GENTLEMEN,
Let us exchange congratulations on the enjoyments and the prosliterary anniversary. The land we live in has no interest so dear,if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of days of reason andthought. Where there is no vision, the people perish. The scholarsare the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations ofthe earth. No matter what is their special work or profession, theystand for the spiritual interest of the world, and it is a commoncalamity if they neglect their post in a country where the materialinterest is so predominant as it is in America. We hear somethingtoo much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts.We are a puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following,are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the communityacquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our populationand arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is thehope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a goldmine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, andthe very body and feature of man.

I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the industriousmanufacturing village, or the mart of commerce. I love the music ofthe water-wheel; I value the railway; I feel the pride which thesight of a ship inspires; I look on trade and every mechanical craftas education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein.There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectualstep, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is thespiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousandtimes. And I will not be deceived into admiring the routine ofhandicrafts and mechanics, how splendid soever the result, any morethan I admire the routine of the scholars or clerical class. Thatsplendid results ensue from the labors of stupid men, is the fruit ofhigher laws than their will, and the routine is not to be praised forit. I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the result, -- Iwould not have the laborer sacrificed to my convenience and pride,nor to that of a great class of such as me. Let there be worsecotton and better men. The weaver should not be bereaved of hissuperiority to his work, and his knowledge that the product or theskill is of no value, except so far as it embodies his spiritualprerogatives. If I see nothing to admire in the unit, shall I admirea million units? Men stand in awe of the city, but do not honor anyindividual citizen; and are continually yielding to this dazzlingresult of numbers, that which they would never yield to the solitaryexample of any one.

Whilst the multitude of men degrade each other, and givecurrency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer ofhope, and must reinforce man against himself. I sometimes believethat our literary anniversaries will presently assume a greaterimportance, as the eyes of men open to their capabilities. Here, anew set of distinctions, a new order of ideas, prevail. Here, we seta bound to the respectability of wealth, and a bound to thepretensions of the law and the church. The bigot must cease to be abigot to-day. Into our charmed circle, power cannot enter; and thesturdiest defender of existing institutions feels the terrificinflammability of this air which condenses heat in every corner thatmay restore to the elements the fabrics of ages. Nothing solid issecure; every thing tilts and rocks. Even the scholar is not safe;he too is searched and revised. Is his learning dead? Is he livingin his memory? The power of mind is not mortification, but life.But come forth, thou curious child! hither, thou loving, all-hopingpoet! hither, thou tender, doubting heart, who hast not yet found anyplace in the world's market fit for thee; any wares which thoucouldst buy or sell, -- so large is thy love and ambition, -- thineand not theirs is the hour. Smooth thy brow, and hope and love on,for the kind heaven justifies thee, and the whole world feels thatthou art in the right.

We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy.Not thanks, not prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for ourcommunication with the infinite, -- but glad and conspiringreception, -- reception that becomes giving in its turn, as thereceiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy. I cannot, --nor can any man, -- speak precisely of things so sublime, but itseems to me, the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency,his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyondexplanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found theonly logician. Not exhortation, not argument becomes our lips, butpaeans of joy and praise. But not of adulation: we are too nearlyrelated in the deep of the mind to that we honor. It is God in uswhich checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In thebottom of the heart, it is said; `I am, and by me, O child! this fairbody and world of thine stands and grows. I am; all things are mine:and all mine are thine.'

The festival of the intellect, and the return to its source,cast a strong light on the always interesting topics of Man andNature. We are forcibly reminded of the old want. There is no man;there hath never been. The Intellect still asks that a man may beborn. The flame of life flickers feebly in human breasts. We demandof men a richness and universality we do not find. Great men do notcontent us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes themconspicuous. There is somewhat indigent and tedious about them.They are poorly tied to one thought. If they are prophets, they areegotists; if polite and various, they are shallow. How tardily menarrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! Thecrystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geologicalstructure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata,concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, neververtically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with auger andplumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventionsand theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as heprobes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take alateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong windtook everything off its feet, and if you come month after month tosee what progress our reformer has made, -- not an inch has hepierced, -- you still find him with new words in the old place,floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust. The newbook says, `I will give you the key to nature,' and we expect to golike a thunderbolt to the centre. But the thunder is a surfacephenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the sage. The wedgeturns out to be a rocket. Thus a man lasts but a very little while,for his monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a few months. Itis so with every book and person: and yet -- and yet -- we do nottake up a new book, or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat ofexpectation. And this invincible hope of a more adequate interpreteris the sure prediction of his advent.

