first
in hailing the moral perfections of his character,
and the immense benefit his life has exerted and
exerts.
In England we are treading in the footmarks
of Alfred, of Bacon, of Shakspeare, of Newton,
of Milton, of Raleigh, of Nelson, of More, of
whatever is sublime in thought or in determin-
ation.
The credit of all the judges on earth stands on
the probity and common sense shown by a few
judges in their decisions. Alfred judges wisely;
Coke, Bracton, More; Lord Mansfield, Judge
Parsons, Judge Marshall, use original sense and
mother wit; and all mankind are impressed with
the beauty and splendor of this office, and hun-
dreds of mediocre judges who never dare use
original power, but govern themselves by pre-
cedent, only live in safety and credit on the
merits of these few.
Piety and theology too have but few fountains;
and all the arts.
Proclus thinks that the Pythian oracle con-
cerning Socrates meant that “not he who pos-


1854) DUTY. JUDGES. ROMILLY 469
sesses scientific knowledge, but the good alone
possesses an exempt transcendency”; that is, he
had the sense not to be “a man of information,"
such as Charles Lamb dreaded.
I am here to represent humanity: it is by no
means necessary that I should live, but it is by
all means necessary that I should act rightly. If
there is danger, I must face it. I tremble. What
of that? so did he who said, “It is my body
trembles, out of knowing into what dangers my
spirit will carry it.”
Cromwell's English judges sent to Scotland
administered justice better than ever before or
since. The old Scotch Judge said, “There
was no great merit in their impartiality, — they
were a kinless pack.”
English antagonism, or Two Nations. Side by
side, the fierce aristocracy conserves, and the
man of equity and mercy reforms; Eldon and
Romilly; the King and Clarkson.
Romilly a glorious minority in his age. An
example he of the domestic Englishman. He
could not sustain the loss of his wife, and killed
himself. He gave the real reason when he re-


470
JOURNAL
[AGE 50
INIC
fused an offered seat in Parliament, or at a
public dinner. His religion on the same low
footing as the rest, he thanks God for his
money and his social position, like Pepys.
Dr. Parr is no sentimentalist and knows the
full value of the silver he stoutly gives. They
are not dodgers nor dough-faces. Yet the votes
on Romilly's Bills show strong wickedness.
Seven bishops vote the inhumanities, just as
the dignified clergy here uniformly cast a das-
tardly vote.
It does seem as if a vow of silence coupled
with systematic lessons might teach women the
outline and new direction of the philosopher,
but they give themselves no leisure to hear; they
are impatient to talk.
[On August 15th Mr. Emerson delivered an
Address, at Williams College (Williamstown,
Mass.), on the invitation of the Adelphi Union,
on his favourite subject for such occasions, the
privilege and the duty of the Scholar. Matter
was probably drawn from this address for “The
Scholar” and “ The Man of Letters ” (Lectures
and Biographical Sketches), and many leaves are
torn out of this journal which probably did duty


18541 WILLIAMSTOWN ADDRESS 471
on that occasion when there was not time to
copy them. What follows remained among Mr.
Emerson's manuscripts.]
The Scholars are an organic caste or class in
the State. Men toil and sweat, earn money,
save, consent to servile compliance, all to raise
themselves out of the necessity of being menial
and overborne. For this they educate their
children to expiate their own shortcomings.
Art, libraries, colleges, churches, attest the re-
spect to what is ulterior, — to theism, to thought,
which superexist by the same elemental neces-
sity as flame above fire. Our Anglo-Saxon so-
ciety is a great industrial corporation. It sees
very well the rules indispensable to success. You
must make trade everything. Trade is not to
know friends, or wife, or child, or country. But
this walking ledger knows that though he, poor
fellow, has put off his royal robes, somewhere
the noble humanity survives, and this consoles
him for the brevity and meanness of his street-
life. He has not been able to hide from himself
that this devotion to means is an absurdity; is,
for a livelihood, to defeat the ends of living.
And it is out of the wish to preserve sanity, to
establish the minor propositions without throw-


472
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
ing overboard the major proposition, how not
to lose the troop, in the care for the baggage,
that he has said, “ Let there be schools, a clergy,
art, music, poetry, the college.”
. But if the youth, looking over the college
wall at the houses and the lives of the founders,
make the mistake of imitating them, they may
well say, “We paid you that you might not be
a merchant. We bought and sold that you
might not buy and sell, but reveal the reason
of trade. We did not want apes of us, but guides
and commanders.”
This atheism of the priest, this prose in the
poet, this cowardice and succumbing before ma-
terial greatness is a treason one knows not how
to excuse. Let the scholar stand by his order.
I wish the college not to make you rich or great,
but to show you that the material pomps and
possessions, that all the feats of our civility, were
the thoughts of good heads. The shopkeeper's
yardstick is measured from a degree of the meri-
dian. All powers by which a man lays his hand
on those advantages are intellectual; it is thoughts
that make men great and strong; the material
results are bubbles, filled only and coloured by
this divine air. But this great ocean which in it-
self is always equal and full, in regard to men,


1854) SCHOLARS RESPONSIBLE 473
ebbs and flows. Now for us it is in ebb. It is
the vulgarity of this country — it came to us,
with commerce, out of England — to believe
that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use or de-
sign, is merit. Who is accountable for this ma-
terialism? Who but the Scholars? When the
poets do not believe in their own poetry, how
should the bats and the swine? The world is
always as bad as it dares to be, and if the ma-
jority are evil it is because the minority are not
good. If the heathen rage, it is because the
Christians doubt. People wish to be amused,
and they summon a lecturer or a poet to read
to them for an hour; and so they do with
a priest. They want leaders : intellect is the
thread on which all their worldly prosperity is
strung.
Yet I speak badly for the scholar if I seem
to limit myself to secular and outward benefit.
All that is urged by the saint for the superior-
ity of faith over works is as truly urged for the
highest state of intellectual perception over any
performance. I, too, am an American and value
practical ability. I delight in people who can do
things, I prize talent, — perhaps no man more.
But I think of the wind, and not of the weather-
cocks.


474
JOURNAL (AGE 50
[The following paragraph and others scat-
tered through this part of the journal were very
possibly notes from the address.]
Pythagoras deserves his fame with scholars,
because we never heard the severity of literary
discipline but from him. The severity of mili-
tary discipline is familiar, and is justified by men's
easy belief in the reality of those values it sub-
serves. Severity of mechanical toil we under-
stand, - seven years' apprenticeship, and twelve
hours a day. But literary toil — so few men have
literary faculty, that these few are not sustained
by the expectation and loyalty of the commun-
ity, and held to the most severe of disciplines
proper to the highest of arts. In law is severity
of teaching.
Plato, what a school had he! What wealth
of perception in Plotinus, Proclus, Jamblichus,
Porphyry, Synesius.
There is no meter of mind whereon readily,
as on our thermometer, we may say he had 10°,
20°, 100°.
VO
French. Heine thinks the office of the French
language to test the sense that is in any philo-
sophy or science. Translate it into French, and


1854) ENGLISH WHIM. SLAVERY 475
you dispel instantly all the smoke and sorcery,
and it passes for what it is.
English whim. I admire as proof of their plen-
teousness of nature, the perpetual fun of anta-
gonism. They are lions to fight, but it is for
some old mummy of obsolete ages. Claverhouse,
a smooth fop, slashes like a steam-engine, and
Lord Nelson is a little boy captain, of the most
absurd appearance. Mr. Woodward, at a loss
what to attack, writes against the Lord's Prayer.
The most daring dragons in the universe, the
island abounds in old women in men's clothes
screaming like seasick females in a rough sea.
The fathers made the blunder in the conven-
tion in the Ordinance of 10 July, 1787, to adopt
population as basis of representation, and count
only three fifths of the slaves, and to concede
the reclamation of fugitive slaves for the consid-
eration of the prohibition that “there shall be
neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the
said (Northwest) Territory, unless in punishment
of crimes.” The bed of the Ohio River was the
line agreed on east of the Mississippi. In 1820
when new territory west of the Mississippi was
to be dealt with, no such natural line offered;


476
[Age 50
JOURNAL
and a parallel of latitude was adopted, and
36°30' N. was agreed on as equitable.
The fathers made the fatal blunder in agree-
ing to this false basis of representation, and to
this criminal complicity of restoring fugitive
slaves: and the splendor of the bribe, namely,
the magnificent prosperity of America from 1787,
is their excuse before God and men, for the
crime. They ought never to have passed the Or-
dinance. They ought to have refused it at the
risk of making no Union; and, if no solution
could be had, it would have been better that two
nations, one free and one slave-holding, should
have started into existence at once. The bribe,
if they foresaw the prosperity we have seen, was
one to dazzle common men, and I do not won-
der that most men now excuse and applaud it.
But crime brings punishment, always so much
crime, so much ruin : a little crime a minor pen-
alty; a great crime, a great ruin; and now, after
sixty years, the poison has crept into every vein
and every artery of the State.
Our policy is too low. A high, true, abstract
policy, a law of equity resting on love of men,
does not provoke blind fury, but respect, and
pause, and conviction, and tears of love and grat-
itude. The narrow, tricksy, time-serving policy


1854) DEVOTION. THE AGE. CANT 477
is met by the like trick and cant, and is hated and
resisted. William Penn and Clarkson, William
Jay and Gerritt Smith, and each partisan abo-
litionist, as fast as he is seen to be rooted in
an idea of the human mind, and to have come
into the world pledged to spend and be spent
for something not selfish, not geographical, but
human and divine, has the respect and tears of
gratitude of mankind.
This age is Swedenborg's. I have said the ideas
of the age so shine that even the nightmares, as
they go, can see them. It is notable that all the
Rappers and Mesmerists agree in a subjective re-
ligion; all agree that the departing human soul
finds such a world as it left; sees and associates
and acts according to what it is educated to be:
- repudiate the Hebrew ideas, and embrace the
subjective philosophy of the Saxons, that the soul
makes its own world.
Cant. We only use different names ; he calls
it attar of rose, and I call it bilgewater.
The English and the Americans cant sadly.
They cover over their greediness with a pre-
tended zeal for religion or patriotism, and strew
sugar on a bottled spider. Choate's letter to the


478
[AGE 50
JOURNAL
New England Society, in 1851, pretending that
the stern old Puritans of 1620 would spurn tbe rose-
pink sentimentalism of resisting the Fugitive Slave
Bill, is an example. . . . Copy-slip morality!
They think the Bible a better sort of copal var-
nish.
The escort of friends with which cach spirit
walks through time!
Fourier was right in his seventeen hundred
and sixty men to make one man. I accept the
Quetelet statistics. In a million men, one Homer,
and in every million, and Homer requires Homer
to read him. The doctrine of Copernicus is not
in one man, but in the air, and whenever a man
has larger lungs, dilates enough to breathe uni-
versal air, he is Copernican. Archimedes, New-
ton, Euclid, Laplace, Bacon, are ample and think
adequately to Nature, which never alters.
Science is not chronological, but according to
the health of the inquirer. . . . And so often
amid myriads of invalids, fops, dunces, and all
kinds of damaged individuals, one sound healthy
brain will be turned out, in symmetry, and re-
lation to the system of the world ; - eyes that
can see, ears that can hear, soul that can feel,


1854) DISCOVERER. PARADOXES 479
mind that can receive the resultant truth. Then
you have the Copernicus without regard to his
antecedents or to his geography. This person
sees the simple and vast conditions which every
law of Nature must fulfil and is prepared to ad-
mit the circulation of the blood, the genesis of
the planets, universal gravity, the analogy run-
ning through all parts of nature, and the cor-
respondence of physics and metaphysics.
Our boys get caught in their own nets, marry
the means, and defeat the ends. Churches, col-
leges, nations, men, do. Thus we get engines
but no engineer. Republics exerting their whole
power for slavery.
English illogical as others, punishing dissent,
punishing education ; vast expense for suppres-
sion of slave trade and (yet] driving counties of
poor children into cruel and demoralizing labor
in factory and mines; subsidizing Austria to rob
and enslave Poland and Hungary.
The capital example of our day is the rever-
ence of law, because law is the expression of the
will of mankind, and the obedience to it when
it contravenes the will of all humanity; the ob-
tuseness at seeing that an immoral law is void.
All great men, all logical men, all original men,


480
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
keep their eye on the major proposition, the
object of law, and are keenly and instantly sen-
sible when it is violated.
The generalizing and ascending effort even
in chemistry finds not atoms at last, but spher-
ules of force, — that makes man not a citizen
or a working bee, but a sovereign end to him-
self; that makes minds differ as they can take
strides of advance, one, another, and another;
onward there is always a better, a heaven, an
inviting infinitude.
Well, this [the originating class] differs in
kind from the working class. They live in
means; this is contemplative of end;— they are
working; this is poetic. They believe [those
moved by this spirit] that the ship needed com-
pass, as well as sails and rudder; they wished
piety, they wished thought and inspiration, and
secured it so by sequestration, leisure, elevation,
generalization; laws of thought, they wished to
secure ; somebody who could climb where they
could not; could fly, if it were possible, to
heavenly domes ; could sing as they had heard
of singing -[several pages are torn out]
[Scholars.] How sacred, how sweet the func-
tion, to which these are reserved! The stars,
the wind, the souls in heaven, have nothing
Se


1854) SCHOLAR, HIS WINGS 481
purer or more noble in charge. These are to
gather the flowers of the past, to express the
essence of old wisdom, to hold the unruly pre-
sent firm to the sphere. To keep the first Cause
in mind, to consecrate all to an aim, to be the en-
gineer of this wonderful engine which the Nine-
teenth Century in million workshops builds.
But the scholar is to be a new potentate, and
must be schooled in the rules of his conduct,
like any other king. What he utters is to be
true for the instruction of nations, and, that it
may be commanding, it must be true. He must
be in awe of himself. Why is Socrates invinci-
ble? Because Socrates is more afraid of Socrates
than of the thirty tyrants.
And what means to do the impossible, to
gripe the gliding Proteus, to anchor this float-
ing, escaping Italy? I will tell you: the Affec-
tions are the wings by which the intellect
launches on the Void, and is borne across it.
Great Love is the Inventor and expander of
the frozen powers — feathers frozen to our sides.
e
Heaven takes care to show us that war is a
part of our education, as much as milk, or love,
and is not to be escaped. We affect to put it
all back in history, as the Trojan War, the


482
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
war
Wars of the Roses, the Revolutionary War.
Not so; it is your war. Has that been declared ?
has that been fought out? and where did the
Victory perch? The wars of other people and
of history growl at a distance, but your war
comes near, looks into your eyes, in politics, in
professional pursuit, in choices in the street, in
daily habit, in all the questions of the times, in
the keeping or surrendering the control of your
day, and your horse, and your opinion; in the
terrors of the night; in the frauds and skepti-
cism of the day.
The American independence ! that is a legend:
your Independence! that is the question of all the
present. Have you fought out that? and settled
it once and again, and once for all in the minds
of all persons with whom you have to do, that
you and your sense of right and fit and fair are
an invincible, indestructible somewhat, which is
not to be bought or cajoled or frightened away.
That done, and victory inscribed on your eyes
and brow and voice, the other American free-
dom begins instantly to have some meaning and
support.
an
av
Isaac Hoar, son of old Tim Hoar (who owned
large land tracts in Westminster) built the frame


1854) MINOT HOUSE. MACAULAY 483
of his house in East Quarter of Concord, over
the cellar which he had dug and stoned. Then
he thought he would go up to Westminster and
look after his land there; so sold the frame to
Mr. Minot, who removed it up to its present
place, and built the house [at present] George
Minot's in 1803, or 4, and lived there till he
died. George Minot was fifteen years old when
he came to live with his grandfather, and lived
with him till he died ten years after. The other
house in Hawthorne's place, George Minot was
born in. It was an old house, two hundred years
old.*
as a
S
Macaulay, the pride of England, the best ex-
ample of her cleverness, writes elaborately and
with talent his essay on Bacon, to prove, not
ironically, but in good faith,-in as good faith as
he is capable of,— that“solid advantage,” as he
calls it, a sensual benefit, is the only good....
This history is of the picturesque little unpainted house
on the side of the hill opposite Mr. Emerson's house and a
little nearer town. It was taken down in 1897. An oil paint-
ing of it by Mr. Robertson James is in the Concord Library.
2 This house seems to have been the one added by Mr.
Alcott as an L to the “ Orchard House.”
3 The substance of what follows, but more carefully writ-
ten, is printed in English Traits, p. 240.


