Emerson’s Essays

• “To what end visit Europe, if people carry with them their old [limited] horizon? … The wise man travels to discover himself.” (Lowell)
• Poetry as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned [very passionate] expression which is in the countenance [facial expression] of all science.” (Wordsworth)
• “The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find it. It is the open secret of all true genius. It is wholesome to angle in those profound pools, though one be rewarded with nothing more than the leap of a fish that flashes his freckled side in the sun, and as suddenly ensconces in the dark and dreamy waters again.” (Lowell)

I. History

• “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. … Of the works of this mind history is the record.”
• “But always the thought is prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws.”

• “A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece…America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch…are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.”

  • Are a thousand forests in an acorn? I suppose the potential lies in that acorn…but there are manifold other seeds. A thousand forests lie in the squirrels who disperse those acorns or the warm summer rains that drench thirsty roots.
• “There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from great repositories of nature [and this light from a distant star]…so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.”
• “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall see nothing, learn nothing, keep nothing.”
• Seeing ourselves from afar through others, we “[remedy] the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions…lose all their meanness when hung as [constellations], so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.”
• “The student is to read history actively and not passively… I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.”
• “We are always coming up with the facts that have moved us in history… [thus] all history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no History, only Biography… What [the mind] does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.”
• “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened in the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teach the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.”
• “Why, being as we are, surrounded by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them…”
• “Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral.”
• You cannot draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree. You cannot write about something without becoming it.
• “The true poem is the poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder.”
• “The habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances.”
• “Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man; stands between the unjust ‘justice’ of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account.”
• “As near and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.”
• “And although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet it is much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary images, —awakens the reader’s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.”
• “Poets utter the great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” (Plato)
• “[Man] is the compend of time; he is also the correlative of nature.”
• “A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshore that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. Insulate and you destroy him. He cannot live without a world.”
• “…the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature, but from it, rather. The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer’s boy come much nearer to these—understand them better than the dissector or the antiquary.”

II. Self-Reliance

• “To believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. … In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
• “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards…[but by] pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty effort let us advance on Chaos and the Dark.”
• “[Youthful independence] are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
• “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

• “To be great is to be misunderstood.”

  • Gives examples of Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Copernicus…
• “My book should smell of pines and resound the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carried in his bill into my web also.”
• “The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? …The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceedeth obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceedeth. We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth.”
• “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer up-right; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. … But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”
• “When a man loves with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.”
• “Isolation must precede true society. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. … But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.”
• “Prayer that craves a particular commodity-anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.”

• “…the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see—how you can see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.”’They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-coloured, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.”

  • get something which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. … He carries ruins to ruins. … I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”
• “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.”
• “It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man.”

III. Compensation

• “POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light, in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.”
• “The influences of climate and soil in political history are another [compensation]. The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions.”
• “Nothing artificial can endure.”
• “Achilles is not quite invulnerable; for Thetis held him by the heel when she dipped him in the Styx and the sacred waters did not wash that part. … There is a crack in every thing God has made.”
• “No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him.” (Burke)
• “The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others.”
• “If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.”
• “The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.”
• “As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him.”
• “In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. … we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”
• “The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Existence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on which as a back-ground the living universe paints itself forth; but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.”
• “In a virtuous action I properly am; in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.”
• “There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses all limits. It affirm in man always an Optimism, never a Pessimism.”
• “Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.” (Saint Bernard)
• “The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.”

IV. Spiritual Laws

• “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. … These are the soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe their cure. A simple mind will not know those enemies.”
• “We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him.”

• “There is less intention in history than we ascribe to it. … [The successes of great men] lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye their deed.”

• Much like Tolstoy’s prescription of Napoleon

• “It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.”

• “The walking of man and all animals is a falling forward.”

• From our past, we fall into the present towards the future.

• “A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. … What attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard.”
• “‘My children,’ said an old man to his boys scared by a figure in a dark entry, ‘my children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves.’ … The good which [man] sees compared to the evil which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil.”
• “[Man] cleaves to one person and avoids another, according to their likeness or unlikeness to himself in his associates and moreover in his trade, and habits, and gestures, and meats, and drinks…”
• “The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort, friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their concepts to the mind of man. ‘Do not trouble yourself too much about the light on your statue,’ said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor; ‘the light of the public square will test its value.’”
• “The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent though by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which refuses our entire manner of life and says, ‘Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.’”
• “Byron says of Jack Bunting, ‘He knew not what to say, and so he swore.’”
• “Let a man believe in God, and not in names and places and persons.”
• “Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo, suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature.”