In the absence of man, we turn to nature, which stands next.In the divine order, intellect is primary; nature, secondary; it isthe memory of the mind. That which once existed in intellect as purelaw, has now taken body as Nature. It existed already in the mind insolution; now, it has been precipitated, and the bright sediment isthe world. We can never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature.It is flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone. But we no longerhold it by the hand; we have lost our miraculous power; our arm is nomore as strong as the frost; nor our will equivalent to gravity andthe elective attractions. Yet we can use nature as a convenientstandard, and the meter of our rise and fall. It has this advantageas a witness, it cannot be debauched. When man curses, nature stilltestifies to truth and love. We may, therefore, safely study themind in nature, because we cannot steadily gaze on it in mind; as weexplore the face of the sun in a pool, when our eyes cannot brook hisdirect splendors.

It seems to me, therefore, that it were some suitable paean, ifwe should piously celebrate this hour by exploring the _method ofnature_. Let us see _that_, as nearly as we can, and try how far itis transferable to the literary life. Every earnest glance we giveto the realities around us, with intent to learn, proceeds from aholy impulse, and is really songs of praise. What difference can itmake whether it take the shape of exhortation, or of passionateexclamation, or of scientific statement? These are forms merely.Through them we express, at last, the fact, that God has done thus orthus.

In treating a subject so large, in which we must necessarilyappeal to the intuition, and aim much more to suggest, than todescribe, I know it is not easy to speak with the precisionattainable on topics of less scope. I do not wish in attempting topaint a man, to describe an air-fed, unimpassioned, impossible ghost.My eyes and ears are revolted by any neglect of the physical facts,the limitations of man. And yet one who conceives the true order ofnature, and beholds the visible as proceeding from the invisible,cannot state his thought, without seeming to those who study thephysical laws, to do them some injustice. There is an intrinsicdefect in the organ. Language overstates. Statements of theinfinite are usually felt to be unjust to the finite, andblasphemous. Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, whenhe said, "I am God;" but the moment it was out of his mouth, itbecame a lie to the ear; and the world revenged itself for theseeming arrogance, by the good story about his shoe. How can I hopefor better hap in my attempts to enunciate spiritual facts? Yet letus hope, that as far as we receive the truth, so far shall we be feltby every true person to say what is just.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushingstream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature ina corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set thefirst stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to bea bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is theresult of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness ofthe pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation.Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanatesis an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation.If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated bythe torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; asinsane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do notflow with the course of nature. Not the cause, but an ever noveleffect, nature descends always from above. It is unbroken obedience.The beauty of these fair objects is imported into them from ametaphysical and eternal spring. In all animal and vegetable forms,the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no mechanics, canaccount for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must beassumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without placeto insert an atom, -- in graceful succession, in equal fulness, inbalanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like anodor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexactand boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown.Away profane philosopher! seekest thou in nature the cause? Thisrefers to that, and that to the next, and the next to the third, andeverything refers. Thou must ask in another mood, thou must feel itand love it, thou must behold it in a spirit as grand as that bywhich it exists, ere thou canst know the law. Known it will not be,but gladly beloved and enjoyed.

The simultaneous life throughout the whole body, the equalserving of innumerable ends without the least emphasis or preferenceto any, but the steady degradation of each to the success of all,allows the understanding no place to work. Nature can only beconceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end, toa universe of ends, and not to one, -- a work of _ecstasy_, to berepresented by a circular movement, as intention might be signifiedby a straight line of definite length. Each effect strengthens everyother. There is no revolt in all the kingdoms from the commonweal:no detachment of an individual. Hence the catholic character whichmakes every leaf an exponent of the world. When we behold thelandscape in a poetic spirit, we do not reckon individuals. Natureknows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sproutsinto forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of grasses andvines.

