I HAVE read that those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was
something finer in the man than any thing which he said. It has been
complained of our brilliant English historian of the French Revolution
that when he has told all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify
his estimate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of
Plutarch's heroes, do not in the record of facts equal their own fame.
Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, are men of
great figure and of few deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the
personal weight of Washington in the narrative of his exploits. The
authority of the name of Schiller is too great for his books. This
inequality of the reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not
accounted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the
thunder-clap, but somewhat resided in these men which begot an
expectation that outran all their performance. The largest part of their
power was latent. This is that which we call Character,--a reserved
force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is
conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius,
by whose impulses the man is guided but whose counsels he cannot impart;
which is company for him, so that such men are often solitary, or
if they chance to be social, do not need society but can entertain
themselves very well alone. The purest literary talent appears at one
time great, at another time small, but character is of a stellar and
undiminishable greatness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence,
this man accomplishes by some magnetism. "Half his strength he put not
forth." His victories are by demonstration of superiority, and not by
crossing of bayonets. He conquers because his arrival alters the face of
affairs. "O Iole! how did you know that Hercules was a god?" "Because,"
answered Iole, "I was content the moment my eyes fell on him. When I
beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least
guide his horses in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a
contest; he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever
thing he did." Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only half attached,
and that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples appears
to share the life of things, and to be an expression of the same laws
which control the tides and the sun, numbers and quantities.
But to use a more modest illustration and nearer home, I observe that in
our political elections, where this element, if it appears at all,
can only occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently understand
its incomparable rate. The people know that they need in their
representative much more than talent, namely the power to make his
talent trusted. They cannot come at their ends by sending to Congress a
learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one who, before he was
appointed by the people to represent them, was appointed by Almighty God
to stand for a fact,--invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself,--so
that the most confident and the most violent persons learn that here is
resistance on which both impudence and terror are wasted, namely faith
in a fact. The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of
their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country
which they represent; nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant
and true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. The
constituency at home hearkens to their words, watches the color of
their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public
assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. Our frank countrymen of
the west and south have a taste for character, and like to know whether
the New Englander is a substantial man, or whether the hand can pass
through him.
The same motive force appears in trade. There are geniuses in trade,
as well as in war, or the State, or letters; and the reason why this or
that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man; that is all
anybody can tell you about it. See him and you will know as easily why
he succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would comprehend his fortune.
In the new objects we recognize the old game, the Habit of fronting the
fact, and not dealing with it at second hand, through the perceptions of
somebody else. Nature seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see the
natural merchant, who appears not so much a private agent as her factor
and Minister of Commerce. His natural probity combines with his insight
into the fabric of society to put him above tricks, and he communicates
to all his own faith that contracts are of no private interpretation.
The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity and
public advantage; and he inspires respect and the wish to deal with
him, both for the quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and for the
intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability affords.
This immensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of the Southern
Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his familiar port, centres in
his brain only; and nobody in the universe can make his place good. In
his parlor I see very well that he has been at hard work this morning,
with that knitted brow and that settled humor, which all his desire to
be courteous cannot shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts have
been done; how many valiant noes have this day been spoken, when others
would have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride of art and
skill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote combination, the
consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of
the world. He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man must
be born to trade or he cannot learn it.
This virtue draws the mind more when it appears in action to ends not
so mixed. It works with most energy in the smallest companies and in
private relations. In all cases it is an extraordinary and incomputable
agent. The excess of physical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher
natures overpower lower ones by affecting them with a certain sleep. The
faculties are locked up, and offer no resistance. Perhaps that is the
universal law. When the high cannot bring up the low to itself, it
benumbs it, as man charms down the resistance of the lower animals. Men
exert on each other a similar occult power. How often has the influence
of a true master realized all the tales of magic! A river of command
seemed to run down from his eyes into all those who beheld him, a
torrent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded them
with his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. "What
means did you employ?" was the question asked of the wife of Concini,
in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; and the answer was, "Only
that influence which every strong mind has over a weak one." Cannot
Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the person
of Hippo or Thraso the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable a bond?
Suppose a slaver on the coast of Guinea should take on board a gang
of negroes which should contain persons of the stamp of Toussaint
L'Ouverture: or, let us fancy, under these swarthy masks he has a gang
of Washingtons in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative
order of the ship's company be the same? Is there nothing but rope and
iron? Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never a glimpse of right
in a poor slave-captain's mind; and cannot these be supposed available
to break or elude or in any manner overmatch the tension of an inch or
two of iron ring?