484
JOURNAL (AGE 50
From this unworthy expositor whom Bacon
would disdain we refer to Bacon himself: “If
any man thinketh philosophy and universality
to be idle studies,”:...
See [what Bacon) says (vol. i, p. 131), on Ra-
tional Philosophy, “ the lumen siccum,' - which
doth parch and offend most men's watery and
soft natures” who esteemed “those discourses
of Socrates which were then termed corrupting
of manners, and were after acknowledged for
sovereign medicines of the mind and manners,
and so have been received ever since until this
day."
Bacon, who esteemed it the greatest error of
all the rest, the mistaking or misplacing of the
last or farthest end of knowledge as for ornament
The rest of the quotation is found in English Traits,
p. 240.
2 Bacon here quotes Heracleitus's expression (dry light) as
he found it in Plutarch's Morals, but, according to the late
Professor John Wright, of Harvard University, what Heraclei-
tus really said was, “ A dry soul is wisest and best,” as what
is dry is most near to fire, and fire is at the top of Heraclei-
tus's upward way. For a curious account of the corruption of
the original Greek see note in English Traits, p. 381, Cen-
tury Edition.
3 Mr. Emerson is still comparing him with his "unworthy
expositor."


re
or a
1854) THE WALK. REALISM 485
and reputation for lucre and profession or a shop,
etc., who esteemed so highly the effect of learn-
ing on moral and private virtue.
Delicious summer stroll through the end-
less pastures of Barrett, Buttrick, – Estabrook
Farms,'- yesterday, with Ellery, the glory of
summer; what magnificence, yet none to see it.
What magnificence, yet one night of frost will
kill it all. Ellery was witty on the Biographie
Universelle de soi même. Henry Thoreau had
been made to print his house into his title-page,
in order that Alcott might have that to stick into
one of the Biographie Universelle."
Realism. A Pythagorean discipline would ask,
Do you need to succumb? then depart. You
have excluded yourself. We have no need of
you.
It is the decline of literature and poetry, when
the frivolous throngs of gentlemen and ladies,
1 A very attractive region in the northeast part of Concord ;
seventeenth-century farms long since abandoned as dwelling-
places, — though the old orchards of cider apples remained, -
and lapsing into forest.
2 Mr. Channing's whimsical joke refers to Thoreau's
Walden, and Mr. Alcott's love of pictures, which he liked to
cut out from books.


486
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
without thought or human aims, are suffered
to assume a superiority and take it as allowed,
that their pomps and palaces are anything but
the tribute to wisdom; when they break their
loyalty, and scholars court them, 't is time we
went back to the morntains and began our civil-
ity answ with the first inventions.
There are more inventions in the thoughts of.
one happy day than ages could execute.
Hold thought cheap! It is the thread on
which are surung the system of Nature and the
Heaven of heavens.
A man can only write one book. That is the
reason why everybody begs readings and ex-
tracts of the young poet until thirty-five. When
he is fifty, they still think they value him, and
they tell him so; but they scatter like partridges,
if he offer to read his paper. They think it is
because they have some job to do. But they
never allowed a job to stand in the way when
he was twenty-five.
cause
Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.'...
i The rest of the passage is in "Worship" (Conduct of
Life, p. 220).


ne
1854) PURE SCIENCE. HAFIZ 487
Liebig to Faraday. “What struck me most
in England was the perception that only those
works that have a practical tendency awake at-
tention and command respect, while the purely
scientific, which possess far greater merit, are
almost unknown. And yet the latter are the
proper and true source from which the others
flow. Practice alone can never lead to the dis-
covery of a truth or a principle. In Germany
it is quite the contrary. Here, in the eyes of
scientific men, no value, or at least but a tri-
fling one, is placed on the practical Results. The
enrichment of science is alone considered wor-
thy of attention. I do not mean to say it is
better: for both nations the golden medium
would certainly be a real good fortune.”—LIEBIG
ap. Lyell's TRAVELS 1841, vol. 1, p. 246.
ar
BIG
See, the chymist of love
Will the dust of the body
Convert into gold
Were it never so leaden.
O Hafiz, churls
Know the worth of great pearls.
Give high the prized stone
Only to sacred friends alone.
Hafiz, ii, 91.


488
(AGE 50
JOURNAL
[Two versifications by Mr. Emerson follow
this mere translation from the German, of which
the later and better is given.]
Thou foolish Hafiz, say, do churls
Know the worth of Oman's pearls ?
Give the sacred moon-like stone
To the sacred friend alone.
or
Give the gem which dims the moon
To the noblest, or to none.
01
What said Fontenelle about poetry, women,
and the fine arts, three things on which he had
written much and knew little? I suppose, every
one has favorite topics, which make a sort of
museum or privileged closet of whimsies in his
mind, and which he thinks is a kind of aristoc-
racy to know about. Thus, I like to know about
lions, diamonds, wine, and Beauty; and Mar-
tial, and Hafiz.
If you read Cardinal de Retz in a village, you
will easily be able to plant his principal char-
acters on various heads who play the like parts
in the county which his heroes performed in
France. We have our M. de Rohan, whose only
talent is to dance, and knows that his element


1854) ATHLETIC ENGLISH 489
for rising in the state is at the drop-ins and
military balls. We have our old granny of a
M. d'Angoulême or M. de Beaufort, who is
only a private man, and affects neutrality: our
small Mazarin, whose talent is to go about the
bush, to give to understand; Mr. E, of Bangor,
who never pronounces, never finishes his sen-
tence, but “ you take the idee?”
The one precept the English have retained of
all their Norse traditions is exercise; and it makes
the rule of palaces as well as of farms. The
roads, the London parks, the country-seats, the
game preserves of Scotland, Europe, Asia, and
Africa, are the riding-grounds of the English.
The boating, yachting, cricket, skittles, shoot-
ing, deer-stalking, and every species of equitation
are their twelfth commandment, on which na-
tional existence hangs : rule of the public schools,
rule of the university, rule of every country-seat.
At noble houses, even, may be seen an old ser-
jeant kept to drill young ladies in military exer-
cise, - attitude, march, and exercise of the chest
and arms to this sacred end of English health.
Le style, c'est l'homme, said Buffon; and Goethe
said, that, as for poetry, etc., he had learned to


490
JOURNAL [AGE 50
speak German; and I say of Burrill's fifty lan-
guages, that I shall be glad if he knows one;
for if I be asked how many masters of English
idiom I know, I shall be pestered to count three
or four among living men.
A good head cannot read amiss. In every
book he finds passages which seem confid-
ences.' . .. No book has worth by itself; but
by the relation to what you have from many
other books, it weighs.
Feats. Cardan's praise of algebra (see Hal-
lam, i, 358) is beautiful; and Newton's and
Leibnitz's quarrel about fluxions belongs to this
category.
Quotation. It is curious what new interest an
old sentence or poem acquires in quotation. Hal-
lam is never deep, but he is a fair mind, able to
appreciate poetry, unless it becomes deep, ...
and Hallam cites a sentence from Bacon or Syd-
ney, or distinguishes a lyric of Edwards or Vaux,
and straightway it commends itself to me as if
it had received the Isthmian crown.
i See “Success” (Society and Solitude, p. 296).


1854) PLAIN ENGLISH '491
We say the English have a homely taste, a
Bible style, from first to last hate euphuism; as,
in Alfred, Saxon Chronicles, Chaucer, Ballads,
Gammer Gurton, and Ralph Roister, Latimer,
Shakspeare, Cotton and other translators, De-
foe, Bunyan, Hudibras, Swift, down to Cowper
and Burns. Then came the strife between the
two principles, — Platonism and materialism.
Bacon represents better than he knew the pre-
cise plight of English mind. For he held by
divine nature on the divine side, and then by
London birth, on the common sense, and com-
mercial. He struggled hard to do justice to the
Muse, and prayed to his countrymen to hear
ber ; but prayed to them that had no mercy.
Well so long as the Muse ruled, so long we had
poetry, and the common sense served well. But
this rebelled and usurped the lead.'
Here are several facts which need notice: -
The plain style indicates that the people had
their share in it.
Then I think it [style] is not easy or rightly
measured by time, as decades or centuries, as
by names of men.
i Compare what is said of Bacon in the chapters on “ Liter-
ature” (English Traits, pp. 238–241).


492
(ACE 50
JOURNAL
are
1
W
IS
Then this pivotal Lord Bacon. His rules or
reform or influence is nothing. He is a bubble
of a certain stream of thought, which is of great
importance. All his importance is the influx
of idealism into England. Where that goes is
poetry, health, progress. The rules of its genesis
or its diffusion are not known. It seems an
affair of race or of chemistry. Locke is as surely
the influx of decomposition as Bacon and the
Platonists of growth.' Bacon held of both; of
ideas in his genius, – of English trade in his
politics.
As to his doctrine of fruit, or to the direction
of his centuries of observations on useful science,
I think little of that. I suppose his experiments
were worth nothing. He had no genius that way.
Franklin, or Arkwright, or Davy, or any one
with a talent for experiment.
The whole is told in saying Bacon had gen-
ius and talent. Genius always looks one way,
always is ideal, or, as we say, Platonist, and Ba-
con had genius. But (a common case, too,) he
had talents and the common ambition to sell
them. Hence his perfidies and sycophancy. His
common sense held of his genius. There was
I A few of the above sentences occur in English Traits, but
are kept here to keep the sequence.


1854) BACON. ANALOGIES 493
no treachery to the supreme Reason in wishing
the laws of meteorology or of political economy
well understood. His treachery to his genius
begins as soon as he left the employments he
loved, and which ennobled him, for the lucra-
tive jobs which the queen or the favorite im-
posed.
I should say that all were told if one should
trace the degree in which the sense of unity or
the instinct of seeking resemblances predomi-
nated in the mind of England. For hence all
poetry comes; and when a man comes who dis-
trusts theory, discredits analogy, believes men
must go on for ages accumulating facts before
any sane generalizations can be attempted, it is
certain that such an one has no poetic power,
and that nothing original or beautiful will be
produced by him.'
It is droll that whilst men love the fruit, they
hate the tree; that the animal instinct loves the
music of poets; it hates the tendency of their
minds.
September 5.
Is it that wherever the mind takes a step, it is
to put itself at one with a larger class discerned
1 The last sentence is found in “ Literature” (Englisb
Traits, p. 239).


494
JOURNAL
[Age 51
beyond the lesser class with which it has been
conversing?
There are a few astonishing generalizations
which circulate in the world,'. ..
If I reckon up my debts by particulars to
English books, how fast they reduce themselves
to a few authors, and how conspicuous Shak-
speare, Bacon, and Milton become; Locke a
cipher. I put the duty of being read, invariably
on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is
it? If he is very learned and yet heavy, it is a
double-shot which fells both himself and his
readers.
Whois Selden? No sensible American, I take
it, can spend much time on the subject of tithes.
Not because it is old, but because it is trifling.
Plutarch is much older, but his topics are inter-
esting.
And the criticism the poets suggest reaches
them, too, for we perceive that they kept alto-
gether too fair terms with their own times, and
with this dull kind of learning; and that a new
and better age will address itself more simply to
what is really good.
1 The rest of the passage thus beginning and much that
follows are found in English Traits (pp. 237 and 239).