That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby,appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, andit be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy orwise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded. Readalternately in natural and in civil history, a treatise of astronomy,for example, with a volume of French _Memoires pour servir_. When wehave spent our wonder in computing this wasteful hospitality withwhich boon nature turns off new firmaments without end into her widecommon, as fast as the madrepores make coral, -- suns and planetshospitable to souls, -- and then shorten the sight to look into thiscourt of Louis Quatorze, and see the game that is played there, --duke and marshal, abbe and madame, -- a gambling table where each islaying traps for the other, where the end is ever by some lie orfetch to outwit your rival and ruin him with this solemn fop in wigand stars, -- the king; one can hardly help asking if this planet isa fair specimen of the so generous astronomy, and if so, whether theexperiment have not failed, and whether it be quite worth while tomake more, and glut the innocent space with so poor an article.

I think we feel not much otherwise if, instead of beholdingfoolish nations, we take the great and wise men, the eminent souls,and narrowly inspect their biography. None of them seen by himselfand his performance compared with his promise or idea, willjustify the cost of that enormous apparatus of means by which thisspotted and defective person was at last procured.

To questions of this sort, nature replies, `I grow.' All isnascent, infant. When we are dizzied with the arithmetic of thesavant toiling to compute the length of her line, the return of hercurve, we are steadied by the perception that a great deal is doing;that all seems just begun; remote aims are in active accomplishment.We can point nowhere to anything final; but tendency appears on allhands: planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like afield of maize in July; is becoming somewhat else; is in rapidmetamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, thanyonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, aglobe, and parent of new stars. Why should not then these messieursof Versailles strut and plot for tabourets and ribbons, for a season,without prejudice to their faculty to run on better errands by andby?

But nature seems further to reply, `I have ventured so great astake as my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrivedat any end. The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, butmy aim is the health of the whole tree, -- root, stem, leaf, flower,and seed, -- and by no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp atthe expense of all the other functions.'

In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression naturemakes on us, is this, that it does not exist to any one or to anynumber of particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit;that there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but thewhole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, obeys thatredundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call_ecstasy_.

With this conception of the genius or method of nature, let usgo back to man. It is true, he pretends to give account of himselfto himself, but, at last, what has he to recite but the fact thatthere is a Life not to be described or known otherwise than bypossession? What account can he give of his essence more than _so itwas to be_? The _royal_ reason, the Grace of God seems the onlydescription of our multiform but ever identical fact. There isvirtue, there is genius, there is success, or there is not. There isthe incoming or the receding of God: that is all we can affirm; andwe can show neither how nor why. Self-accusation, remorse, and thedidactic morals of self-denial and strife with sin, is a view we areconstrained by our constitution to take of the fact seen from theplatform of action; but seen from the platform of intellection, thereis nothing for us but praise and wonder.

The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the lastvictory of intelligence. The universal does not attract us untilhoused in an individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility?The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seenwith the shore or the ship. Who would value any number of miles ofAtlantic brine bounded by lines of latitude and longitude? Confineit by granite rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and itis filled with expression; and the point of greatest interest iswhere the land and water meet. So must we admire in man, the form ofthe formless, the concentration of the vast, the house of reason, thecave of memory. See the play of thoughts! what nimble giganticcreatures are these! what saurians, what palaiotheria shall be namedwith these agile movers? The great Pan of old, who was clothed in aleopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and thefirmament, his coat of stars, -- was but the representative of thee,O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying inthy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; inthy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bowerof love and the realms of right and wrong. An individual man is afruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. Thehistory of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in theexperience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into aparticular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorderinto order. Each individual soul is such, in virtue of its being apower to translate the world into some particular language of itsown; if not into a picture, a statue, or a dance, -- why, then, intoa trade, an art, a science, a mode of living, a conversation, acharacter, an influence. You admire pictures, but it is asimpossible for you to paint a right picture, as for grass to bearapples. But when the genius comes, it makes fingers: it is pliancy,and the power of transferring the affair in the street into oils andcolors. Raphael must be born, and Salvator must be born.