This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperates
with it. The reason why we feel one man's presence and do not feel
another's is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being; justice
is the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a
scale, according to the purity of this element in them. The will of the
pure runs down from them into other natures as water runs down from
a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force is no more to be
withstood than any other natural force. We can drive a stone upward for
a moment into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will forever
fall; and whatever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, or of
a lie which somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is the
privilege of truth to make itself believed. Character is this moral
order seen through the medium of an individual nature. An individual is
an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought,
are left at large no longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound. All
things exist in the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With what
quality is in him he infuses all nature that he can reach; nor does he
tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, all
his regards return into his own good at last. He animates all he can,
and he sees only what he animates. He encloses the world, as the patriot
does his country, as a material basis for his character, and a theatre
for action. A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True,
as the magnet arranges itself with the pole; so that he stands to all
beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso
journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the
medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level.
Thus, men of character are the conscience of the society to which they
belong.
The natural measure of this power is the resistance of circumstances.
Impure men consider life as it is reflected in opinions, events, and
persons. They cannot see the action until it is done. Yet its moral
element preexisted in the actor, and its quality as right or wrong it
was easy to predict. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive
and negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact,
a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative.
Will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as
having its natural place in the north. It shares the magnetic currents
of the system. The feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative
pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the action. They never behold a
principle until it is lodged in a person. They do not wish to be lovely,
but to be loved. Men of character like to hear of their faults; the
other class do not like to hear of faults; they worship events; secure
to them a fact, a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and they
will ask no more. The hero sees that the event is ancillary; it must
follow him. A given order of events has no power to secure to him the
satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it; the soul of goodness
escapes from any set of circumstances; whilst prosperity belongs to a
certain mind, and will introduce that power and victory which is its
natural fruit, into any order of events. No change of circumstances
can repair a defect of character. We boast our emancipation from many
superstitions; but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer
of the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no longer immolate a bull to
Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble
before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic
Judgment-day,--if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it;
or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or poverty,
or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of murder? If I quake,
what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or
another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the
person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The
covetousness or the malignity which saddens me when I ascribe it to
society, is my own. I am always environed by myself. On the other part,
rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by
serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to
events for confirmation of our truth and worth. The capitalist does not
run every hour to the broker to coin his advantages into current money
of the realm; he is satisfied to read in the quotations of the market
that his stocks have risen. The same transport which the occurrence of
the best events in the best order would occasion me, I must learn to
taste purer in the perception that my position is every hour meliorated,
and does already command those events I desire. That exultation is only
to be checked by the foresight of an order of things so excellent as to
throw all our prosperities into the deepest shade.
The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness. I revere the
person who is riches; so that I cannot think of him as alone, or poor,
or exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual patron, benefactor,
and beatified man. Character is centrality, the impossibility of being
displaced or overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. Society
is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into
ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an ingenious man I shall
think myself poorly entertained if he give me nimble pieces of
benevolence and etiquette; rather he shall stand stoutly in his place
and let me apprehend if it were only his resistance; know that I have
encountered a new and positive quality;--great refreshment for both of
us. It is much that he does not accept the conventional opinions and
practices. That nonconformity will remain a goad and remembrancer, and
every inquirer will have to dispose of him, in the first place. There is
nothing real or useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with
laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the
uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom
it cannot let pass in silence but must either worship or hate,--and
to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion and the
obscure and eccentric,--he helps; he puts America and Europe in the
wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, 'man is a doll, let us
eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do,' by illuminating the untried
and unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment and appeal to the public,
indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and which must see a
house built, before they can comprehend the plan of it. The wise man
not only leaves out of his thought the many, but leaves out the few.
Fountains, the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because he is
commanded, the assured, the primary,--they are good; for these announce
the instant presence of supreme power.
Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. In nature, there
are no false valuations. A pound of water in the ocean-tempest has no
more gravity than in a midsummer pond. All things work exactly according
to their quality and according to their quantity; attempt nothing they
cannot do, except man only. He has pretension; he wishes and attempts
things beyond his force. I read in a book of English memoirs, "Mr. Fox
(afterwards Lord Holland) said, he must have the Treasury; he had served
up to it, and would have it." Xenophon and his Ten Thousand were quite
equal to what they attempted, and did it; so equal, that it was not
suspected to be a grand and inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that
fact unrepeated, a high-water mark in military history. Many have
attempted it since, and not been equal to it. It is only on reality that
any power of action can be based. No institution will be better than the
institutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who undertook a
practical reform, yet I was never able to find in him the enterprise of
love he took in hand. He adopted it by ear and by the understanding from
the books he had been reading. All his action was tentative, a piece of
the city carried out into the fields, and was the city still, and no new
fact, and could not inspire enthusiasm. Had there been something latent
in the man, a terrible undemonstrated genius agitating and embarrassing
his demeanor, we had watched for its advent. It is not enough that the
intellect should see the evils and their remedy. We shall still postpone
our existence, nor take the ground to which we are entitled, whilst
it is only a thought and not a spirit that incites us. We have not yet
served up to it.