1854) THE DULL. HISTOL. 495
All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle. Under-
witted persons who live in a perpetual sense of
inferiority, if also they have the misfortune to
have a bad temper, seek to avenge themselves
by contriving little insults, which have the effect
of making others momentarily inferior. Some-
body said, not ill, of these, that there was a
variety of names and persons among them, but
it signifies little which of them you meet, you
find the same cast of character in all.
See Hooker's paragraph on Music in Eccles-
iastical Polity, Book v, p. 238 fol.
as
va
sons an
Hooker calls the Imagination“the only store-
house of wit, and the peculiar chair of memory.”
History of ecclesiastical councils arraying na-
tions for and against some clause or quibble in a
creed, and sucking the blood and treasure of ages
to the one or the other part, as in the contro-
versies of Europe on the Nicene and Athanasian,
or of the two sects of Mahomet, - or of Catholic
and Protestant later, or now of the Mesmerism,
etc., are all only valuable after ages have cleared
away the smoke with the lives, cities, and institu-
tions of the parties, and disclose the structure of
mind which necessitated these heats and rages.
awa
mi
nec


490
JOURNAL
(AGE 51
The W bite Feather, a novel, in two volumes.
Who has signed the paper?
What has been the usage ?
What does the church say?
What will be worn ?
The poor keep perpetual fast, the rich per-
petual feast.
A great step (for good and evil) in liberty
taken by Nectarius at the advice of Eudæmon,
a priest at Constantinople, - to disuse peniten-
tiaries, i.e., public confession of communicants.
(See Hooker, Book vi, p. 343.)
[Here follow several extracts from Pepys's
Diary.]
The perfection of writing is when the animal
thinks; and wine, no doubt, and all fine food
furnishes some elemental wisdom; and the fire,
too, as it burns; for I fancy that my logs, which
have grown so long in the sun and wind, are a
kind of Muses. A Greek epigram out of the
anthology, a verse of Herrick or Dorset, are in
harmony both with sense and spirit.
It would seem all legislatures are alike, for
Pepys says, his cousin Roger P., member of


1854) CHRISTIAN IDEALISM 497
Parliament, “ tells me that he thanks God, he
never knew what it was to be tempted to be a
knave in his life, till he did come into the House
of Commons, where there is nothing done but
by passion and faction and private interest."
(Vol. ii, p. 150.)
Transfusion of blood of a sheep into a man,
with benefit. (See Pepys, ii, 160, 158.)
Hooker and his coevals show the power of
an ideal dogma. Christianity was an idealism
which did a world of good in the materialism of
old Rome, and of the robbers and pirates of the
Middle Age. It was a noble heart-warmer with
the range and play it gave to thought and im-
agination, in opening the doctrine of love. These
old fellows ranged like poets in these ethereal
fields, and only quoted a text now and then, to
give a quasi-authority to their fancies. But 't is
wonderful the difference between their range, and
the strait waistcoat and close corners of our
priests. They quote condescendingly, and out
of gentleman-like good humour, not needing it
out of any poverty, for they have as good of their
own; but ours in a cowed and servile way, never
matching it by anything as good.
Then I notice the freedom with which they


498
JOURNAL [AGE 51
fill up the faint outline map which the Christian
hypothesis affords them with a bold mythology
of their own. Thus the Heaven, on the sparsest
hint, they populate with angels in rank and de-
gree (borrowed, I believe, out of Dionysius), and
exercise their fancy very freely and well in this
rhetoric, which, to the next age, or to the next
writer, becomes instantly authority, and is re-
peated over, like Holy Writ, from one to another,
till it becomes believed by being often said.
Hooker, however, it must be owned, calls,
“this present age, full of tongue and weak of
brain."
Elizabeth Hoar. The last night talked with
Elizabeth the Wise, who defined Common Sense
as the perception of the inevitable laws of exist-
ence. The philosophers considered only such
laws as could be stated; but sensible men, those
also which could not be stated;-a very just dis-
tinction, which, I find, with contentment that I
had recognized in my paragraph about Dr. John-
son, but had not rightly laid down beforehand.
I find also in her a certain forward motion of the
mind when at last, through a thousand silences
and delays, she begins to speak, which is excel-
lent, as being the mind's own motion, through


O
return
1854] MONEY. GREEK. GENIUS 499
beauty and sweetness of the thing perceived, and
without any manner of reflection or return on
one's self.
Her illustration of the common laws was,
“You must count your money. For, if you call
it petty, and count it not,'through greatness of
soul,' it will have its revenge on your soul, by
coming in thither also, in the sequel, with inju-
rious suspicions of your best friends and other
disquietudes.”
Izaak Walton and all the writers of his age be-
tray their reading in Greek literature. Plutarch,
Plato, and the Greek philosophers, especially of
the Stoic sect, nourish them.
Sidney, Sir Philip, is Platonist and stands well
for poetry.
Genius. Temperance in love: and the child of
the god is the superfluity of strength. Temper-
ance in art: and the poet is never the poorer
for his song. The masters painted and carved
for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone
out of them. Alcott thought the father of the
Hebrew Boy must have been superior to his
son.
Genius. A few poems appear to have been


500
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
written between sleeping and waking; irrespons-
ibly.'
Universities are, of course, hostile to gen-
iuses....
Last night, talking with Ellery Channing, it
appeared still more clear, the two nations in
England, - one in all time fierce only for mince
pie, — the old, granniest, beef-eating solemn
trifler, a Cheapside 'prentice, and growing to be
a Cheapside lord ; — the other a fine, thought-
ful, religious, poetical believer, — fit for hero,
fit for martyr, deriving in his flights only the
solidity, and square elbows, and method, from
his Cheapside brother, and rewarding him with
puritanism, with drama, with letters and liberty.
It would be well to begin the story with
notice of my first visit to England. I was then
more ignorant than now. I am ignorant enough
now, Heaven knows, — nay, I am of the hope-
lessly ignorant class, to whom the knowledge
of scholars is always a marvel, — fault of some
i The passage is printed in « Works and Days” (Society
and Solitude, p. 182).
2 See English Traits, p. 212.
3 English Traits.


1854) PERSONS. TRANSITION 501
method in my mind. But I was ignorant enough
then to wish to go to Europe only to see three
of four persons, — Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Landor, and Carlyle. I should have wished to
see Goethe in Germany, but he was then just
dead. After these, there was not in England,
excepting — [page torn out]. .
as
I praise the expansive, the still generalizing,
because it seems as if transition, shooting the
gulf, were the essential act of life. Nature for-
ever aims and strives at a better, at a new de-
gree, the same nature in and out of man, the
same nature in a river-drop and in the soul of
a hero.
One class of minds delighting in a bounded
fact ; and the other class in its relations or cor-
respondency to all other facts.
The art of conversation, or the qualification
for a good companion, is a certain self-control,
which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with
a respect to the emergencies of the moment.
“What a sublime and terrible simplicity there
is in our navy. Nothing is admitted but what
is absolutely useful. Cannon, decks, sailors, all
wore the appearance of stern vigour; no beauti-


502
JOURNAL
(AGE 51
ful forms in the gun-carriages ; no taste or ele-
gance in the cannon; ports, square and hard,
guns, iron ; sailors, muscular.” — Haydon.
James Furness said, “There was only one
person in the world he envied, and that was his
wife.”
Franklin, when they questioned as to the
utility of something, said, “What is the use of
a baby?”
Solitary was he? why, yes, but he comforted
himself by thinking that his society was limited
only by the amount of brain Nature appropri-
ated in this age to carry on the government of
the world.
Dr. Jackson's big crystal of beryl comes from
Acworth, New Hampshire. Mr. Francis Alger
has one in his yard at South Boston weighing
three tons,' which was offered to Dr. Jackson
for twenty dollars. Mr. Alger was carried
thither by Dr. Jackson and bought the moun-
tain. Dr. Jackson said, he did not give more
than two hundred dollars for the whole.
i Probably the block of quartz with three enormous beryls
projecting from it (in the Natural History Society's building
in Boston) weighed so much, and not the beryl alone.


1854) POETS. HORSEMEN 503
When I showed Ellery a finest sunset, in the
central glory of which a telegraph-pole stood,
like the spear of Uriel, he looked and said,
“Why, yes, Nature lies like the Irish.”
October 11.
Never was a more brilliant show of coloured
landscape than yesterday afternoon - incredibly
excellent topaz and ruby at four o'clock; cold
and shabby at six.
SI
[Old English Poets.] The heart of the ques-
tion is, how came such men as Herbert, Her-
rick, Donne, Chapman, and Marvell to exist ?
What made those natures? was that climate?
was that race? For 'tis certain there were more
where these came from; that the people who
lived with them must be like them; the appre-
ciation never lags far after the invention. The
hearing ear is close to the speaking tongue, and
no genius can long or often utter anything which
is not invited and gladly entertained by men
around him.
Sir Philip Sidney says of Pietro Puglione,
when he praised horsemen as “the noblest of
soldiers, masters of war, and ornaments of peace,


504
JOURNAL (AGE 51
speedy goers, and strong abiders, triumphers
both in camps and courts”: “Nay, to so unbe-
lieved a point he proceeded as that no earthly
thing bred such wonder to a prince as to be a
good horseman ;-skill of government was but
a pedanterie in comparison.”
Imagination. We live by our imaginations, by
our admirations, by our words. A man pays a
debt quicker to a rich man than to a poor one;
wishes the bow and compliment of a rich man,
weighs what he says; he never comes nearer
him for all that; but dies at last better con-
tented for this amusement of his eyes and his
imagination.
· Intellect. I notice that I value nothing so
much as the threads that spin from a thought
to a fact, and from one fact to another fact, mak-
ing both experiences valuable and presentable,
which were insignificant before, and weaving
together into rich webs all solitary observa-
tions.
The old men believed in magic.' ...
1 For the rest of the passage see or Illusions” (Conduct of
Life, pp. 318, 319).


1854) THOUGHT. MINORITY 505
I wish to know the nomenclature of botany
and astronomy. But these are soulless both, as
we know them; vocabularies both. Add astro-
logy to astronomy, and 't is somewhat. Add
medicine and magic to botany, and that is some-
thing. But the English believe that by moun-
tains of fact they can climb into the heaven of
thought and truth: so the builders of Babel be-
lieved. But the method of truth is quite other,
and heaven descends, when it will, to the pre-
pared soul. We must hold our science as mere
convenience, expectant of a higher method from
the mind itself.
Queteletism. The action of the Saxons in
America is bad, but has its checks, and though
the evil lies nearer the hand than does the good,
yet I never fear that people will be able to get
away from their brain: the moment they run
into extremes, the minority, always ready to be-
come a majority, defeats them; they will not
burn their fingers twice.
Success is a measure of brain. It requires one
that can carry the conditions in his head, - cli-
mate, politics, market, persons, -and enter bod-
ily into the complications of the dance, and by
keeping the figure, not jostle any of the partners.
be


506
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
“All Difference is quantitative,” said Schell-
ing; and common sense seems a spread of vital-
ity over the whole radiant brain, instead of only
at points, so as to apprehend all the conditions
of success, - more vitality, like Spallanzani's
blinded bat, which yet fitted among stretched
cords, in and out without touching one.
“And if one ought to thank God for the
joys that do not tend to salvation?” says Mme.
de Sablé.
English sense. A piece of ivory was found in an
Egyptian tomb four thousand years old. When
exposed to the air it rapidly crumbled. Buckland
said, “ Boil it in gelatine"; and it came out
sound as new ivory.
The French before the battle of Alma issued
an order of the day about glory and the Em-
peror. Lord Raglan ordered the commissary
to supply the troops with extra allowance of
porter.
as
Nature helps everybody, brings each to higher
ground than he was wont to occupy. Nature
furnishes the nouns which must be of use when-
ever and wherever. All the verbs of language


1854) A LIVING PHILOSOPHY 507
express motion, which must exist wherever we
go.
We have reformed our botany, our chemis-
try, our geology, our anatomy, through the ap-
pearance of a several genius; but our meta-
physics still awaits its author. A high, analogic
mind; a mind, which, with one aperçu, pene-
trates many successive crusts, and strings them
as beads on its thread of light, will delight us
with mental structure as a naturalist with his
architectures. Now, our metaphysics are like
Kett and Blair.
English finality. Englishmen think as far as
the bishop and the chancellor. So we believe in
melioration just as far as it has gone from fossil
up to Anglo-Saxon, but we are passing into new
heavens (and the earth and the atmosphere
have not ended their purging chemistry) and
so into new earths.
Swedenborg is the theosophist of the present
age. ’T is very fine for England and America,
Boston and London, refined circles, to affect a
scorn. Some theory must be at the bottom; and
these surface-creatures might be shown that they
are Swedenborgians, or else skeptics. They hate
— all men hate — skepticism, and when shown


508
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
what kind of rotten underpinning they are strut-
ting upon, they will kiss the robe of Swedenborg.
An idealist rare. Farmer Hunt doubted
whether there really were any tongs, which he
seemed to hold in his hand; and Rowse's scene-
painter was a root-and-branch doubter : but
most men have animal bias or beast bias, and
are encumbered by their tools, that is, by mat-
teş: only a supreme spirit plays with matter,
and sees all history as a fluid ocean wrought up
at will into every astonishing variety of form
by nimble ideas.
eans
To say, “the majority are wicked,” means
no malice, nor bad heart in the observer, but
simply that the majority are young, are boys,
are animals, and have not yet any opinion, but
borrow their opinion of the newspaper, and, of
course, are not worth considering: they have
not yet come to themselves, do not yet know
their opinion. That, if they knew it, is an oracle
of God, and worthy of all curiosity and respect
from them, and from all.
Choate said of the testy Chief Justice Shaw,
“I perceive that he is ugly, but I know that he
is divine.”


1854) JUDGE SHAW. READING 509
Judge Shaw said to Mr. William Sturgis,
“When the Pacific Road is finished, I am going
with you to see your old friends on the north-
west coast." Sturgis replied, “If I am only re-
cently dead, I will go with you.”
AUTHORS OR Books QUOTED OR REFERRED TO
IN JOURNAL FOR 1854
Bhagavat Geeta; Vyasa ; Pythagoras; Simon-
ides ; Aristotle; Euclid of Alexandria;
Martial ; Dionysius of Alexandria ; Plotinus;
Porphyry; lamblichus ; Synesius; Proclus;
Sidonius;
King Alfred ; Henry de Bracton ; Saadi, Gul-
istan; Hafiz; Chaucer;
Robert de Thornton ; Machiavelli; Coper-
nicus ; Latimer; Nicholas Udall, Ralph Roister
Doister; John Still, Gammer Gurton; Cardan
apud Hallam ; Richard Edwards;
Raleigh; Coke; Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity;
Sir Fulke Greville, Life of Sidney ; Sully, Mé-
moires; Van Helmont; Hobbes; Lord Herbert
of Cherbury; Selden ; Izaak Walton; Chief Jus-
tice Sir Ranulph Crewe, apud Cruse's Digest;
John Evelyn, Diary; Sir Kenelm Digby ;
Waller; Suckling; Rushworth, Historical Collec-


510
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
tion of Passages of State; Butler, Hudibras; Love-
lace;
Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires; Giordano Bruno;
Bunyan ; Robert Boyle; Pepys, Diary; Charles
Sackville, Earl of Dorset; Lady Russell, Letters;
Fontenelle ; Defoe ; Cowper; Swift; Harvey;
Berkeley ; William Law; Voltaire;
Lord Mansfield ; Buffon; John Hunter;
Galiani, Journal d'économie publique; Burke ;
Bentham ; Mirabeau ; Goethe ; Laplace;
Pierre Louis Roederer, Histoire de la Société
polie ; Chief Justice Marshall; Sir Samuel Rom-
illy; Thomas Taylor ; Kirby and Spence, Ento-
mology; Pierre Dumont, Traités de législation ;
Ritson, Select Collection of English Songs;
Mackintosh; Sharon Turner, History of the
Anglo-Saxons; Chateaubriand, Etudes historiques;
Fourier; Lord Jeffrey ; Schelling; Niebuhr,
Roman History; Life and Letters of Hallam;
Moore, Life of Sheridan ; Southey, Life of Nel-
son ; Von Raumer, England;
Webster; Audubon; William N. Senior,
Political Economy (?); Sir J. F. Davis, The
Chinese; Hue, Travels in China ; Sir John Her-
schel; Haydon; Theophilus Parsons; Guizot,
Love in Marriage; Heine; Rufus Choate, Letter
to the New England Society;


ADING
511
1854]
READING
Francis Lieber, Civil Liberty and Self-Gov-
ernment ; Baron Liebig; G. P. R. James, His-
tory of the British Navy; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries
du Lundi ; Disraeli; Bulwer; Chadwick, Reports
on Administration of the Poor Laws;
Tennyson, Vision of Sin ; Browning; J. J. G.
Wilkinson, Human Body, War, Cholera ;. W.
B. Carpenter, Physiology ; Charles Read, Chris-
tie Johnstone, Peg Woffington; Ruskin ; W. E.
Channing, Poems; Stansbury, Valley of the
Great Salt Lake.