V. Love

• “Love is omnipresent in nature as motive and reward. Love is our highest word and the synonym of God.”
• “Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled.”
• “In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever… Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day.”

VI. Friendship

• “Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each. … A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.”
• “Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You become pronounced. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world…”
• “We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves.”
• Why get bothered when someone doesn’t acknowledge kindness? “It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean.”
• “True love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends instantly the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal…”
• “The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.”

VII. Prudence

• “There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. … One class lives to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor of the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.”
• “The spurious prudence, making the sense final, is the god of sots and coward, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and therefore literature’s. The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.”
• “Climate is a great impediment to idle person. … The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.”
• “…society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic; and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.”
• “Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”

VIII. Heroism

• “The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. … war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering.”

IX. The Over-Soul

• “Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence. … I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.”
• “As with events, so it is with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me,—I see that I am a pensioner,—not a cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.”
• “All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison,—but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will;— is the vast background of our being, in which they lie,— an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed.”
• “From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the façade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”
• “[The soul] abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable… Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. … The spirit sports with time- ‘Can crowd eternity into an hour, / Or stretch an hour to eternity.’”
• “In all conversations between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.”
• “There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one… The learned and studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.”
• “In my dealing with my child…my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing. They are all lost on him: but as much as I have, avails… out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.”
• “We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things.”
• “The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after. Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. … An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description to the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them.”
• “Men ask of the immortality of the soul, and the employments of heaven, and the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left relies to precisely these interrogatories. … The moment the doctrine of immortality is separately taught, man has already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance.”
• “The whole intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its friendship, its quarrels,—is one wide judicial investigation of character… But who judges? and what? Not our understanding… No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets them judge themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict.”
• What distinguishes great poets, philosophers, and teachers is that they speak from within, and that other class of spectators speak from without.
• “The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.”

X. Circles

• “St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”
• “The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.”
• “That which builds is better than that which is built.”
• “The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon.”
• “A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.” (Oliver Cromwell)
• “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety… in short to draw a new circle.”

XI. Intellect

• “Water dissolves wood and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire dissolves water, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its resistless [solvent].”
• “Let us be silent, for so are the gods.”

XII. Art

• “…he will come to value the expression of nature and not nature itself…”
• “Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes so much as common sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.”

• “In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair.”

• Symmetrical… is it? Striving towards symmetry, thus depending on asymmetry, perhaps? Fair and just as a whole? Self-correcting, self-balancing?

• “When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.”

Second Series

I. The Poet

• “Olympian bards who sung / Divine ideas below, / Which always find us young, / And always keep us so.”
• “For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent.”
• “But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.”

• “We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manners of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing object of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and storms, which should be their toys.”

• So it should be with the poet. “His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.”

II. Experience

• “Men ask ‘what’s the news?’ as if the old were so bad.”
• “The secret of illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. … Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but the health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects.”
• “‘Mamma, why don’t I like the story as well as when you told it me yesterday?’ … will it answer thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole, and this story is a particular? The reason of the pain this discovery causes us, is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friendship and love.”
• “We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry,—a narrow belt.”
• “The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, bu the individual is always mistaken. It turns out [something] new, and very unlike what he promised himself.”
• “and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative.
• “Sin seen from the thought, is a diminution or less: seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no es-sence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not: it has an objective existence, but no subjective.”

III. Character

• “Character is the 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.”
• “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.”
• “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.

VI. Nature

“The rounded world is fair to see,

Nine times folded in mystery:

Though baffled seers cannot impart

The secret of its laboring heart,

Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast And all is clear from east to west.

Spirit that lurks each form within

Beckons to spirit of its kin;

Self-kindled every atom glows,

And hints the future which it owes.”

• “These are plain pleasure, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise.”
• “Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.”
• “We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future.”
• “The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet.”
• “I am taught the poor need of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enchantment and sequel to this beauty.”
• “If we consider how much we are nature’s, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature who made the mason, made the houses.”
• “Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? … The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be beaver, if she stoops to such a one as he.”
• “[Nature’s] mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel’s wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and report of the return of the curve.”
• “To every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much. … We aim above the mark, to hit the mark.”

VIII. Nominalist and Realist

• “As the master overpowered the littleness and in-capableness of the performers, and made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was making through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women. The genius of nature was paramount at the oratorio.”
• “I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.“
• “For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticizing him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul.”