These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice of
incessant growth. Men should be intelligent and earnest. They must also
make us feel that they have a controlling happy future opening before
them, whose early twilights already kindle in the passing hour. The hero
is misconceived and misreported; he cannot therefore wait to unravel any
man's blunders; he is again on his road, adding new powers and honors to
his domain and new claims on your heart, which will bankrupt you if you
have loitered about the old things and have not kept your relation to
him by adding to your wealth. New actions are the only apologies
and explanations of old ones which the noble can bear to offer or to
receive. If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to
consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and
has doubled his power to serve you, and ere you can rise up again will
burden you with blessings.
We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is only measured
by its works. Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its
granary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, though he
sleep, seems to purify the air and his house to adorn the landscape and
strengthen the laws. People always recognize this difference. We know
who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscription
to soup-societies. It is only low merits that can be enumerated.
Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it
through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and
half-dislike, and must suspend their judgment for years to come, you may
begin to hope. Those who live to the future must always appear selfish
to those who live to the present. Therefore it was droll in the good
Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of his
donations and good deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling,
to Hegel, to Tischbein; a lucrative place found for Professor Voss,
a post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two
professors recommended to foreign universities; &c., &c. The longest
list of specifications of benefit would look very short. A man is a
poor creature if he is to be measured so. For all these of course
are exceptions, and the rule and hodiernal life of a good man is
benefaction. The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the
account he gave Dr. Eckermann of the way in which he had spent his
fortune. "Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a million
of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary and the large income
derived from my writings for fifty years back, have been expended to
instruct me in what I now know. I have besides seen," &c.
I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate traits of this
simple and rapid power, and we are painting the lightning with charcoal;
but in these long nights and vacations I like to console myself so.
Nothing but itself can copy it. A word warm from the heart enriches me.
I surrender at discretion. How death-cold is literary genius before this
fire of life! These are the touches that reanimate my heavy soul and
give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find, where I thought
myself poor, there was I most rich. Thence comes a new intellectual
exaltation, to be again rebuked by some new exhibition of character.
Strange alternation of attraction and repulsion! Character repudiates
intellect, yet excites it; and character passes into thought, is
published so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of moral worth.
Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it or to
contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance, and of persistence,
and of creation, to this power, which will foil all emulation.
This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's have been laid on
it. Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall slip up into life in
the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and blazon every new
thought, every blushing emotion of young genius. Two persons lately,
very young children of the most high God, have given me occasion for
thought. When I explored the source of their sanctity and charm for the
imagination, it seemed as if each answered, 'From my nonconformity; I
never listened to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel,
and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my
own; hence this sweetness; my work never reminds you of that;--is pure
of that.' And nature advertises me in such persons that in
democratic America she will not be democratized. How cloistered and
constitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal! It was
only this morning that I sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods.
They are a relief from literature,--these fresh draughts from the
sources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an age of polish and
criticism, the first lines of written prose and verse of a nation.
How captivating is their devotion to their favorite books, whether
Aeschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as feeling that they have a
stake in that book; who touches that, touches them;--and especially
the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought from which
he writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever read
this writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake to
comparisons, and to be flattered! Yet some natures are too good to be
spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into
the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will
warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of
trumpets, but they can afford to smile. I remember the indignation of an
eloquent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity,--'My
friend, a man can neither be praised nor insulted.' But forgive the
counsels; they are very natural. I remember the thought which occurred
to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was,
Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that,
answer me this, 'Are you victimizable?'
