Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

eems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely.
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced
to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The
knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes
into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and
reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the
circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a
god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and
crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic
beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape
the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the
sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us.
The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is
stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places
creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like
iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us
to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no
history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and
the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into opening
landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding
each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out
of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present,
and we were led in triumph by nature.

2. These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are
plain pleasures, 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. We never can part with it; the mind loves its
old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our
eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what
health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and
brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest
face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our
nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out
daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much
scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of
natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her
dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul.
There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to
which the chilled traveler rushes for safety,--and there is the
sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our
living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances
from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the
remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and
reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we
dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel[473] and Uriel,[474]
the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.

3. It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have
given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still
air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet
over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving rye-fields;
the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets
whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers
in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which
converts all trees to wind-harps;[475] the crackling and spurting of
hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls
and faces in the sitting-room,--these are the music and pictures of
the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
outlook, and on the skirt of the village.[476] But I go with my
friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] and with one stroke
of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes,
and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted
man to enter without novitiate and probation.[479] We penetrate bodily
this incredible beauty: we dip our hands in this painted element: our
eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a
villeggiatura,[480] a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing
festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and
enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these
delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances,
signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention,
the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned
that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty.
I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to
please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and
sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman
shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what
sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the
heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal
man. Only as far as masters of the world have called in nature to
their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the
meaning of their hanging-gardens,[481] villas, garden-houses, islands,
parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these
strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be
invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe
and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these
tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what
the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his
company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of
these beguiling stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to
realize in some Versailles,[482] or Paphos,[483] or Ctesiphon.[484]
Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for
the background, which save all our works of art, which were otherwise
baubles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness,
they should consider the effect of man reputed to be the possessors of
nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor
fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night,
and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before him.
He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch
Mountains,[485] for example, which converts the mountains into an
Æolian harp,[486] and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the
Dorian[487] mythology, Apollo,[488] Diana,[489] and all divine hunters
and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily
beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of
society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake
of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not
rich! That they have some high-fenced grove, which they call a park;
that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has
visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant,
to watering-places, and to distant cities, are the groundwork from
which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their
actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays
her son, and enhances the gift of wealthy and well-born beauty, by a
radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the
road,--a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to
patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of
the air.

4. The moral sensibility which makes Edens[490] and Tempes[491] so
easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never
far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como
Lake,[492] or the Madeira Islands.[493] We exaggerate the praises of
local scenery. In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the
meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first
hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night
stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common,[494] with all the
spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna,[495] or on the
marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning
and evening, will transfigure maples and alders. The difference
between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great
difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any
particular landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which
every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty
breaks in everywhere.

5. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this
topic, which school-men called natura naturata, or nature passive.
One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to
broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A
susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind,
without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a
wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral
from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a
fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A
dilettantism[496] in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields
is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters
and inquisitive of woodcraft and I suppose that such a gazetteer as
wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take place in
the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's
chaplets"[497] of the book-shops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too
clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men
begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most
unfit tribute to Pan,[498] who ought to be represented in the
mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous
before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot
renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude
of false churches[499] accredits the true religion. Literature,
poetry, science, are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret,
concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or
incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the
city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The
sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the
beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the
landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there
were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the
king is in the palace nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is
gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn
from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested
by the pictures and architecture. The critics who complain of the
sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done,
must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from
our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and
serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or
absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and
selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are
convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with
compunction; if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should
shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not
with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied
as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology,
mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy
and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.

6. But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this
topic, but not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura
naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven
snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and
multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus,[500] a
shepherd), and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in
creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation
on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate
results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little
motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly
cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes
pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of
boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the
secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures,
and exchange our Mosaic[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large
style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn
what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed,
then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has
disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door
for the remote Flora,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to
come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how
inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] and then race after
race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to
Plato,[508] and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all
must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.

7. Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second
secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be
written on the thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling
bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the
mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A
little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the
simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at
last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her
craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has
but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her
dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water,
tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.

8. Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her
own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms
and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and,
at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it.
Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird
with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction
is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials, and
begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage:
otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch
a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world,
vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their
imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and
probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having
tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated:
the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come
to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly
belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their
beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors
with our ridiculous tenderness.

9. Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest
curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude
and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himalaya
mountain-chains[509] and the axis of the globe. 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 house. We may easily hear
too much of rural influences. The cool, disengaged air of natural
objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures
with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp
out and eat roots, but let us be men instead of wood-chucks, and the
oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of
ivory on carpets of silk.

10. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore
is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it
was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas,
crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its
own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment.
The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and
Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which
now it discovers.

11. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
also into organization. The astronomers said,[514] "Give us matter,
and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not
enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse,
one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the
centrifugal and centripetal[515] forces. Once heave the ball from the
hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew." "A very
unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain begging
of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of
projection, as well as the continuation of it?" Nature, meanwhile, had
not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the
impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push,
but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no
end of the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through
every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and
through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration
is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the
world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the
planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, 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. Without electricity the air would rot,
and without this violence of direction which men and women have,
without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We
aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of
exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad,
sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to
play, but blabs the secret;--how then? is the bird flown? O no, the
wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths,
with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their
several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in
which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl,
for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the
fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any
power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a
painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this
day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered
her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every
faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame,
by all these attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance,
which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This
glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his
eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics[516] say
what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because
the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does
not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single
seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds,
that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that
hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least,
one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated
profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged
round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or a sudden
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from
some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private
felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in
his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the
race.

12. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind
and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in
his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make
sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to
heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is
reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the
contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the
overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The
poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any
hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent
Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God
himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George
Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial
tracts, and James Naylor[520] once suffered himself to be worshiped as
the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his
thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may
discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the
people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A
similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and
ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and
penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to
him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by midnight and by
the morning star; he wets them with his tears: they are sacred; too good
for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is
the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in
the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has
elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed
experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to
his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them
over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition,
which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot
suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion
with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy
characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or
the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit
that one may have impressive experience, and yet may not know how to put
his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom
has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our
peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously
the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, so long as he does not
feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does
not see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from
the instinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his
mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who does not think
that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do
anything well, who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work
may be of none, but I must not think it is of none, or I shall not do it
with impunity.

13. In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking,
something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith
with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of
approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is
also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in
nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to
drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us
hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all
our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself
are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which
reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the
end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from
the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an
operose[521] method! What a train of means to secure a little
conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this
kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and file
of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the
water-side, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual!
Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these
things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove
friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation,
character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the
animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door,
brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the
children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought,
virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought
and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good
time, whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in
the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main
attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been
lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is
the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the
governments generally of the world, are cities and governments of the
rich, and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who
would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive
with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for
nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a
company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say.
The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of
aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to
exact this immense sacrifice of men?

14. Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be
expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external
nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and
flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction.
This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the
softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead,
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst
yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as
fore-looking to such pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is
an odd jealousy; but the poet finds himself not near enough to this
object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does
not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but
outskirt and far-off reflection[522] and echo of the triumph that has
passed by, and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance
in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the
adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of
stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid
distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the
sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his
foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It
is the same among men and women as among the silent trees; always a
referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is
it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscapes is
equally inaccessible? 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 heaven, if she stoops
to such a one as he.

15. What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first
projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many
well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe
a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious
resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and
fools of nature? One looks at the face of heaven and earth lays all
petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the
intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not
be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an
Oedipus[523] arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain.
Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape
on his lips. Her 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. But it also appears, that our
actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we
designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual
agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy
words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we
measure our individual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if
we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of
identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the
workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning
dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and
chemistry, and, over them, of life preëxisting within us in their
highest form.

16. The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain
of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition
of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel.
Wherever the impulse exceeds the Rest or Identity insinuates its
compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the
prunella[524] or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the
fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to
particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We
anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon;
the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by
electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your
fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but
nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy
salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and
impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in
impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And
the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the
center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and
religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent
ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile
essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.
Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural
objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power
which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the
particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and
distills its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs
and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been
poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as
pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of
cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long
time.

SHAKSPEARE;[525] OR, THE POET

[Transcriber's Note: Shakspeare is spelled as "Shakspeare" as well as
"Shakespeare" in this book. The original spellings have been retained.]

1. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
sight and of arm, to come to the desired point. The greatest genius is
the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
uppermost and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

2. The Genius[526] of our life is jealous of individuals and will not
have any individual great, except through the general. There is no
choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning,
and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic
continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and
find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I
foresee a new mechanic power:" no, but he finds himself in the river
of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities
of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.
The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out
the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by
her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out
of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the
mind.

3. Shakspeare's youth[527] fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offense easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The
Puritans,[528] a growing and energetic party and the religious among
the Anglican Church,[529] would suppress them. But the people wanted
them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous inclosures
at country fairs, were the ready theaters of strolling players. The
people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress
newspapers now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could
king, prelate, or puritan,--alone or united, suppress an organ, which
was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch,[530] and library,
at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their
own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national
interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would
have thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit
less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a
baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers
which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene,[531]
Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford,
Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

4. The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when[532] he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on
the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy,[533] which the audience will
bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Cæsar,[534]
and other stories out of Plutarch,[535] which they never tire of; a
shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut[536] and
Arthur,[537] down to the royal Henries,[538] which men hear eagerly;
and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales,[539] and
Spanish voyages,[540] which all the London prentices know. All the
mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright,
and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the
property of the Theater so long, and so many rising geniuses have
enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or
adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work
of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in
that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had
best lie where they are.

5. Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried.
Had the prestige[541] which hedges about a modern tragedy existed,
nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body
which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a
ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again,
may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the
people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so
much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full
strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet
owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in
Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was
the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on
pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was
projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with
reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and
treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still
enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as
the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple
or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of
poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which
no single genius,[542] however extraordinary, could hope to create.

6. In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's[543] laborious computations
in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in
which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation
hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII, I
think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy,[544] and the following
scene from Cromwell,[545] where,--instead of the meter of Shakspeare,
whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading
for the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
traits of Shakspeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the
coronation,[546] are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to
Queen Elizabeth[547] is in bad rhythm.[548]

7. Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
to value his memory[549] equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether
through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in
distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they
are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very
near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a
good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken
wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high
place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer,[550]
perhaps; of Chaucer,[551] of Saadi.[552] They felt that all wit was
their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as
poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales
of the world,--

"Presenting Thebes'[553] and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine."

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been
beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556]
Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and
Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the
Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560]
Ovid,[561] and Statius.[562] Then Petrarch,[563] Boccaccio,[564] and
the Provençal poets,[565] and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the
Rose[566] is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide,[567] from Lollius of Urbino: The
Cock and the Fox,[568] from the Lais of Marie: The House of
Fame,[569] from the French or Italian: and poor Gower[570] he uses as
if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build
his house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no worth
where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to
be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once
shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to
steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately
place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts;
but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our
own.

8. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.
The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at
Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency,
and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of
their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by
correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence,
anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and
resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert
Peel[572] and Mr. Webster[573] vote, so Locke[574] and Rousseau[575]
think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around
Homer,[576] Menu,[577] Saada,[578] or Milton,[579] from which they
drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all
perished,--which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard
speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any
companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there
at last in his breast a Delphi[580] whereof to ask concerning any
thought or thing whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have
answer, and rely on that? All the debts which such a man could
contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of
originality: for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a
whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has
conversed.

9. It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in
the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a
thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English
Bible[581] is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the
English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a
time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,[582]
admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the
world. Grotius[583] makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's
Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already
in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms.[584] He picked
out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law,[585]
the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial
truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where
these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by
being translation on translation. There never was a time when there
was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and
all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like
the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas,[586] Æsop's
Fables,[587] Pilpay,[588] Arabian Nights,[589] Cid,[590] Iliad,[591]
Robin Hood,[592] Scottish Minstrelsy,[593] are not the work of single
men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market
thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop,
all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word;
every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the
generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his
originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the
recorder and embodiment of his own.

10. We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
Society,[594] for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from
the Mysteries[595] celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the
final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays,
from Ferrex and Porrex,[596] and Gammer Gurton's Needle,[597] down to
the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare
altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success,
and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no
book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old
yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope
to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached[598] or not, whether he
held horses at the theater-door, whether he kept school, and why he
left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

11. There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing
age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth,[599] and King James,[600] and the Essexes,[601]
Leicesters,[602] Burleighs,[603] and Buckinghams;[604] and lets pass
without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which
alone will cause the Tudor dynasty[605] to be remembered,--the man who
carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and
on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some
ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias.
A popular player,--nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race;
and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men,
as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon,[606] who took the
inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned
his name. Ben Jonson,[607] though we have strained his few words of
regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first
vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has
conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question,
the better poet of the two.

12. If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's
time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton[608] was
born four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after
him; and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the
following persons:[609] Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip
Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton,
Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Berlarmine,
Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus
Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of
his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom
doubtless[610] he saw,--Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont,
Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest. Since the
constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of
Pericles,[611] there was never any such society;--yet their genius
failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask
was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century
to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after
his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.
It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for
he is the father of German literature: it was on the introduction of
Shakspeare into German, by Lessing,[612] and the translation of his
works by Wieland[613] and Schlegel,[614] that the rapid burst of
German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the
nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living
Hamlet,[615] that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized.
His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our
ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge[616] and
Goethe[617] are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a
silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
Christianity, qualifies the period.