JOURNAL
A LONG LECTURE SEASON
VERSES
THOUGHTS ON SCIENCE, NATURE
AND POETRY
FINISHING ENGLISH TRAITS
LECTURE ON WOMAN
AMHERST ADDRESS
SLEEPY HOLLOW
THE FAR WEST AGAIN





URNAL XLVI
1855
(From Journals NO and RO)
[For Journal writing there was scant time
when the winter's arduous and exposing work
of lecturing began,-“whisked by the stormy
wing of Fate out of my chain and whirled like
a dry leaf through the State of New York," as
Mr. Emerson put it, in a letter to Carlyle.
During December he lectured, mostly before
Massachusetts Lyceums, almost every other
evening; in January thirteen were given, still
in New England towns, only two of them in
Boston, one of these being his strong protest
against advancing Slavery and its demoralization
of the North. The same lecture was given in
Philadelphia, and seventeen on various themes
in the Middle States, one in Hamilton, Ontario,
during February. Returning home in March,
eleven more were read before New England
audiences.]


516
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
(From NO)
“ Success shall be in thy courser tall,
Success in thyself, which is best of all,
Success in thy hand, success in thy foot,
In struggle with man, in battle with brute,
The holy God and Saint Drotten dear
Shall guide and bless thee through thy career.
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”
From the Danish; GEORGE BORROW.
February, 1855.
They laughed us down. They treated the
rule of right as puerile enthusiasm.
We sacrifice the convenient, the pleasant,
the expedient to the Right.
The real struggle of Europe is for two things,
1, Nationality ; 2, Morality, as the fundamental
guide of statesmanship; republicanism not being
the end desired, but is the only means possible.
“ Connais les cérémonies. Si tu en pénètres le sens,
tu gouverneras un royaume avec la même facilité
que tu regards dans ta main.” — CONFUCIUS.
Don't attempt too many things. Unlimited
activity is bankruptcy.
Against the absurdity of expense, we set up


1855) THOUGHT. A QUESTION 517
the beauty of manners. They think it becoming
in a gentleman to spend much for his dinner.
We think it becoming to spend little for his
dinner, much for his brain.
Man feels the antipodes and the pole: they
are his, like the drops of his blood.'
Revere self. Every thought not only a fount
of a man and his career, but will have its glori-
fication in the grand man; its star; and its age.
Who are you that you should desert it? It will
have its literature and art, yet. Alum is wanted
in the strata, and so is marl and phosphorus.
Romulus threw his spear into the Palatine Hill.
The spear took root, and became a tree.
Cur
TOR
Rome, N. Y., February 18.
What occurred this morning touching the
imagination? In meeting a new student, I in-
cline to ask him, Do you know any deep man?
Has any one furnished you with a new image?
For to see the world representatively, implies
high gifts.
1 The rest of the passage thus beginning is found in
“ Beauty" (Conduct of Life, p. 283). Many other sentences
for that essay occur in this journal and are here omitted.


518
[AGE 51
JOURNAL
[Here first appears the poem “The Romany
Girl' almost as in its finished form in the Poems.]
The sun goes down and with him takes
The coarseness of my poor attire;
The fair moon mounts, and aye the Aame
Of gipsy beauty blazes higher, etc.
History is all party pamphlets; Lingard for
Catholics, Hume for Tories, Hallam for Whigs,
Brodie for radicals. Mitford writes Greek history
for monarchists, Grote for Republicans.
Dance. Under the soul of the world, “the
bodies are moved in a beautiful manner, as being
parts of the whole: but certain things are cor-
rupted, in consequence of not being able to sus-
tain the order of the whole. Just as if, in a great
dance, which is conducted in a becoming man-
ner, a tortoise being caught in the middle of the
progression, should be trod upon, not being able
to escape the order of the dance; though, if the
tortoise had arranged itself with the dance, it
would not have suffered from those that com-
posed it.” – Plotinus.
“ Fortune and Hope! I've made my port,
Farewell, ye twin deceivers ;
Ah! many a time I've been your sport,
Go, cozen new believers.”


C
m
1855) AUTOBIOGRAPHY. ALCOTT 519
πάντα ρεϊ.
UTICA, February 11.
Ah! how few things! A warm room, and
morning leisure. I sit by the Holy River, and
watch the waves. Will it not cease to flow for
me? I need not ask for more. Let them ask
for results and externals, they who have not
this source. Minima pars sui puella' – they
who are not substance have need of the com-
pensation of costume.
I do not know that I am ready, like my
Dervish” in his more total devotion, to throw my
babes into the Stream. No, I am householder,
and father, and citizen, far too much for that.
But what blazing evidence his vices (so esteemed)
afford to the pure beauty that intoxicates him!
How far better his outward shiftlessness and
insensibility to what are reckoned the primary
claims, than the Bulwer view of intellect, as a
sort of bill of exchange easily convertible into
fine chambers, wines, and cigars.
Of him, that is, of the Dervish by the River,
I think, this morning, most respectfully, when I
remember his magnanimity, unparalleled I think
among men of his class, – that he truly loves the
1 The girl is the least part of herself, (HORACE ?)
2 Alcott ?
no
ess


520
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
thought, and wishes its widest publication, and
gladly hears his own from the lips of other men.
What a fact, too, that when Higginson went
to the Court-House, having made up his mind
that he should not return thence, the only man
that followed him into it was Alcott ! '
we re
When we read the criticism, - it may be right
or wrong, — we side with it; we think the critic
may be in the right, but it is quickly forgotten.
And long afterward we must still go back to
London for the wise remark, imagery, the wit,
the indignation that are unforgettable.
The rule of positive and superlative is this:
as long as you deal with sensible objects in the
sphere of sense, call things by their right names.
But every man may be, and some men are, raised
to a platform whence he sees beyond sense to
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then a clergyman at
Worcester, planned to lead a rush on the United States Court-
House in Boston to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns.
The assault failed from want of proper support, and Higginson
was wounded. Alcott, armed only with his cane, braved the
danger with philosophic composure and deliberateness. (For
some account of this affair see Life of Richard H. Dana, by ..
C. F. Adams, and the Memoir of Alcott, by W. E. Harris and
F. B. Sanborn.)


1855] FRANCE. BEHAVIOUR 521
moral and spiritual truth ; when he no longer
sees snow as snow, or horses as horses, but only
sees or names them representatively for those
interior facts which they signify. This is the way
the poets use them. And in that exalted state,
the mind deals very easily with great and small
material things, and strings worlds like beads
upon its thought. The success with which this
is done can alone determine how genuine is the
inspiration.
France. Alfieri said, the character of the
French consists in not having one.
Kossuth's remark contrasts the pound and
shilling system of English army promotion with
the opportunity of the French soldier, who finds
the materials of a marshal's staff in his own
knapsack.
A man's manners, to be radiant, must an-
nounce his reality. His wealth is inexhaustible
only in his proper vein. On every other ground,
he soon acquaints you with all his collections.
Tour de force.
r People fatigue us because they are apes and
drilled. Make a man happy by gratifying his
powers with their legitimate objects and activity,
and you make him strong.


522
[AGE 51
JOURNAL
Subjectiveness. Governor Reynolds, of Illinois,
said, “ The people were always right.” One said,
“But they crucified Our Saviour; were they
right then?” The Governor looked about him
and then replied, “ Yes, they were right then,
for if they had not crucified him, he could not
have been our Saviour.”
This may serve as one out of a thousand ex-
amples that every proposition is true, or may be
made true by an active wit.
Men ride on a thought, as if each bestrode an
invisible horse, which, if it became visible, all
their seemingly mad plunging motions would be
explained.
England. When my eyes opened I found I
was jogging between the narrowest walls and
seeing nothing else, and that I had mistaken
those walls of the lane for England.
Thus, the religion of England, is it the estab-
lishment?'...
Lord Lyndhurst said, “The man who has
nothing must be a radical to get what other
people have; he who has something, must be a
conservative, to keep it.”
i Here follows the concluding paragraph of the chapter
« Religion " in English Traits.


1855) ENGLAND AT HAMILTON 523
I prefer a little integrity to any career. Real-
ity the charm of a good novel like Villette.
February 24.
But two good nights in a fortnight:- one at
Buffalo; the second at Hamilton (Ontario), in
finding myself in England, as it seemed, with
English soft coal fire, my fine warm parlor hung
round with Wilkie prints, and with Burrage's (?)
print of a champion course at Amesbury ; with
English servant, and the hotel full of solid Eng-
lishmen talking London politics in the dear is-
land tones. Hon. Hugh Cameron complimented
me on the Essay on Friendship !
e me
- Coa
se
Curious to see these men standing there with
Bibles open, fiercely defending old Bailey Chris-
tianity, with finger on text,' — coarse and cruel
men, constables and grocers, every feature and
tone being only a placard, “ Beware of Pick-
pockets,” — and they fancying that we only
know them by the texts they quote, and the
words they articulate.
i Mr. Emerson was still engaged in writing English Traits,
as appears by the passage on “ Religion” following in the Jour-
nal a little later, and, some crude religious talk, heard at Hamil-
ton, apparently revived impressions of insular narrowness.


524
JOURNAL
[AGE 51
“May you lie down in that peace which escap-
eth explanation, and rise to the duties which go
with the peace.” — Aunt Mary to ELIZABETH
HOAR.
LIZABETH
“To move the reader deeply, the author must
be in perfect repose.” — NIEBUHR.
Niebuhr lost his divination for some years,
and it returned to him.
It is as easy to twist beams of iron as candy
braids, if only you take all the steps ; as the ma-
chine-shop can show you each step is simple and
easy; and geology shows it just as easy to bend
and twist and braid strata of ores, basalt, por-
phyry, and granite, as to make anchors:- geo-
logy shows the steps.'
'Tis clear that the European is a better ani-
mal than the American. Here you can only have
Webster, or Parsons, or Washington, at the first
descent from a farmer or people's man. Theirsons
will be mediocrities; but in England, in Europe,
the privileged classes shall continue to furnish the
best specimens. The Czars of Russia shall con-
tinue to be good stock.
1 A similar sentence occurs in “Considerations by the
Way” (Conduct of Life, p. 276).


1855) RADIATION. MUSEUMS 525
I look on the homage paid by men to a great
man, as the expression of their hope.' ...
Natural History. Radiation is the lesson of
natural history. Every one of these monsters —
a lizard, a mouse, a crocodile, a baboon - is only
some function of mine magnified. ... From
your centre Nature carries every integral part
out to the horizon, and mirrors yourself to you
in the universe.
Yet the effect of a museum of Natural History
is not to help and inspire us, but rather to mor-
tify, by gigantising these limitations. These are
the Titans that warred with Jove, and he only
saved himself by the skin of his teeth.
Natural history builds up from oyster and
tadpole. Mythology gives us down from the
heavens.
Beauty is the quality which makes to en-
dure.' ...
Greeks. 'Tis strange what immortality is in
1 The rest of the passage is printed in " Progress of Cul-
ture” (Letters and Social Aims, pp. 226, 227).
'2 The paragraph thus beginning is in " Beauty” (Conduct
of Life, p. 295).


526
[AGE 51
JOURNAL
their very rags;so much mentality about the race
has made every shred durable.
We run very fast, but here is this horrible
Plato, at the end of the course, still abreast of us.
Our novelties we can find all in his book. He
has anticipated our latest neology.
The history says, the Romans conquered the
Greeks: but I analyse the Roman language, I
read the Roman books, I behold the Roman
buildings, I dig up marbles in the Roman gar-
dens; and I find Greeks everywhere still para-
mount, in art, in thought;—and in my history,
the Greeks conquered Rome.
cen
Landor is a man of wit and versatile powers,
who by pure affluence of his own wit creates a
Parnassus about him, is independent of his times,
and seems like a king on his travels with his
court about him. He is the steadfast friend of
liberty and honour.
Then what to say of Tennyson? When I read
“Maud" then I say, Here is one of those Eng-
lish heads again such as in the Elizabethan days
were rammed full of delightful fancies. What
colouring like Titian, colour like the dawn.'....
The rest of the passage is printed in English Traits,
p. 257.


e
4
verses
1855] CHAUCER. QUOTATION 527
Rhyme and Rhetoric. As boys write verses
from delight in the music or rhyme, before they
learn to delight in the sense, so, when grown
older, they write from love of the rhetoric, sooner
than for the argument, and, in most instances, a
sprightly genius chooses the topic and treatment
that gives him room to say fine things, before
the sad heroic truth.
Chaucer and Chapman had legs and trunk to
their poetry : the poem was a finer man, and had
all the parts of a man. But these fine young wits
who write exquisite verses now," the brain of a
purple mountain,” etc., — their poetry has no
legs.
Quotation. What I said in one of my Saadi
scraps of verse,'I might say in good sooth, that
Thus the high Muse treated me
Directly never greeted me,
But when she spread her dearest spells
Feigned to speak of some one else :
1 That is, not quoted from Saadi, but Mr. Emerson used
his name or other versions of it, Said or Seyd, when he wished
to paint the Poet, his characters and spiritual experiences. (Sec
“Uriel,"' «rSaadi,” and also “Fragments" on "The Poet and
the Poetic Gift ” in the Appendix to the Poems.) This pas-
sage in full is found on page 324 of the Century Edition of
the Poems.