There is no attractiveness like that of a new man. The sleepynations are occupied with their political routine. England, Franceand America read Parliamentary Debates, which no high genius nowenlivens; and nobody will read them who trusts his own eye: only theywho are deceived by the popular repetition of distinguished names.But when Napoleon unrolls his map, the eye is commanded by originalpower. When Chatham leads the debate, men may well listen, becausethey must listen. A man, a personal ascendency is the only greatphenomenon. When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius todo it. Follow the great man, and you shall see what the world has atheart in these ages. There is no omen like that.

But what strikes us in the fine genius is that which belongs ofright to every one. A man should know himself for a necessary actor.A link was wanting between two craving parts of nature, and he washurled into being as the bridge over that yawning need, the mediatorbetwixt two else unmarriageable facts. His two parents held each ofone of the wants, and the union of foreign constitutions in himenables him to do gladly and gracefully what the assembled human racecould not have sufficed to do. He knows his materials; he applieshimself to his work; he cannot read, or think, or look, but he unitesthe hitherto separated strands into a perfect cord. The thoughts hedelights to utter are the reason of his incarnation. Is it for himto account himself cheap and superfluous, or to linger by the waysidefor opportunities? Did he not come into being because something mustbe done which he and no other is and does? If only he _sees_, theworld will be visible enough. He need not study where to stand, norto put things in favorable lights; in him is the light, from him allthings are illuminated, to their centre. What patron shall he askfor employment and reward? Hereto was he born, to deliver thethought of his heart from the universe to the universe, to do anoffice which nature could not forego, nor he be discharged fromrendering, and then immerge again into the holy silence and eternityout of which as a man he arose. God is rich, and many more men thanone he harbors in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and thebeauty of all. Is not this the theory of every man's genius orfaculty? Why then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipperto this saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here artthou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thouthink meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unitehis ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?

Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his healthand erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmitsinfluences from the vast and universal to the point on which hisgenius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for thecurrent of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man'swisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end mustbe superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency inhim to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit hisagency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, thehuman with the divine. I conceive a man as always spoken to frombehind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all themillions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. Aschildren in their play run behind each other, and seize one by theears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseenpilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs allmen, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man willexactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longerseparate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, heshall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greaterwisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he isborne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and ofhis house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. Butif his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth thatis still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done,then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears.His health and greatness consist in his being the channel throughwhich heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which anecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist,when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled withthe divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscienceand omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heavenwhen the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only theInfluenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiformbenefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust ofimparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to berecognized as individuals, -- is finite, comes of a lower strain.

Shall I say, then, that, as far as we can trace the naturalhistory of the soul, its health consists in the fulness of itsreception, -- call it piety, call it veneration -- in the fact, thatenthusiasm is organized therein. What is best in any work of art,but that part which the work itself seems to require and do; thatwhich the man cannot do again, that which flows from the hour and theoccasion, like the eloquence of men in a tumultuous debate? It wasalways the theory of literature, that the word of a poet wasauthoritative and final. He was supposed to be the mouth of a divinewisdom. We rather envied his circumstance than his talent. We toocould have gladly prophesied standing in that place. We so quote ourScriptures; and the Greeks so quoted Homer, Theognis, Pindar, and therest. If the theory has receded out of modern criticism, it isbecause we have not had poets. Whenever they appear, they willredeem their own credit.

This ecstatical state seems to direct a regard to the whole andnot to the parts; to the cause and not to the ends; to the tendency,and not to the act. It respects genius and not talent; hope, and notpossession: the anticipation of all things by the intellect, and notthe history itself; art, and not works of art; poetry, and notexperiment; virtue, and not duties.