[Transcriber's Note: Number runs from 12 to 14. Number 13 omitted]

14. The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions,
advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that
will lead to proof; and with what result? Beside some important
illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have
adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and
dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It appears that, from
year to year, he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars'
Theater:[618] its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: and he
bought an estate in his native village, with his earnings, as writer
and shareholder; that he lived in the best house in Stratford;[619]
was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of
borrowing money, and the like; and he was a veritable farmer. About
the time when he was writing Macbeth,[620] he sues Philip Rogers, in
the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence,
for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects,
appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or
excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in
the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other
actors and managers. I admit the importance of this information. It is
well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

15. But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
have come to an end of this gossip no ray of relation appears between
it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random
into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would
have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring,
like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish
the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and
Collier,[621] have wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent
Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont,[622] have vainly assisted.
Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready,[623] dedicate their
lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express.
The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word
leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly
torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I
remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer,[624] the
pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now
remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no
part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--

"What may this mean,[625]
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly
reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks
of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any
biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer
Night's Dream[626] admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or
parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of
that delicate creation? The forest of Arden,[627] the nimble air of
Scone Castle,[628] the moonlight of Portia's villa,[629] "the antres
vast[630] and desarts idle," of Othello's captivity,--where is the
third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or
private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets?
In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,--in the
Cyclopean architecture[631] of Egypt and India; in the Phidian
sculpture;[632] the Gothic ministers;[633] the Italian painting;[634]
the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,[635]--the Genius draws up the
ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives
way to a new, which sees the works, and ask in vain for a history.

16. Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can
tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most
apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his
tripod,[636] and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique
documents extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and
Collier; and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which
seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but
the man within the breast, has accepted, as words of fate; and tell me
if they match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or,
which gives the most historical insight into the man.

17. Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with
Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey[637] and Rowe,[638] we
have really the information which is material, that which describes
character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man
and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded
convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every
heart,--on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the
prizes of life, and the ways whereby we come at them; on the
characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect
their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which
defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift
in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets,
without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are
no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the
confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same
time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has
he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the
gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his
delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
giving. Let Timon,[639] let Warwick,[640] let Antonio[641] the
merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare's being
the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to
us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of
religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What
mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or
function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king
has he not taught state, as Talma[642] taught Napoleon? What maiden
has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not
out-loved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not
instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

18. Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on
Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit;
that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly
as these critics of his dramatic merit, who still think it secondary.
He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and
images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been
less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how
good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it
turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw
some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose
history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose,
into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the
occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the
universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare
and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he
wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of
England and Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man,
and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of
men and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the
terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.

19. Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as
he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of
doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No
man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
humanity[643] coördinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a
story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has
certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental
prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part,
and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing,
but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no
importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no
cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
readers.

20. This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
compass: the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute
details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the
scrutiny of the solar microscope.

21. In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
power to make one picture. Daguerre[644] learned how to let one flower
etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to
etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never
representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation
of things into song is demonstrated.

22. His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets,
though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as
inimitable as they: and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit
of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so
is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now
as a whole poem.

23. Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism,[645] yet the
sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps
himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is
not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off
with him in some distant direction; he always rides.

24. The finest poetry was first experienced: but the thought has
suffered a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men
often attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy
to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
acquainted with parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and
that is Rachael. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar
with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has
gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost all that
is exuvial. This generosity bides with Shakspeare. We say, from the
truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by
heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.

25. One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
over the universe. Epicurus[646] relates, that poetry hath such charms
that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the
true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer
lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was
rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
repentance?" Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and
cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and
emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.

26. And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and
benefactor, when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations
of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere
lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs
Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection
of humanity.

27. Shakspeare, Homer, Dante,[647] Chaucer, saw the splendor of
meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had
another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the
ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore
a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its
thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute
commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed them as colors to
compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the
step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the
virtue which resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--what
is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements, which
waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master of the
revels[648] to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through
majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the
planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to
glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise
in all towns, "very superior pyrotechny this evening!" Are the agents
of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a
street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the
trumpet-text in the Koran,[649]--"The heavens and the earth, and all
that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long
as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has
not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its
materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it
signify? It is but a Twelfth Night,[650] or Midsummer Night's Dream,
or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or
less? The Egyptian verdict[651] of the Shakspeare Societies comes to
mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this
fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of
keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he
been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of
Bacon, Milton, Tasso,[652] Cervantes,[653] we might leave the fact in
the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to
the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed,
and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into
Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself,--it must even go into
the world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane
life, using his genius for the public amusement.

28. Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,[654] German,[655]
and Swede,[656] beheld the same objects: they also saw through them
that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway
vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an
obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life
became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation,
beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and
curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires
before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener
sank in them.

29. It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The
world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle
with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg
the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal
inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more
beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with
universal wisdom.

PRUDENCE.[660]

What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and
that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
lubricity[661] and people without perception. Then I have the same
title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience.
We paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the
man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church
or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find
what he has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in
me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship[662]
with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real
and constant, not to own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of
appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God
taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It
is content to seek health of body by complying with physical
conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.