528
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
I was free to overhear,
Or I might at will forbear ;
But that casual word
Thus at random overheard,
Was the symphony of spheres,
And proverb of a thousand years.
My best thought came from others. I heard
in their words my own meaning, but a deeper
sense than they put on them: and could well and
best express myself in other people's phrases,
but to finer purpose than they knew.
“He that borrows the aid of an equal un-
derstanding,” said Burke,“ doubles his own : he
that uses that of a superior elevates his own to
the stature of that he contemplates."
Common Fame. I trust a good deal to common
fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or
wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make
better chairs or knives, crucibles or church or-
gans, than anybody else, you will find a broad
hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in
the woods.' And if a man knows the law, people
1 There has been much inquiry in the newspapers recently
as to whether Mr. Emerson wrote a sentence very like the
above which has been attributed to him in print. The Editors


tu
1855) JUSTICE IN FAME 529
find it out, though he live in a pine shanty, and
resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so
as to wrap the prisoned soul in an elysium; or
can paint landscape, and convey into oils and
ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Au-
tumn; or can liberate or intoxicate all people
who hear him with delicious songs and verses ;
'tis certain that the secret cannot be kept: the
first witness tells it to a second, and men go by
fives and tens and fifties to his door. What a
signal convenience is fame.
Well, it is still so with a thinker. If he pro-
poses to show me any high secret, if he profess
to have found the profoundly secret pass that
leads from Fate to Freedom, all good heads and
all mankind aspiringly and religiously wish to
know it, and, though it sorely and unusually
taxes their poor brain, they find out at last
whether they have made the transit or no. If
they have, they will know it; and his fame will
surely be bruited abroad. If they come away
unsatisfied, though it be easy to impute it (even
in their belief) to their dulness in not being able
do not find the latter in his works, but there can be little doubt
that it was a memory-quotation by some hearer, or, quite prob-
ably, correctly reported from one of his lectures, the same im-
age in difering words.
TUSU


530
[AGE 51
JOURNAL
to keep step with his snow-shoes on the icy
mountain paths, – I suspect it is because the
transit has not been made. 'Tis like that crooked
hollow log through which the farmer's pig found
access to the field; the farmer moved the log so
that the pig, in returning to the hole, and pass-
ing through, found himself to his astonishment
still on the outside of the field : he tried it again,
and was still outside ; then he fled away, and
would never go near it again.
Whatever transcendant abilities Fichte, Kant,
Schelling, and Hegel have shown, I think they
lack the confirmation of having given piggy a
transit to the field. The log is very crooked,
but still leaves Grumphy on the same side of
the fence he was before. If they had made the
transit, common fame would have found it out.
So I abide by my rule of not reading the book,
until I hear of it through the newspapers.
Our Concord mechanics and farmers are very
doubtful on the subject of Culture, and will
vote against you: but I notice they will all send
their children to the dancing-school. They are
rather deaf on the subject of mental superior-
ity; but they value the multiplication-table, and
decimal fractions, and theodolites, and survey-


as
1855] THE SCHOLAR'S DUTY 531
ing and navigation. They value reading and
writing
February.
Philip Randolph' was surprised to find me
speaking to the politics of anti-slavery, in Phil-
adelphia. I suppose, because he thought me a
believer in general laws, and that it was a kind
of distrust of my own general teachings to ap-
pear in active sympathy with these temporary
heats.
He is right so far as that it is becoming in
the scholar to insist on central soundness, rather
than on superficial applications. I am to give a
wise and just ballot, though no man else in the
republic doth. I am not to compromise or mix
or accommodate. I am to demand the absolute
right, affirm that, and do that; but not push
Boston into a false, showy, and theatrical atti-
tude, endeavoring to persuade her she is more
virtuous than she is. Thereby I am robbing
myself, more than I am enriching the public.
After twenty, fifty, a hundred years, it will be
a
1 A valued young friend and correspondent of Mr. Emer-
son's in Philadelphia, who said in a letter to Carlyle soon af-
ter: “ One day in Philadelphia you should have heard the
wise young Philip Randolph defend you against objections of
mine" (Carlyle- Emerson Correspondence, vol. ï, p. 242).


532
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
quite easy to discriminate who stood for the
right, and who for the expedient.
The vulgar, comprising ranks on ranks of fine
gentlemen, clergymen, college presidents and
professors, and great Democratic statesmen bel-
lowing for Liberty, will of course go for safe
degrees of liberty, - that is, will side with pro-
perty against the Spirit, subtle and absolute,
which keeps no terms.
Munroe seriously asked what I believed of
Jesus and prophets. I said, as so often, that it
seemed to me an impiety to be listening to one
and another, when the pure Heaven was pour-
ing itself into each of us, on the simple condi-
tion of obedience. To listen to any second-hand
gospel is perdition of the First Gospel. Jesus
was Jesus because he refused to listen to an-
other, and listened at home.
August.
Out upon scholars with their pale, sickly,
etiolated indoor thoughts. Give me the out-of-
door thoughts of sound men,- the thoughts,
all fresh, blooming.
For the great poets, like the Greek artists,
elaborated their designs, but slighted their finish,
and it is the office of poets to suggest a vast


1855) ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 533
wealth, a background, a divinity, out of which
all this and much more readily springs; and if
this religion is in the poetry, it raises us to some
purpose, and we can well afford some staidness
-ór gravity in the verses.
e
a
Prima Philosopbia.
“ Dissolvers of Fate.”—IAMBLICHUS.
“How can the soul be adjacent to the one, ex-
cept by laying asleep the garrulous matter that
is in her?” — PROCLUS.
“Eternal beings only have a real existence.”
- PROCLUS, Providence and Fate, ii, 464.
“In last natures, there are representations of
such as are first, and all things sympathize with
all.” — PROCLUS.
“While life everywhere resounds, the most
abject beings may be said to retain a faint echo
of the melody produced by the mundane lyre.”
- Taylor's PROCLUS, ii, 395.
“Life is that which holds matter together.”
— PORPHYRY.
res
Oi peovtes. For flowing is the secret of things
and no wonder the children love masks,'...
1 What follows is printed in Natural History of Intellect,
pp. 58, 59.


534
JOURNAL
(AGE 51
A mythology discerning the eternal from the
transitory, called Ideas gods. And availing itself
of that oblivion which accompanies any mind
raised above the comprehension of his contem-
poraries (for he speaks as a man among oxen),
easily imputed the strange imaginative words he
dropped, to oracles and gods. The Chaldæan
Oracles are plainly all esoteric metaphysics and
ethics of a deep thinker speaking after truth,
and not after appearance, and using whatever
images occurred, to convey his grand perception.
Then Proclus says, with perfect naiveté, “Hence
the gods exhort to understand the forerun-
ning form of light,'” etc., - citing the Chal-
dear Oracles.
Memory, connecting inconceivable mystery
with inconceivable mystery.
In children, thought is slow, therefore time
is long. You shall hear, as soon as they are well
into frocks and trousers, the young rememberers
begin to say, “Don't you berember how we used
to do this and that,” as if recalling great spaces
of time, and it was only a few months, or maybe,
last year.
These geologies, chemistries, astronomies,
leave us where they found us. The invention


1855) INSPIRED SCIENCE 535
is of great use to the inventor, but harms the
pupil, whom it hinders from helping himself.
The facts that Science collects are of no value
to any one but the owner. Mother wit animates
mountains of facts by turning them to human
use, - milking the cow, suspending the load-
stone, pouring human will and human wit
through things till the world is a second self, —
blushes with shame, laughs with health, is a
temple of religion. But the moment these facts
fall to dull man, they are like steel-filings when
the magnet is withdrawn. 'Tis science in Eng-
land, science in America, very jealous of theory.
A house held up by magnetism, — draw out
the magnet, and the house falls and buries the
inhabitant.
Percival (transcribed by Robert de Thornton
in the fifteenth century).
“Give lythes' to me,
Two words or three,
Of one that was fair and free,
And fell in his fight.
His right name was Percivell,
He was fostered in the fell,
He drank water of the well,
And yet he was wight.”
i ear.


536
(AGE 51
JOURNAL
Passion.
When wrath and terror changed Jove's regal port
And the rash-leaping thunderbolt fell short."
m
Nature, — what we ask of her is only words
to clothe our thoughts. The mind is to find the
thought. Chemistry, Geology, Hydraulics are
secondary. The atomic theory is, of course,
only an interior process produced, as the geo-
meters say, or the outside effect of a foregone
metaphysical theory ; hydrostatics only the sur-
coat of ideal necessities. Yet the thoughts are
few, the forms many; the large vocabulary, or
many-coloured coat of the indigent Unity. The
savants are very chatty and vain; but, hold
them hard to principle and definition, and they
become very mute and near-sighted. What is
motion? What is beauty? What is life? What
is force? Push them hard, drive them home.
They will not be loquacious. I have heard that
Peirce, the Cambridge mathematician, had come
to Plato at last. 'T is clear that the invisible and
imponderable is the sole fact. “Why changes
not the violet earth into musk?” asks Hafiz.
What is the term of this overflowing metamor-
phosis? I do not know what are the stoppages,
i Poems, Appendix, “ Fragments on Life," p. 358.


1855] THE ANSWER. WEBSTER 537
but I see that an all-dissolving unity changes
all that which changes not.
'Tis a fine fable for the advantage of char-
acter over talent, the strife of Jove and Phe-
bus.' ...
The aim is ever to frame an answer that does
not admit of an answer. But there is no such
answer framable. “Your cattle have broke into
my woodlot, and browsed the trees,” says the
gentleman. “The cattle must be damned fools,”
replies the farmer, “to browse on pine-trees,
when there's good grass in the road.” “Cattle
are damned fools,” returned the gentleman.
The judge said at Salem, “The law is so and
so," and ruled the evidence out. Webster asked
a rehearing. “If that be law,” said Mr. Webster,
" then it were better to run a ploughshare under
the foundations of this court-house.” And Web-
ster got a reversed ruling and Colman's evidence
admitted.
“I have great respect for the opinions of
Lord Camden. I was bred to a high esteem for
i For the fable see “Works and Days” (Society and
Solitude, pp. 184, 185).


538
(Age 51
JOURNAL
his learning and wisdom. But, in regard to the
point in question, I differ from Lord Cam-
den,” said Webster.
“At last Goodrich was put upon the stand.
As soon as I looked him in the face, I saw that
he had not been robbed. With my first ques-
tion, I brought him, -and in twenty minutes
there was not a person in the Court-House who
did not know that no robbery had been com-
mitted,” said Webster, who had received casu-
ally in a stage-coach from Jacob Perkins the
opinion that Goodrich had wounded his own
hand.
House-bunting. Everything is on the street:
highways run through Nature, as, in the human
body, the veins percolate to every spot; you
cannot prick with the finest needle anywhere
but you draw blood. The young people do not
like the town, do not like the seashore, they
will go inland, find a dear cottage deep in the
mountains, secret as their hearts. They set forth
on their travels in search of a home.'...
The youth must leave home; he must hide
in the forest; he departs for Katahdin, or Moose-
i For the rest of this long passage see “ Considerations by
the Way” (Conduct of Life, pp. 268, 269).


1855] CULTURE. TO-DAY 539
head Lake: he cannot get enough alone to write
to his friend, to worship his beloved. He finds,
after much search, the Italy flies faster than he;
he chases a rainbow.
Culture is for the results. The best of educa-
tion, the generalizations we make of our school
and manipulating processes. We early find that
one thing only translates another; that we draw
the same ultimate knowledge from twenty stud-
ies, from twenty arts. It needs the apt scholar,
capable of the lesson,- and the school, the text,
is indifferent.
You must begin at the beginning, and you
must take all the steps in order. Only so shall
you do the feat, in whichever art you se-
lect.' ...
Se.
The past is worshipped, and the morrow prized.
To-day, — what doth it to be so despised?
Future or Past no stricter mystery folds,
O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds.
i The rest of the passage, condensed, is found in “ Con-
siderations by the Way” (Conduct of Life, p. 276).
2 See the perfected form of this quotation, called “ Heri,
Cras, Hodie” (Yesterday, To-morrow, To-day) in the
Poems (p. 295).


540
[AGE 51
JOURNAL
Milton was abstemious of praise. And how
odious are most dedications with their adulatory
personalities, in Bacon, in Pliny the Elder, in
Martial, in Horace ! In Hafiz only, the genial
heaven-daring courage with which he sets his
Shah beside, and even above, Allah, makes us
pardon the flattery, for the poetry. Excellent is
the courageous treatment.
The lover delights in the surprise of face and
form yet so dearly related to him. The more
foreign, the better. The lady's eye seemed al-
ways looking at distant lands and distant peo-
ple: she could never be domesticated. It was
like a young deer or a young leopard, or a for-
est bird, newly caught and brought into your
yard. Still descend to him, prefer him, but, for
Heaven's sake, do not lose this exotic charm,
which fills his imagination.
Far capitals, and marble courts, her eye still seemed
. to see,
Minstrels, and dames, and high-born men, and of the
best that be.
It is on the completeness with which metri-
cal forms have covered the whole circle of rou-
tinary experience that improvisation is possible


1855] IMPROVISATION
541
to a rhymer familiar with this cyclus of forms,
and quick and dexterous in combining them.
Most poetry – stock poetry we call it, that we
see in the magazines — is nothing but this mo-
saic-work done slowly.
But whether is improvisation of poetry pos-
sible, as well as this ballad-mongering?
Yes, no doubt, since geniuses have existed, we
will not be disloyal or hopeless. But beside the
strange power implied of passing at will into the
state of vision and of utterance, is required huge
means, vast health and vigor and celerity.
Ellery Channing's poetry has the merit of
being genuine, and not the metrical common-
places of the magazine, but it is painfully in-
complete. He has not kept faith with the
reader; 't is shamefully indolent and slovenly.
He should have lain awake all night to find the
true rhyme for a verse, and he has availed him-
self of the first one that came ; so that it is all
a babyish incompleteness.
Walter Scott is the best example of this mas-
tery of metrical commonplaces that makes vul-
gar improvisation.
as-
I am to read Guizot“ Love in Marriage" or
at least Lady Russell. The song of 1596 says,


542
JOURNAL
(AGE 52
The wife of every Englishman is counted blest.
Ritson.
Bring me home no beef, for that is full of bones,
But bring me home good ale enow, 't is bread and
milk at once.
Ritson.
Hafiz.
O follow, O see the sonnet's Aight!
Thou seest a feet career,
O child, begot in a night,
That travels a thousand year.
The chief fact in history of the world is the
penury with which the stream of thought runs.
In five hundred years millions and millions of
men, and not a hundred lines of poetry; though
almost all of them have some ear and apprehen-
sion for poetry, and not a few try to write. Poet-
ical persons hum a verse, and go as far as half
a quatrain, - which they cannot complete. Ex-
aggerating people talk of moments when their
brain seemed bursting with the multitude of
thoughts! I believe they were mistaken; there
was no danger. Yet nothing but thought is pre-
cious, and we must respect in ourselves this
possibility, and abide its time. Jones Very, who


1855) THOUGHT. FAITH. BIAS 543
thought it an honour to wash his own face, seems
to me less insane than men who hold themselves
cheap.
Let us not be such that our thoughts should
disdain us. If I could find that a perfect song
could form itself in my brain, I should indulge
it and pamper it as bees their queen.
Hour follows hour, and eternity eternity,
without doubt for the believer.
A man bears Belief as a tree bears apples.
Life expensive, but probably was always, only
we forget the shillings as we do the vermin.
The present race are wanted for fifty years;
the idealist for always. There is never a fine as-
piration but is on its way to its body or institu-
tion.
Look up Kant on History.
Bias. The writer who draws on his proper
talent can neither be overshadowed nor sup-
planted. The oak may grow as beautifully and as
vastly as it will, it never can take a ray of beauty
from the palm; and both of them at their best
will only set off the beauty of the pine or the
elm.


544
(AGE 52
JOURNAL
. Opposition is our belt and tonic. No opinion
will pass, but must stand the tug of war.
Men wish to pay homage to courage and
perseverance, to a man whose steps have no
choice, but are planted, each one. We know
the austere law of liberty, — that it must be
reconquered day by day, that it subsists in
a state of war, that it is always slipping away
from those who boast it, to those who fight
for it.
mor
In race it is not the broad shoulders, or lithe-
ness, or stature, that give advantage.' . .. I find
the writing and speaking of Englishmen in Eliza-
beth's, James's, and Charles I and II's days, to
have a greater breadth, and, at the same time,
more delicacy with a negligent greatness than any
since George I came in. Americans are hardly
bred sufficiently to read and apprehend the
sweetness of Mrs. Hutchinson,' of Pierrepont,
of Lady Russell, of Vane, of Herbert, and of
Kenelm Digby.
1 What follows is printed in English Traits, pp. 46, 47.
2 The wife of Colonel Thomas Hutchinson (the Governor
of Nottingham who defended it for the Parliament) wrote his
Memoir ; several extracts from which follow (See Society and
Solitude, p. 273, and Miscellanies, p. 407).