There is no office or function of man but is rightly dischargedby this divine method, and nothing that is not noxious to him ifdetached from its universal relations. Is it his work in the worldto study nature, or the laws of the world? Let him beware ofproposing to himself any end. Is it for use? nature is debased, asif one looking at the ocean can remember only the price of fish. Oris it for pleasure? he is mocked: there is a certain infatuating airin woods and mountains which draws on the idler to want and misery.There is something social and intrusive in the nature of all things;they seek to penetrate and overpower, each the nature of every othercreature, and itself alone in all modes and throughout space andspirit to prevail and possess. Every star in heaven is discontentedand insatiable. Gravitation and chemistry cannot content them. Everthey woo and court the eye of every beholder. Every man who comesinto the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into hismind, for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicateworld than that they occupy. It is not enough that they are Jove,Mars, Orion, and the North Star, in the gravitating firmament: theywould have such poets as Newton, Herschel and Laplace, that they mayre-exist and re-appear in the finer world of rational souls, and fillthat realm with their fame. So is it with all immaterial objects.These beautiful basilisks set their brute, glorious eyes on the eyeof every child, and, if they can, cause their nature to pass throughhis wondering eyes into him, and so all things are mixed.

Therefore man must be on his guard against this cup ofenchantments, and must look at nature with a supernatural eye. Bypiety alone, by conversing with the cause of nature, is he safe andcommands it. And because all knowledge is assimilation to the objectof knowledge, as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so mustits science or the description of it be. The poet must be arhapsodist: his inspiration a sort of bright casualty: his will in itonly the surrender of will to the Universal Power, which will not beseen face to face, but must be received and sympathetically known.It is remarkable that we have out of the deeps of antiquity in theoracles ascribed to the half fabulous Zoroaster, a statement of thisfact, which every lover and seeker of truth will recognize. "It isnot proper," said Zoroaster, "to understand the Intelligible withvehemence, but if you incline your mind, you will apprehend it: nottoo earnestly, but bringing a pure and inquiring eye. You will notunderstand it as when understanding some particular thing, but withthe flower of the mind. Things divine are not attainable by mortalswho understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive at thesummit."

And because ecstasy is the law and cause of nature, thereforeyou cannot interpret it in too high and deep a sense. Naturerepresents the best meaning of the wisest man. Does the sunsetlandscape seem to you the palace of Friendship, -- those purple skiesand lovely waters the amphitheatre dressed and garnished only for theexchange of thought and love of the purest souls? It is that. Allother meanings which base men have put on it are conjectural andfalse. You cannot bathe twice in the same river, said Heraclitus;and I add, a man never sees the same object twice: with his ownenlargement the object acquires new aspects.

Does not the same law hold for virtue? It is vitiated by toomuch will. He who aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, notat a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land withTemperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor,fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things whenprosecuted for themselves as an end. To every reform, in proportionto its energy, early disgusts are incident, so that the disciple issurprised at the very hour of his first triumphs, with chagrins, andsickness, and a general distrust: so that he shuns his associates,hates the enterprise which lately seemed so fair, and meditates tocast himself into the arms of that society and manner of life whichhe had newly abandoned with so much pride and hope. Is it that heattached the value of virtue to some particular practices, as, thedenial of certain appetites in certain specified indulgences, and,afterward, found himself still as wicked and as far from happiness inthat abstinence, as he had been in the abuse? But the soul can beappeased not by a deed but by a tendency. It is in a hope that shefeels her wings. You shall love rectitude and not the disuse ofmoney or the avoidance of trade: an unimpeded mind, and not a monkishdiet; sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering. Tell menot how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world, itsconversion into a Christian church, the establishment of publiceducation, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws oflove for laws of property; -- I say to you plainly there is no end towhich your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, ifpursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence tothe nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed withobjects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensibleto the senses: then will it be a god always approached, -- nevertouched; always giving health. A man adorns himself with prayer andlove, as an aim adorns an action. What is strong but goodness, andwhat is energetic but the presence of a brave man? The doctrine invegetable physiology of the _presence_, or the general influence ofany substance over and above its chemical influence, as of an alkalior a living plant, is more predicable of man. You need not speak tome, I need not go where you are, that you should exert magnetism onme. Be you only whole and sufficient, and I shall feel you in everypart of my life and fortune, and I can as easily dodge thegravitation of the globe as escape your influence.