As I have said, Nature keeps these sovereignties in her own hands, and
however pertly our sermons and disciplines would divide some share of
credit, and teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes her own
gait and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes very light of gospels
and prophets, as one who has a great many more to produce and no excess
of time to spare on any one. There is a class of men, individuals of
which appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and
virtue that they have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem
to be an accumulation of that power we consider. Divine persons are
character born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory
organized. They are usually received with ill-will, because they are new
and because they set a bound to the exaggeration that has been made
of the personality of the last divine person. Nature never rhymes her
children, nor makes two men alike. When we see a great man we fancy a
resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his
character and fortune; a result which he is sure to disappoint. None
will ever solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice,
but only in his own high unprecedented way. Character wants room; must
not be crowded on by persons nor be judged from glimpses got in the
press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great
building. It may not, probably does not, form relations rapidly; and we
should not require rash explanation, either on the popular ethics, or on
our own, of its action.
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove
impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait which the artist recorded in
stone he had seen in life, and better than his copy. We have seen many
counterfeits, but we are born believers in great men. How easily we
read in old books, when men were few, of the smallest action of the
patriarchs. We require that a man should be so large and columnar in
the landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded that he arose, and
girded up his loins, and departed to such a place. The most credible
pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and
convinced the senses; as happened to the eastern magian who was sent to
test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the Yunani sage arrived
at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the
Mobeds of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed
for the Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht,
advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing that
chief, said, "This form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truth
can proceed from them." Plato said it was impossible not to believe in
the children of the gods, "though they should speak without probable
or necessary arguments." I should think myself very unhappy in my
associates if I could not credit the best things in history. "John
Bradshaw," says Milton, "appears like a consul, from whom the fasces
are not to depart with the year; so that not on the tribunal only, but
throughout his life, you would regard him as sitting in judgment upon
kings." I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that
one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men
should know the world. "The virtuous prince confronts the gods, without
any misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, and does not
doubt. He who confronts the gods, without any misgiving, knows heaven;
he who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without doubting, knows
men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, and for ages shows empire the
way." But there is no need to seek remote examples. He is a dull
observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of
magic, as well as of chemistry. The coldest precisian cannot go abroad
without encountering inexplicable influences. One man fastens an eye on
him and the graves of the memory render up their dead; the secrets that
make him wretched either to keep or to betray must be yielded;--another,
and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their
cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and eloquence
to him; and there are persons he cannot choose but remember, who gave a
transcendent expansion to his thought, and kindled another life in his
bosom.
What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they spring from
this deep root? The sufficient reply to the skeptic who doubts the power
and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of joyful intercourse
with persons, which makes the faith and practice of all reasonable men.
I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound
good understanding which can subsist after much exchange of good
offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself
and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other
gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.
For when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower
of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it
should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such
friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things
are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one
time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of the
character, the most solid enjoyment.
If it were possible to live in right relations with men!--if we could
abstain from asking anything of them, from asking their praise, or help,
or pity, and content us with compelling them through the virtue of
the eldest laws! Could we not deal with a few persons,--with one
person,--after the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of their
efficacy? Could we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, of
silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek him? If we are
related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world that no
metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse
which runs,--
"The Gods are to each other not unknown."
Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to each
other, and cannot otherwise:--
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.
Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must seat themselves
without seneschal in our Olympus, and as they can instal themselves
by seniority divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken, if the
associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is a
mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All the
greatness of each is kept back and every foible in painful activity, as
if the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff-boxes.
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by
some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend,
we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now
possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the
resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the
heart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. The
ages are opening this moral force. All force is the shadow or symbol of
that. Poetry is joyful and strong as it draws its inspiration thence.
Men write their names on the world as they are filled with this. History
has been mean; our nations have been mobs; we have never seen a man:
that divine form we do not yet know, but only the dream and prophecy
of such: we do not know the majestic manners which belong to him, which
appease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the most
private is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and
grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never saw
it. What greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and encouragements
to us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints which the
world has written and then worshipped, are documents of character. The
ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune,
and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality
of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which
has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes
of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact. But the
mind requires a victory to the senses; a force of character which will
convert judge, jury, soldier, and king; which will rule animal and
mineral virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds,
of stars, and of moral agents.
If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least let us do
them homage. In society, high advantages are set down to the possessor
as disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in our private
estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure to know a fine
character and to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last
that which we have always longed for is arrived and shines on us with
glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to be
critical and treat such a visitant with the jabber and suspicion of the
streets, argues a vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This
is confusion, this the right insanity, when the soul no longer knows
its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there any
religion but this, to know that wherever in the wide desert of being the
holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? if
none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the
fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my
gloom and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of this
guest. There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and
household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his
starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is
all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself
that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world sooner than
soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and
houses,--only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only
compliment they can pay it is to own it.
*****