1855) THE POCKET. NEWTON 545
The Englishman is wont to esteem his pocket
a place of sanctity; a hold which no human hand
but his own is allowed to enter. The habit of
putting into it increases the passion to fill it,
which, day by day, creeps on the man, until I
fear at last he comes to value his mind as an-
other pocket, into which no one ever goes but
himself, and valuable for that reason; he can put
away there what he does not like to have seen,
- and it is subservient to the first.
Newton. Dr. Boerhaave said of him, “That
man comprehends as much as all mankind be-
sides." Newton told Mr. Machin,“that his head
never ached but when he was studying the lunar
irregularities.” And when Dr. Halley pressed
him to complete his theory of the moon, he re-
plied, “ that it made his head ache, and kept him
awake so often, that he would think of it no
more.” He afterwards told Conduitt, “that, if
he lived till Halley made six years' observations,
he would have another stroke at the moon."
Newton composed his chronology at Cam-
bridge, where he was in the habit, he said, “of
refreshing himself with history and chronology
when weary of other studies.”
Leibnitz said, that he had consulted all the


546
[AGE 52
JOURNAL
learned in Europe upon some difficult points
without having any satisfaction, and that when
he applied to Sir Isaac, he wrote him in answer
by the first post to do so and so, and then he
would find it.
Bishop Burnet valued Newton for having the
whitest soul he ever knew.
Nature shows everything once somewhere in
large. Your earthquake is the first chemist, gold-
smith, and brazier : he wrought to purpose in
his craters, before men borrowed the hint in their
crucibles. Bayle called the marine remains in
mountain and mine the medals of the deluge.
Mr. Owen saw the fibrous or tubular structure
of the teeth of the mastodon; the microscope
showed this to be an universal fact. Hunter saw
in the snail that the snail was to its shell as the
pulp is to a tooth.
Flamsteed will cause his man to calculate more
synopses of the moon's places both from the
observations and tables as “ soon as observed,
whereby it will be soon evident whether the
heavens will allow these new equations you
introduce." ;
ens
e new
1 All the above quotations seem to come from Sir David


1855) HOMOLOGY. AGNI 547
Identities for intellect. Sallust's complaint that
nobody will believe more than he can do him-
self; which is just.
The universal belief that because you have
such a form and organization as mine, — point
for point, - you must believe as I do. If you do
more than I, the worse for you. And science of
to-day is Homologies.
Rig Veda Sanbita. “Who, Agni, among men
is thy kinsman?
"Agni! (Fire) bring the gods awaking with
the morning, thou accepted messenger of the
gods, bearer of oblations, giver of dwellings, be-
loved of many, the smoke-bannered, the light-
shedding. I praise Agni at the break of day, the
best and youngest of the gods, the guest of man,
exempt from death, preserver, the sacrificer !
Juvenile Agni ! whose flames delight, wafter of
the burnt-offering! Resplendent Agni, visible
to all, protector of people in villages, associate
of man, lord of red coursers, son of strength.
Place upon the grass the morning-moving dei-
ties, to drink the soma juice, for it was yesterday
expressed.
Brewster's Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries
of Sir Isaac Newton, then newly published.


548
JOURNAL [AGE 52'
“I invoke the lovely Night and Dawn to sit
upon the sacred grass at this our sacrifice.
“Mortals, you owe your daily birth to Indra,
who, with the rays of the morning, gives sense
to the senseless, and to the formless, form. The
shedder of rain, the mighty lord, the always com-
pliant, invests men with his strength, as a bull
defends a herd of kine.
“The hymn, the cause of increase, is to be
repeated to Indra. ...
“Maruts (winds?) sportive, without horses,
borne by spotted deer (clouds) were born self-
radiant, with weapons, war-cries, and decorations.
I hear the cracking of the whips in their hands,
wonderfully inspiring courage in the fight. Praise
the sportive and resistless strength of the
Maruts.
“ Which is the chief leader among you,
agitators of heaven and earth, who shake all
around, like the top of a tree? . . . At the
roaring of the Maruts, every dwelling of the
earth shakes.
“ Maruts, with strong hands, come along the
beautifully embanked rivers, with unobstructed
progress. May the felloes of your wheels be
firm!
“Utter the verse that is in your mouths :


1855) ASWINS. VARUNA. VISHNU 549
spread it out like a cloud spreading rain; chant
the measured hymn. ...
“ Aswins (waters?) long-armed, bearers of
wealth, guides of men, sit down on the sacred
grass. Affluent Aswins ! have you not ever
drunk the soma juice?: Come as a ship to bear
us over the ocean of your praises. ... Ambrosia
is in the waters; in the waters are medicinal
herbs.”
Varuna. “He who knows the path of the birds
flying in the air, he abiding in the ocean, knows,
also, the course of ships. He who knows the
path of the vast, the graceful, and the excellent
wind, and who knows those who reside above.
Through him the sage beholds all the marvels
that have been or will be wrought." ...
« Vishnu traversed this world; three times
he planted his foot, and the whole world was
collected in the dust of his footstep."
(The three steps are the Present, the Past,
and the Future.)
“For the stars cast or inject their imagination
or influence into the air,” says Behmen.
1 Mr. Emerson notes that the Soma comes from the Acid
Milkweed ( Aselepias viminalis).


'550
JOURNAL
(AGE 52
In youth, we admire much in ourselves or in
others, as high individuality, which turns out
later to be merely of temperament, or of sex,
and therefore extremely common.
Cants. Another of the cants is the cant about
banks. Ours is declared to be, says Sam
Hooper,' “ the most perfect system of currency
and banking in the world.”
The most audacious cant of Europe was “the
Holy Alliance," — and of America, “the ex-
tending the area of freedom”; now “manifest
destiny"; and “preservation of the Union.”
England has Wilkinson, Carlyle, Tennyson,
Landor, Dickens, Thackeray, Hallam, Layard,
Bulwer, Gladstone, Henry Drummond, Cob-
den, Chadwick, Stephenson, Owen.
But what stout old fellows were Bede,
Camden, Newton, Hooke, Flamsteed, Fuller,
Leland, Hearne, Dodsworth (162 volumes);
Bayle, Dugdale, Brian, Walton, Coke, Little-
ton.
sen
An important defect in America, “the ab-
sence of a general education of the eye.”
i Senator from Massachusetts.


1855] YOUR GIFT. SMALL MEN 551
Jacob Behmen's pictures are in the fine alle-
gory of Book ix, chapter 12, p. 280, and there
only pleasing
I hold that a wise man will write nothing but
that which is known only to himself and that
he will not produce his truth until it is impera-
tively demanded by the exigencies of the con-
versation which has arrived at that point. So is
the shrine and pedestal ready, so he produces
his statue, and it fills the eye.
The English are stupid because they reserve
their strength. The Lowells ripen slowly. Hurry-
ing America makes out of little vanities its great
men, as, now, the three leading men in Amer-
ica are of a small sort, who never saw a grander
arch than their own eyebrow; never saw the
sky of a principle which made them modest and
contemners of themselves. Yet Washington,
Adams, Quincy, Franklin, I would willingly
adorn my hall with, and I will have daguerres
of Alcott, Channing, Thoreau.
A man of thought is willing to die, willing to
live ; I suppose because he has seen the thread
on which the beads are strung, and perceived
that it reaches up and down, existing quite in-
eau.
au,


552
(AGE 52
JOURNAL
dependently of the present illusions. A man of
affairs is afraid to die, is pestered with terrors,
because he has not this vision. Yet the first
cannot explain it to the second.
Greenough thinks civility grew fast in East
and South Europe because the climate allowed
them leisure to occupy themselves about mat-
ters of general and lasting import.
“The leisure which Nature gave them we
may have, if we belong to our climate, and do
not make our civilization merely a colossal one."
“ For not only in servitude is man robbed
of half his life. Without a state, and an im-
mediate Fatherland, the noblest man is little
worth: — with them, even the simple can do
much.” – NIEBUHR, Letters, iii, 129.
'T is a measure of culture, the number of
things taken for granted.' ...
Saadi. Retzsch is one of those disconsolate
1 The rest of the paragraph may be found in “ Aristo-
cracy” (Lectures and Biographical Sketches, pp. 56, 57).
2 The explanation of this heading is that the true poet —
Saadi as representative — from his insight is always cheerful.
Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch illustrated the poems of
Goethe, Schiller, Burger, and Shakspeare's plays.


1855] EARTH-ILLUSION. BOOKS 553
preachers. Please don't put a dismal picture on
the wall. David Scott tinged his canvas with
sable. But depth of intellect relieves even the
ink of crime with a fringe of light, as in Napo-
leon.
“A Sidney of tranquil principles.” — Evelyn.
Mythology is no man's work.' ...
The illusion of a firm earth is more useful
and more composing than any narcotic.
Macaulay. No person ever knew so much
that was so little to the purpose.
“ Immensi tremor oceani.” On De Ruyter's
monument at Amsterdam.
S non
Books are the destruction of literature. “The
golden age of the Greek literature was that in
which no book grew under the stylus or the
calamus, but these merely served as aids (and
not probably until after the lapse of centuries)
to the precarious tradition of the nation, and
the overladen memory of the poetical singers
and narrators.” — NIEBUHR, Letters, iii, 217.
i See “ Quotations and Originality” (Letters and Social
Aims, pp. 181, 182).


554
JOURNAL
(AGE 52
Sleepy Hollow.' Ellery Channing says, “They
will lay out the grounds in the way of a den-
tist. A dentist wants a good tooth, but it must
be a false tooth.”
Trees should be the only ornaments. Let
the grounds well alone, or aim only at the purg-
ation of superfluities.
“ Kings for such a tomb would wish to die,”
etc.
n
.
Schiller said, “Thoughtest thou that this
infinite round is the sepulchre of thine an-
cestors ; that the wind brings thee, that the per-
fumes of the lindens bring, perhaps, the spent
force of Arminius to thy nostril; that thou,
in the refreshing fountain, perhaps, tastest the
balsamed bones of our great Henry?”
Saadi. Cheerfulness. In every cottage I heard
complaint; in every middle class house I heard
of bad servants. “Where there is no gaiety and
i Mr. Emerson had been invited to make the address at the
consecration of “Sleepy Hollow" as a cemetery on September
29, and the following notes show that duty was in his mind.
His Address is printed in Miscellanies, excepting such por-
tions as were later used in the essay “Immortality.” Mr.
Channing wrote a beautiful poem, and Mr. Sanborn the
hymn sung by the people.


1855) NIEBUHR. QUETELET 555
no enjoyment of life, there can be no vigor and
art in speech or thought,” says Niebuhr.
no
A man is not to aim at innocence, any more
than he is to aim at hair; but he is to keep it.
It is inestimable as a basis or accompaniment
of his ability, but nothing alone.
Niebuhr's Letter to Savigny on his discovery
of the survival of the Roman jugerum in the
Italian pezze, is good Queteletism again.' “The
whole system of the Roman weights and meas-
ures exhibits striking indications of a mathe-
matical basis. Their mile of one thousand paces
bears an evident relation to a degree of the
meridian, and, in all probability, the latter de-
termined the length of the pace and the foot,
which again determined, on the one hand, the
land measure, and on the other, the measure
of capacity; for the ampbora was a cubic foot.”
- Letters, iii, 165.
Thus here again we have in a census of civil
men the fair share of Eulers and Monges and
La Granges appearing.' 'Tis the air, the air
i Quetelet demonstrated the working of natural laws on
men and their institutions.
2 The Letters to a German Princess, of Euler, the mathe-
matician, were clear statements of important facts in mechanics,


556
JOURNAL (AGE 52
that is geometrical, and he who breathes it deeply
begins at once to compute and measure. So it
seems probable that the Phænicians had the
secret of the magnet, which is called Lapis Her-
acleus; and that Hercules's golden cup in which
he sailed the sea was a mariner's compass.
“Paris, that mass of iron deposited on the
banks of the Seine,” says Babinet, complaining
of the disturbance of his delicate magnets.
“ No two terrestrial meridians can be found
alike, any more than two oak leaves,” says Bab-
inet.
· May 20.
Last week, in the race-ground at Cambridge,
a man from New York, named Grindall, ran
ten miles in fifty-seven minutes and some odd
seconds. His competitor was Stetson, who was
only twenty-one seconds behind him.
You may chide sculpture or drawing, if you
will, as you may rail at orchards and cornfields;
but I find the grand style in sculpture as ad-
monitory and provoking to good life as Marcus
Antoninus. I was in the Athenæum, and looked
optics, acoustics, etc. Gaspard Monge, the introducer of " de-
scriptive geometry.” The Mécanique analytique of La Grange
won his great fame and distinction.


1855) METAMORPHCSIS. YEAR 557
at the Apollo, and saw that he did not drink
much port wine. .
The Cid boasted that he never obtained his
swords by barter or trade, but won them in fight.
The life is sacred in each house, that did not
come into the house by any door, but was born
into it.
Series and Degree. Metamorphosis is intelli-
gible only on the doctrine that world repeats
world. In swimming world it swims; in creeping
world, creeps; in flying world it flies. Come up
to higher plane still, act passes into thought,
and Aies with finer wing.
The rear. There is no flower so sweet as the
four-petalled flower, which science much neg-
lects. One grey petal it has, one green, one red,
and one white.
(From RO)
June.
A scholar is a man with this inconvenience,
that, when you ask him his opinion of any
matter, he must go home and look up his man-
uscripts to know.


558
[AGE 5
JOURNAL
How strange, said Choate, all the English to
this day love or hate Charles Fox so much
that they cannot understand the history of
Greece.
Osmunda regalis.
And chiefy that tall fern
So stately, of the Queen Osmunda named
Plant lovelier in its own retired abode
On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere,
Sole sitting by the shores of old romance.
WORDSWORTH.
July.
Morals. 'T is wonderful where the moral in-
fluences come from, since no man is a moralist.
'Tis like the generation of the atmosphere,
which is a secret.
Coleridge is one of those who save England
from the reproach of no longer possessing in
the land the appreciation of what highest wit
the land has yielded, as Shakspeare, Spenser,
Herbert, etc. But for Coleridge, and a lurk-
ing, taciturn, or rarely speaking minority, one
would say that in Germany, and in America,
is the best mind of England rightly respected.


