To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery.
Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buck-eye does not grow in
New England, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here. The wild-goose
is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a
luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern
bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons,
cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter
grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail-fences
are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are
henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen
town-clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer:
but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe
is wider than our views of it.
Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious
passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.
The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our
voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for
diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase
the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How
long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks
also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to
shoot one’s self.—
“Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.”
What does Africa,—what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior
white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when
discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the
Mississippi, or a North-West Passage around this continent, that we
would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is
Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest
to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the
Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and
oceans; explore your own higher latitudes,—with shiploads of preserved
meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans
sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat
merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within
you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is
the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but
a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who
have no _self_-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They
love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the
spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in
their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring
Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect
recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the
moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet
unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles
through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five
hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private
sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.—
“Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitæ, plus habet ille viæ.”
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps
find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get at the inside at last. England
and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front
on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of
land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would
learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations,
if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all
climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even
obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein
are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go
to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on that
farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the
Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on
direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun
down, moon down, and at last earth down too.
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery “to ascertain what
degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one’s self in
formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society.” He declared that
“a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much
courage as a foot-pad,”—“that honor and religion have never stood in
the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve.” This was manly, as
the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man
would have found himself often enough “in formal opposition” to what
are deemed “the most sacred laws of society,” through obedience to yet
more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out
of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to
society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself
through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of
opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it
seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare
any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly
we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to
the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it
is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen
into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is
soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which
the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the
world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to
take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck
of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the
mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish
themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with
the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies
his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be
lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you
shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor
toad-stools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not
enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but
one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as
quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and _hush_ and _who_,
which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were
safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be
_extra-vagant_ enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow
limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of
which I have been convinced. _Extra vagance!_ it depends on how you are
yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another
latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail,
leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I
desire to speak somewhere _without_ bounds; like a man in a waking
moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I
cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true
expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he
should speak extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future or
possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our
outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an
insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our words
should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
Their truth is instantly _translated_; its literal monument alone
remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite;
yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior
natures.
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as
common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which
they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who
are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate
only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the
morning-red, if they ever got up early enough. “They pretend,” as I
hear, “that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion,
spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas;” but in this
part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s
writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors
to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot,
which prevails so much more widely and fatally?
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be
proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score
than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its
blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy,
and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds.
The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not
like the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally,
are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the
Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is
better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he
belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he
can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he
was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such
desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the
music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important
that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn
his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made
for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will
not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a
heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be
sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the
former were not?
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive
after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having
considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a
perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be
perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He
proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it
should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and
rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for
they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a
moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated
piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he
made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed
at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a
stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and
he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it
the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with
the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in
the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and
polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had
put on the ferrule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma
had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these
things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly
expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of
all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a
staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old
cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had
taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh
at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had
been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required
for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and
inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his
art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as
the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where
we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures,
we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two
cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane
moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have
to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom
Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything
to say. “Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember to make a knot in
their thread before they take the first stitch.” His companion’s prayer
is forgotten.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call
it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you
are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love
your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant,
thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is
reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the
rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the
spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there,
and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town’s poor seem to
me often to live the most independent lives of any. May be they are
simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most think that they
are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they
are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be
more disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do
not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or
friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change.
Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not
want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days,
like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my
thoughts about me. The philosopher said: “From an army of three
divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from
the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.”
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many
influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like
darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and
meanness gather around us, “and lo! creation widens to our view.” We
are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of
Crœsus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the
same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you
cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to
the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal
with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It
is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being
a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a
higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not
required to buy one necessary of the soul.
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured
a little alloy of bell metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there
reaches my ears a confused _tintinnabulum_ from without. It is the
noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures
with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the
dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the
contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are
about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress
it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England and
the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. —— of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all
transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their
court-yard like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings,—not
walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to
walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may,—not to live in
this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand
or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They
are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from
somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his
orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most
strongly and rightfully attracts me;—not hang by the beam of the scale
and try to weigh less,—not suppose a case, but take the case that is;
to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist
me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before
I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There
is a solid bottom every where. We read that the traveller asked the boy
if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he
observed to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard
bottom.” “So it has,” answered the latter, “but you have not got half
way to it yet.” So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but
he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at a
certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will
foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would
keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the
furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so
faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work
with satisfaction,—a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke
the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should
be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the
work.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a
table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious
attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry
from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I
thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me
of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an
older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they
had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and
“entertainment” pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but he
made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for
hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow
tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I
called on him.
How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty
virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to begin
the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in
the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with
goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnant
self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to
congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in
Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it
speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with
satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and
the public Eulogies of _Great Men!_ It is the good Adam contemplating
his own virtue. “Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs,
which shall never die,”—that is, as long as _we_ can remember them. The
learned societies and great men of Assyria,—where are they? What
youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of
my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the
spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years’
itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are
acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most
have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above
it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half
our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order
on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits!
As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest
floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself
why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me
who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some
cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and
Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we
tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons
are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such
words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung
with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think
that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire
is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a
first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind
every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should
ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year
locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I
live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner
conversations over the wine.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year
higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even
this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.
It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks
which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its
freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of
New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry
leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s
kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in
Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years
earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it;
which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the
heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and
immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful
and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many
concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,
deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which
has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned
tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished
family of man, as they sat round the festive board,—may unexpectedly
come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture,
to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is
the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to
dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that
day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is
but a morning star.