SUTC
1855] NAPOLEON III. WOMAN 559
And that is the sure sign of national decay,
when the Bramins can no longer read and
understand the Braminical science and philo-
sophy.
Louis Napoleon, the present emperor, is a
plucky fellow who writes spirited terms for his
General Pelissier to offer the Russians, and
bolder far than the English would have dic-
tated. He means to teach them how robbers rob.
Trifles. Lone women, readers, etc., wish to
live with good housekeepers, and never learn
that good housekeepers cordially hate any body
who does not dine at the family hour.
Woman. I think it impossible to separate
their education and interest. The policy of de-
fending their property is good; and if the
women demand votes, offices, and political
equality, as an Elder and Eldress are of equal
power in the Shaker Families, refuse it not.
'Tis very cheap wit that finds it so funny. Cer-
tainly all my points would be sooner carried in
the state if women voted. And the new move-
ment is only a tide shared by the spirits of man
and woman, and you may proceed in a faith


560
(Age 52
JOURNAL
that, whatever the woman's heart is prompted
to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously
prompted to execute.
Women more than all are the element and
kingdom of illusion.' ..
There is unbelief in a cigar, in wine, in all
luxury. The poet doubts his access to the
grand sources of inspiration, doubts the con-
tinuance of the supplies, and steals to these
shabby pots.
“De Greeks be Godes, de Greeks be godes!”
said Fuseli, striding up and down among the
Elgin marbles. What adoptive arms their
[English] genius has, hospitable to ability
from every land. Fuseli, Kneller, Romilly,
Ricardo, Schomburgk, Asser, Handel, Herschel.
The church is an institution of God. Yes,
but are not wit, and wise men, and good judg-
ment whether a thing be so or no, also institu-
tions of God, and older than the other?
i Mr. Emerson on the coming 20th September was to
deliver the address ~ Woman” before the Woman's Rights
Convention in Boston. (Scc Miscellanies, pp. 493-426.)


1855) IMMORTALITY. WOMEN 561
Never to assume an obscure cause, when an
obvious one exists, is a rule of the mind. It is
therefore a little violent — is it not? — to con-
tradict the universal traditions of mankind, in
regard to the Eastern origin of nations, by
assuming independent creation of a several race
for each country.
Sleepy Hollow. The blazing evidence of im-
mortality is our dissatisfaction with any other
solution.
All great natures love stability.
Our fear of death is like our fear that sum-
mer will be short, but when we have had our
swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our
swelter of heat, we say we have had our day;
and rest of brain and affection please.
“When we pronounce the name of man, we
pronounce the belief of immortality.” – LIEBER.
“Death takes us away from ill things, not
from good.”
Superlative. ’T was a great discovery to me,
that, when a lady says, “she shall die,” she
means, take a nap.
I want a horse that will run all day like a
wolf.


562
(AGE 52
JOURNAL
Aristocracy. First come, first served.
There is no rich man like the self-reliant; this
is royalty; he walks in a long street. Once for
all he has abdicated second-thoughts, and asks
no leave of other's eyes, and makes lanes and
alleys palatial.
What talent had this second Charles, that he
could hold his place among the Wrens, Hookes,
Newtons, Flamsteeds, Halleys, Bentleys, Pettys,
Coventrys that clustered in his “Royal Society,”
and atone for the harpies and dragons and all un-
clean beasts which masqueraded in titles around
him? Manners, the manners of power, sense
enough to see his advantage, and manners up
to it; that is his cheap secret, and a boundless
subserviency corresponding in the people. Just
what happens in every two persons who meet on
any affair.'..
SW
Alcott. I was struck with the late superiority
he showed. The interlocutors were all better
than he; he seemed childish and helpless, not
apprehending or answering their remarks aright;
they masters of their weapons. But by and by,
when he got upon a thought, like an Indian
1 The rest of the passage occurs in Behavior” (Conduct
of Life, pp. 183, 184).


1855] THOUGHT. STOOPING 563
seizing by the mane and mounting a wild horse
of the desert, he overrode them all, and showed
such mastery and took up Time and Nature like
a boy's marble in his hand, as to vindicate
himself.
(From NO)
Thought is identical, the oceanic one, which
flows hither and thither, and sees that all are its
offspring : it coins itself indifferently into house
or inhabitant, into plants, or man, or fish, or oak,
or grain of sand. All are re-convertible into it.
Every atom is saturated with it, and will celebrate
in its destiny the same laws. Everything, by be-
ing, comes to see and to know. Work is eyes, and
the artist informs himself in efforming matter.
* England. I wish they had made no exception
to their dislike of adventurers in the recent re-
ception of the Emperor Louis Napoleon. The
pride and traditions of the aristocracy and of the
commons, at the moment when they might have
rallied to the side of purest virtue, were inglor-
iously forgotten. It seems impossible to hold
governments to the belief that the use of dis-
honest partnerships is as ruinous for nations as
for private men.
Where were the Viri Romæ ? Where was


564
JOURNAL
(AGE 52
Cromwell, where the Elizabeth Tudors and
Blakes and Sandwiches, Talbots of Shrewsbury;
where the Nelsons and Collingwoods and Well-
ingtons when the haughty aristocracy and the
haughty commons of London cringed like a
Neapolitan populace before this impudent thief?
The capture of London by French cuirassiers,
or by Russian Cossacks, had not been such a
defeat. Let an English gentleman walk very
modestly henceforward.
Nature is a swamp, on whose purlieus we
see prismatic dew-drops, but her interiors are
terrific.'...
King Alfred. “Good fortune accompanied him
in all things like a gift from God.” Good for-
tune is another name for perception and good
will. What fortune can compare with intellect.
Does the early history of each tribe show the
permanent bias of the tribe, which is then lost or
masked in complex relations, as the tribe spreads
and pronounces itself in colonies, commerce,
codes, arts, letters ; the first simple tendency.
1 See « Sovereignty of Ethics" (Lectures and Biograpb-
ical Sketcbes, p. 188).


1855) ALCOTT'S LACK. EGOTISM 565
The early history shows it, as the musician plays
the air which he proceeds to conceal in a tem-
pest of variations.
Alcott thought he had not a lecture or a book,
but was himself an influence. He justified him-
self by naming or letting you name an ideal
assembly, of Socrates, Zoroaster, Pythagoras,
Behmen, Swedenborg, and, if such were bodily
present, he should not be shamed, but would be
free of that company. I hinted that all these were
exact persons, severe with themselves, and could
formulate something. Could he formulate his
dogma? I proposed to lock him up in prison, so
that he might find out what was memory, what
fancy, what instinct, what analysis? A horse doc-
tor could give a prescription to cure a horse's
heel. Had he no recipe for a bad memory, or a
sick angel? To all which he replied that he must
have a scribe to report his thoughts which now
escaped him.
I dread autobiography which usurps the larg-
est part, sometimes the whole of the discourse
of very worthy persons whom I know.
"sons
OW.
Science. He erects himself into a barrier. The
savant is not willing to report Nature, - to stand


566
(AGE 52
JOURNAL
by report ; but must report Nature Cuvierized,
or Blainvillized, Nature Owenized, or Agassiz-
ized, etc., which modification diminishes the at-
traction of the thing in a fatal manner.
Pyramids and catacombs are not built by whim,
but by ideas. They grew from the credence of
the builder, as our telegraphs and railroads from
ours.
A depression of spirits, in a nation as well as
in an individual, develops the germs of a plague.
“Poetry (among the Scandinavians) was in-
scribed on small quadrangular staves, which were
conveniently adapted for the reception of a verse
or stanza, each face containing a line. Amongst
us, therefore, a verse and a stave are still synon-
ymous.” — Edinburgh Review.
The [Scandinavian?] law said that the un-
guarded open field “was under God's lock, with
heaven for its roof, though but the hedge for its
wall."
The wedding formula of the English Liturgy
is Saxon.
The Trygdamal, or Assurance of truce,
highly poetical.
ssurance


1855] CAPUCHINS. IDEAL MAN 567
Henry Thoreau asks, fairly enough, when is
it that the man is to begin to provide for him-
self? Well, yes, of course, to-day, if ever. But
I think some men are born Capuchins. Capu-
chins, too, are in the nature of things, and this
is the best, or Abbot of the Order. He should
have for his arms the cyclamen, which the Ital-
ians call capuccino.
I think genius has a preëmption, an ante-
cedent or seignorial right in lands and chattels.
Just as man is conscious of the law of veget-
able and animal nature, so he is aware of an In-
tellect which overhangs his consciousness like a
sky; of degree above degree; and heaven within
heaven. Number is lost in it. Millions of ob-
servers could not suffice to write its first law.
Yet it seemed to him [the ideal man?] as if
gladly he would dedicate himself to such a god,
be a fakeer of the intellect, fast and pray, spend
and be spent, wear its colours, wear the infirm-
ities, were it pallor, sterility, celibacy, poverty,
insignificance, were these the livery of its troop,
as the smith wears his apron and the collier
his smutted face, honest infirmities, honourable
scars, so that he be rewarded by conquest of
principles; or by being purified and admitted


568
[AGE 52
JOURNAL
into the immortalities, mount and ride on the
backs of these thoughts, steeds which course
forever the ethereal plains.
Time was nothing. He had no hurry. Time
was well lavished, were it centuries and cycles,
in these surveys. It seemed as if the very sen-
tences he wrote, a few sentences after summers
of contemplation, shone again with all the suns
which had gone to contribute to his knowing.
Few, few were the lords he could reckon:
Memory, and Imagination, and Perception: he
did not know more for living long. Abandon
yourself, he said, to the leading, when the Leader
comes; this was the sum of wisdom and duty.
Shake off from your shoes the dust of Europe
and Asia, the rotten religions and personalities
of nations. Act from your heart, where the wise
temperate guidance is instantly born.
Perception; Memory; Imagination; Meta-
morphosis,' the flowing and the melioration or
ascent. Then, as Dionysius described the or-
ders of celestial angels, so the degrees of Intel-
lect are an organic fact, and indeed it is these
which give birth to mythology.
1 After reflection another lord is added to the list in the
above paragraph.


18551 STRENGTH. AUNT MARY 569
It is true — is it not ? - that the intellectual
man is stronger than the robust animal man;
for he husbands his strength, and endures. “Yet
the puppies fight well,” said Wellington of the
overfine cultivated young Londoners.
Henry Thoreau notices that Franklin and
Richardson of Arctic expeditions outlived their
robuster comrades by more intellect. Frémont
did the same. This is the tough tannin that
cures the fibre, when Irish and Dutch are killed
by fever and toil.
Aunt Mary, if you praised a lady warmly,
would stop you short, — “Is it a coloured wo-
man of whom you were speaking ?” When
Mrs. Brown ran into any enthusiasms on Italian
patriots, etc., “Mrs. Brown, how's your cat?”
When she had once bowed to Goodnow and
his wife at the Lyceum, not quite knowing who
they were (Goodnow had offended her when she
boarded with them), she afterwards went up to
him, and said, “I did not know who you were,
or should never have bowed to you.”
“The verses I had composed on Lady Valle-
tort, walking home one morning from Lacoch,


570
JOURNAL . (AGE 52
remained in my memory floating in indistinct
fragments for some weeks, during which time I
was too busy about other things to write them
down. From time to time I took a look, as it
were, into my memory, to see if they were still
there: at last I copied them out,” etc.— MOORE's
Diary.
Queteletism. If the picture is good, who cares
who made it? Better, of course, it should be
the work of a man in the next street than of
Landseer. And the authorship of a good sen-
tence, whether Vedas or Hermes or Chaldæan
oracle, or Jack Straw, is totally a trifle for ped-
ants to discuss. Only imports it that man should
be wise, - "apparent images of unapparent
gods," – and Montaigne's old remark that if
we can fix it on Homer, – but what do you
know of Homer? dead man and dead man I is
it the letters of one name, and the letters of
another name?
The first lesson of history is the good of
evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is a
better.'
i For the rest of the passage sec “ Considerations by the
Way” (Conduct of Life, p. 253).


1855] TWO HANDLES. HEAVEN 571
Suggestiveness. Everything has two handles,
or, like a seed, two nodes,'. .. one of which
shoots down as rootlet, and one upward as tree.
Every thought is made poetical by converting
it from a particular into a general proposition.
As there is no flower or weed so low or lonely
but is strictly related to its botanic family, so
no thought is solitary, but will slowly disclose
its root in a law of the mind."
Heaven is the exercise of the faculties: the
added sense of power :) to the architect, it is
architecture; to the broker it is money; to the
orator it is force of statement, and rule of his
audience; to the savant, it is discovery of the
extension of his principle, a key to new facts,
new dominion of nature.
I cannot see the fault of a facade or of a tem-
ple, I am so much occupied and pleased with
beautiful details. So I cannot remember and re-
quire the ideal integrity of man, I am so capti-
vated with my friends.
i Compare Natural History of Intellect (p. 300) and
“ Poetry and Imagination ” (Letters and Social Aims, p. 71).
2 Compare Natural History of Intellect, p. 21.
3 Natural History of Intellect, p. 46.


572
[AGE 52
JOURNAL
They told the children that if they count a
thousand stars, they would fall down dead ;-
and you will; but it is because details are fatal
to the integral life.
August.
[During August, Mr. Emerson went to Am-
herst, Massachusetts, on the invitation of the
students of the college, to deliver an address.
On the following pages of the Journal are many
notes of material (much from earlier journals) for
this occasion, a few of which are here given.]
For Amberst. Could you show the riches of
the poor? Could you shame the vain ? Could
you make them think common daylight was
worth something?
The distinction of thought is an aristocratic
distinction. Instead of dealing with raw mate-
rials, it deals with methods. And it only obtains
real progression. Until we have intellectual
property in a thing, we have no right property.
As to first coming and finding, there were com-
ers and finders before you, already in occupa-
tion when you came. There was the bird, and
the beaver, and the buffalo, and the fox. But
there were meliorations these could not reach,
obstructions they could not surmount.


1855) IDEAS AS GODS." MOORE 573
Second part which Cambridge plays at its
own feasts.
Interest of the class of Reform dependent on
their representing an unexplained thought; not
spent volcanos.
What have we to do with reading that ends
in reading?
They (the true philosophers] called ideas
gods; they were worshippers. They dared not
contravene with knacks and talents the divinity
which they recognized in genius. When the
Greeks in the Iliad perceived that the Gods
mingled in the fray, they drew off.
Moore's book is good reading through all
the volumes, for any one who wishes to know
English society. Moore himself, on his very
conditioned and rather low platform (of per-
fectly accepting English conventions without
one breath of noble rebellion), is manly and
resolute; he is sure to face every crisis and op-
ponent, and do what society think the honor-
able thing. His affections are, however, very
pale and permitted, and whatever is said about
his father or his mother, or even his wife and
child, is said to be overheard. It is a little trans-
parent, through all his account of his high friends,


574
JOURNAL (AGE 52
that he is a kept poet, however they please to
phrase it. If he is kept, so also are all the pro-
prieties kept on their part at their peril. But
the same web weaves itself in all times and
countries, however the fashions and names
vary.
The new professions. The phrenologist; the
railroad man; the landscape gardener; the lec-
turer ; the sorcerer, rapper, mesmeriser, medium;
the daguerreotypist. Proposed: The Naturalist,
and the Social Undertaker.
Jean Paul asked — did he not? - for a woman
who should see Nature as a whole, and not in
parts.
Sismondi spent eight hours a day for twenty
years on his histories. But somebody, mean-
while, was spending the same time to purpose ;
the assiduity is the valuable fact. In thought
't is of more note. You laugh at the monotones,
at the men of one idea.'...
But if we look nearly at heroes, we may find
the same poverty; and perhaps it is not pov-
erty, but a fruitful law. Thus, Demosthenes, the
1 See Natural History of Intellect, p. 51.


1855] THOUGHT'S ELASTICITY 575
electrical head in the most electrical city, — all
his speeches, 't is said, have one inspiration,
which is self-reliance. And the like doctrine is
the genius and guiding star of Chatham's elo-
quence.'
And, indeed, if one reduce the doctrine of
Zeno and the Stoic sect, who were the pre-
Christians, the religions of the Greek and Ro-
man states; you will find not many thoughts,
but a few thoughts; one thought, perhaps, -
self-reliance. Christianity insisted on the obverse
of the medal, on love, but not on any variety or
wealth of thoughts.
And the justification of this is in the nature
of thought. . . . Thought is the most elastic
of things, and a whole nation has subsisted on
one book, as the Jews on their Pentateuch, the
Mussulmen on their Koran, the Hindoos on
the Vedas, Europe for a thousand years on
Aristotle, Spain on Cervantes and the Chroni-
cles of the Cid, Bohemia on a single history,
and Snorro Sturleson is alone the Norse His-
tory.
A nation will subsist for centuries on one
i Compare « Eloquence" (Society and Solitude, p. 99)
and “ Celebration of Intellect " (Natural History of Intellect,
p. 120).


576
JOURNAL (AGE 52
thought, and then every individual will be
oppressed by the rush of ideas. And always a
plenum, with one grain or sixty atmospheres.
August 11.
At Amherst the learned professors in the par-
lor were pleased that the plurality of worlds was
disproved, as that restored its lost dignity to the
race of men, and made the old Christian immor-
tality valid again, and probable. I said, this was
a poor mechanical elevation, and all true eleva-
tion must consist in a new and finer possession,
by dint of finer organization, in the same things
in which buffalo and fox had already a brutish,
and Indian and Paddy a semi-brute posses-
sion.
Bubb Dodington's book is the bare story of
courtier servility, all atmosphere or music of
honour quite left out. 'Tis butcher's meat, -
nothing more.
'Tis the result of aristocracy, that its distinct-
ions are now shared by the whole middle class.
The road which grandeur levelled for its coach,
toil can travel in its cart. Latin and Greek and
Algebra are now cheap. 'Tis the London Times


1855)
THACKERAY
577
that now keeps the poets, and the chemist; and
not John of Gaunt, or Lord Dorset, any longer.
Mr. Bellew' told me that Thackeray told him
that he had employed Mr. Hanna to write up
for him lectures on the wits of Queen Anne,
which Thackeray had undertaken to read in
America. Hanna has since produced for him-
self “ Lectures on the Satirists,” but no Thack-
eray has been found to give them fame.
August 27.
Sydney Smith found, as he grew older, men
were better and foolisher than he had believed.
The melioration in pears, or in sheep and
horses, is the only hint we have that suggests
the creation of man. Everything has a family
likeness to him. All natural history from the
first fossil points at him. The resemblances ap-
proach very near in the satyr, to the negro, or
lowest man, and food, climate, and concurrence
of happy stars, a guided fortune, will have at
last piloted the poor quadrumanous over the
awful bar that separates the fixed beast from the
versatile man. In no other direction have we
I A New York artist and illustrator, of English birth.


578
(ACE 52
JOURNAL
any hint of the modus in which the infant man
could be preserved. The fixity or unpassable-
ness or inconvertibility of races, as we see them,
is a feeble argument, since all the historical per-
iod is but a point to the duration in which Na-
ture was wrought. Any the least and solitariest
fact in our natural history has the worth of a
power in the opportunity of geologic periods.
All our apples came from the little crab.
Our
Illusions borse-chestnuts! In this gale of war-
ring elements, it was necessary to bind souls to
human life, as mariners in a tempest lash them-
selves to the mast and bulwarks of a ship; so
Nature employed certain illusions as her ties and
straps. A rattle, a red coral, a doll, an apple, a
horse-chestnut for a child keeps him going,
climbing, and tumbling about, and educates his
muscle, blood, and bones; skates, a river, a boat,
a horse, a gun, the boy; (esprit-du-corps) party-
spirit, and maids draw the youth ; money and
power and his children, the man. Slowly and
rarely and condescendingly the masking veil
falls, and he is allowed to see that all is one stuff
cooked and painted under a hundred counterfeit
appearances. When the boys come into my yard
for leave to gather the horse-chestnuts, I enter


1855] “THE NEWNESS.” ENGLAND 579
into Nature's game, and affect to grant the per-
mission reluctantly, — fearing that any moment
they will find out they are fooled.
Intellect. One of the phrases which Greaves'
I believe, uses, I think particularly descriptive
of inspiration, “the newness.” Open the uncom-
manded doors whence the newness comes, and I
truly live.
Eyes that the beam celestial view
Which evermore makes all things new.
KEBLE.
England. Landor is a Plutarch again. And
there is always a spiritual minority. Thus, in
the age of bronze, appeared Wordsworth and
Coleridge; and now, Wilkinson and Carlyle ;
and, earlier, Thomas Taylor.
Their skepticism is perfectly impious.
Certain conclusions of their science lasting,
as Newton's refractions, fits of easy reflection
and transmission, Leslie's latent heat, Dalton's
atoms, Bradley's [aberration of light and nuta-
tion of the Earth's axis).
1 The English scholar and philanthropist, the admirer of
Alcott. Lane and Wright, his disciples, brought the phrase to
Concord.


580
JOURNAL
(AGE 52
The Universities are wearisome old fogies,
and very stupid with their aorists and alcaics and
digammas, but they do teach what they pretend
to teach, and whether by private tutor, or by
lecturer or by examiner, with prizes and scholar-
ships, they learn to read better and to write bet-
ter than we do.
[Although no word of trouble appears in the
Journal, the year had been a hard one for Mr.
Emerson in other respects than the toilsome lec-
turing afar for a livelihood. In May, a suit was
brought against him by a neighbor who claimed
that a considerable portion of the tract of wood-
land beyond Walden on the Lincoln side, which
Mr. Emerson had bought a few years before
from two other neighbors, belonged to him by
an old deed which he had discovered. The case
was tried and Mr. Emerson lost the part of the
woods in question, much to his regret, but the
pecuniary loss came to those who inadvertently
sold him more land than they owned.
By the advice of a valued and loyal friend Mr.
Emerson had made some investments in the
Eric and Mad River and also in the Vermont
and Canada, and Rutland railroads. In summer
his letters show that the former began to appear


rson
1855) GENIUS AND TALENT 581
doubtful, and in September no dividends came
for the latter, and for several years thereafter his
income was much reduced. It is due to the hon-
oured memory of his old friend Mr. Abel Adams
to record that he insisted upon bearing the ex-
penses of the college course of Mr. Emerson's
son Edward a few years later in the hard times
of the Civil War and also made a bequest to Mr.
Emerson and his children.]
October 4.
Wide the gulf between genius and talent. The
men we know deal with their thoughts as jewel-
lers with jewels which they sell but must not
wear; like carpenters with houses too fine for
such as they to live in. The mystic is as good
as his gold and jewels, good as his house that
he builds, goes always in purple apparel, a glis-
tering angel.
October 9.
Sent Chapter I of English Traits to Phillips,
Sampson & Co.
At the Albion Hotel, we found that Mr.
W.'s' mushrooms tasted “like the roof of a
house."
1 Mr. W., a gourmand, but enjoying the company of liter-
ary men, gave a dinner. These recluses were unused to mush-


582
[AGE 52
JOURNAL
Trebellius, one of the five writers of the
Augustan history in the fourth century, says,
“ Galli, quibus insitum est esse levis," and see
the identity of traits between the French and the
ancient Gauls, in article “ Julius César,” Bio-
grapbie Générale.
Colleges should have a real examination or
test, before granting diplomas, as by competition
for valuable prizes ; so having rivals or enemies
to adjudicate the crown, and this will come to be
suggested and enforced by the neighborhood of
the racecourse at Cambridge, by the pugilistic
prize-fights, by regattas, and cattle-shows. A fair
mode is to propose problems chemical, mathe-
matical, and botanical never yet solved, and re-
wards for the solution. The old custom of de-
fending a thesis against all comers was a fair test,
when there were comers.
Time was when we built castles in the air, –
of the American College. Allston, Greenough,
Nuttall, Audubon, Frémont, Irving, were to
fill the chairs.
God forbid I should complain of being ex-
cluded by this or that man or circle from this
rooms. One, bolder than the others, tried them, and thus
reported.


1855) MERIT WINS. PARLIAMENT 583
or that privilege. On the contrary, the most
absolute submission on my part attends it. For
do I not know that these parties are all eager
to invite high merit to this privilege ; and that
on the instant when that merit is demonstrated
by me, or by any, they will fly to greet it, and
will open every door to it, and bear it on their
arms with joy unfeigned?"
Skepticism? yes, but a saint is a skeptic once
in twenty-four hours.
The House of Commons sits frequently
fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen hours;
whilst “it has been observed, by an irreverent
wit, that the Lords sit scarcely long enough to
boil an egg ” (Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1854).
Till at length the time arrives, when, in the
words of Sir F. Baring, “any man who occu-
i It is possible that in this paragraph Mr. Emerson had in
mind his constant willingness and even wish to have oppor-
tunity to hold a chair of Literature in some New England
College. In later years he said that this was so. But no op-
portunity offered, and after the Divinity School Address in
1838 the doors of Harvard were closed to him until 1867,
when he was invited again to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa
oration, and, four years later, to give a course of lectures on
Philosophy at Harvard University.


584
JOURNAL
(AGE 52
pies the time of the House is a public en-
emy.”
The Charitable Trusts bill proposed by Lord
Brougham in 1816 has at length become a law
in 1853, and Lord John Russell said that this
was about the ordinary period for bringing any
considerable measure to maturity.
English have more constitution than other
people. . . . [Our John] Marshall was a good
specimen (of that vigor]; so much blood he
did not know what to do with it, drank vast
quantities of brandy like water, spent quantities
of strength on swimming, hunting, riding, walk-
ing, and ready for the most absurd frolics, with
the gravity of the Eumenides.
Mr. Blanchard, the carpenter in Concord,
reading in the newspaper the sale of building-
lots on Lake Street, in Chicago, “ Can't hardly
believe that any lands can be worth so much
money, so far off.”
December.'
The radiation of manners. The boundless Am-
erica gives opportunity as wide as the morning,
i On the edge of a severe winter, Mr. Emerson set forth
to lecture before Lyceums in the raw cities and towns of the
then Far West.


1855) IOWA HOTEL. LECLAIRE 585
and the effect is to change the peak of the moun-
tain into a vast tableland, where millions can
share the privilege of this handful of patricians.
LE CLAIRE House,
DAVENPORT, Iowa, December 31.
Rules of the house. “No gentlemen per-
mitted to sit at the table without his coat."
“No gambling permitted in the house.”
I have crossed the Mississippi on foot three
times.
Soft coal, which comes to Rock Island from
about twelve miles, sells for sixteen cents a
bushel; wood at six dollars per cord. They
talk “quarter-sections.” “I will take a quarter-
section of that pie.”
Leclaire being a half breed of the Sacs and
Foxes (and of French-Canadian) had a right to
a location of a square mile of land, and with a
more than Indian sagacity of choosing his war-
path, he chose his lot, one above the rapids,
and the other below the rapids, at Rock Island.
He chose his lot thirty years ago, and now the
railroad to the Pacific runs directly through bis
log bouse, which is occupied by the company for
wood and other purposes. His property has
risen to the value of five or six hundred thou-


586
JOURNAL (AGE 52
even
sand dollars. He is fifty-seven years old and
weighs three hundred and eight pounds.
December 31.
In Rock Island I am advertised as “the
Celebrated Metaphysician,” in Davenport as
“the Essayist and Poet.”
AUTHORS OR Books QUOTED OR REFERRED TO
IN JOURNAL FOR 1855
Rig Veda Sanhita; Vishnu Purana; Confu-
cius; Pentateuch; Aristotle; Varro apud Pliny
the Elder; Sallust;
Martial; Trebellius; Plotinus; Porphyry;
lamblichus; Proclus;
Koran ; Ali ben Abu Talib; Bede; King Al-
fred; Asser; Snorri Sturlason; Saadi; Robert de
Thornton;
Sir Thomas Lyttelton; Cervantes; William
Camden, Britannia; Sir Edward Coke; George
Chapman;
Bishop Brian Walton; Sir William Dugdale,
The Baronage of England; Sir Kenelm Digby;
Thomas Fuller; Clarendon; Colonel Thomas
Hutchinson, Memoirs by his wife; Evelyn; Sir
Henry Vane; Giordano Bruno; Robert Boyle;
Pepys, Diary ; Hooke;


систа,
1855]
READING
587
Newton; Flamsteed; Bishop Burnet; Leib-
nitz; Molyneux; Petty; Pierre Bayle; Halley;
Lady Russell, Letters; Richard Bentley; Boer-
have; Hearne, Leland's Itinerary; Pierrepont;
Montesquieu; Dodington, Diary; James Brad-
ley ; Lord Chesterfield;
Franklin ; Euler, Letters to a German Prin-
cess; Hume, History of England; Kant; John
Hunter; Galiani; Lagrange, Mécanique ana-
litique; Burke; Beaumarchais; Washington ;
John Adams; Josiah Quincy; William Mitford,
History of Greece; Gaspard Monge, Géomé-
trie descriptive; Goethe; Schiller; Mirabeau;
Talleyrand; John Marshall; Dumont, Traités
de législation;
Fichte; Ritson, Select Collection of English
Songs; Abernethy; Hegel; Lingard; Sydney
Smith; Lord Lyndhurst; Ricardo; Schelling;
Southey, Chronicle of the Cid; O'Connell;
Niebuhr, Letters, Roman History; Hallam;
Blainville; Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the
Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Newton; Web-
ster; Guizot, Love in Marriage; Daniel Tread-
well; Grote, History of Greece; Babinet, Études
et Lectures; Quetelet;
Choate; Alcott; Robert Stephenson; Stuke-
ley, On Stonebenge; George Sand, Consuelo;


588
(AGE
JOURNAL
Schomburgk; Cobden; Richard Owen; Horat
Greenough; Bulwer-Lytton; Tennyson, Mau
Gladstone;
Thackeray; Chadwick; J. J. G. Wilkinso
Charles K. Newcomb; John Emile Lemoin
Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Layard; Thorea
W. E. Channing.
END OF VOLUME VIII





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