But there are other examples of this total and supremeinfluence, besides Nature and the conscience. "From the poisonoustree, the world," say the Brahmins, "two species of fruit areproduced, sweet as the waters of life, Love or the society ofbeautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the immortal juiceof Vishnu." What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but becauseit is an overpowering enthusiasm? Never self-possessed or prudent,it is all abandonment. Is it not a certain admirable wisdom,preferable to all other advantages, and whereof all others are onlysecondaries and indemnities, because this is that in which theindividual is no longer his own foolish master, but inhales anodorous and celestial air, is wrapped round with awe of the object,blending for the time that object with the real and only good, andconsults every omen in nature with tremulous interest. When we speaktruly, -- is not he only unhappy who is not in love? his fanciedfreedom and self-rule -- is it not so much death? He who is in loveis wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at theobject beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind thosevirtues which it possesses. Therefore if the object be not itself aliving and expanding soul, he presently exhausts it. But the loveremains in his mind, and the wisdom it brought him; and it craves anew and higher object. And the reason why all men honor love, isbecause it looks up and not down; aspires and not despairs.

And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love ofthe flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a newpicture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: itproceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.Talent finds its models, methods, and ends, in society, exists forexhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius isits own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecturefrom within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator, as weadapt our voice and phrase to the distance and character of the earwe speak to. All your learning of all literatures would never enableyou to anticipate one of its thoughts or expressions, and yet each isnatural and familiar as household words. Here about us coils foreverthe ancient enigma, so old and so unutterable. Behold! there is thesun, and the rain, and the rocks: the old sun, the old stones. Howeasy were it to describe all this fitly; yet no word can pass.Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate speaking brother, lo! healso is a mute. Yet when Genius arrives, its speech is like a river;it has no straining to describe, more than there is straining innature to exist. When thought is best, there is most of it. Geniussheds wisdom like perfume, and advertises us that it flows out of adeeper source than the foregoing silence, that it knows so deeply andspeaks so musically, because it is itself a mutation of the thing itdescribes. It is sun and moon and wave and fire in music, asastronomy is thought and harmony in masses of matter.

What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of theincomputable energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man?Has any thing grand and lasting been done? Who did it? Plainly notany man, but all men: it was the prevalence and inundation of anidea. What brought the pilgrims here? One man says, civil liberty;another, the desire of founding a church; and a third, discovers thatthe motive force was plantation and trade. But if the Puritans couldrise from the dust, they could not answer. It is to be seen in whatthey were, and not in what they designed; it was the growth andexpansion of the human race, and resembled herein the sequentRevolution, which was not begun in Concord, or Lexington, orVirginia, but was the overflowing of the sense of natural right inevery clear and active spirit of the period. Is a man boastful andknowing, and his own master? -- we turn from him without hope: butlet him be filled with awe and dread before the Vast and the Divine,which uses him glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to the chainof events. What a debt is ours to that old religion which, in thechildhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath morning in thecountry of New England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow!A man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit ofothers, like the noble rock-maple which all around our villagesbleeds for the service of man. Not praise, not men's acceptance ofour doing, but the spirit's holy errand through us absorbed thethought. How dignified was this! How all that is called talents andsuccess, in our noisy capitals, becomes buzz and din before thisman-worthiness! How our friendships and the complaisances we use,shame us now! Shall we not quit our companions, as if they werethieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliffof mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewailour innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicateagain with these sharers of a more sacred idea?

And what is to replace for us the piety of that race? Wecannot have theirs: it glides away from us day by day, but we alsocan bask in the great morning which rises forever out of the easternsea, and be ourselves the children of the light. I stand here tosay, Let us worship the mighty and transcendent Soul. It is theoffice, I doubt not, of this age to annul that adulterous divorcewhich the superstition of many ages has effected between theintellect and holiness. The lovers of goodness have been one class,the students of wisdom another, as if either could exist in anypurity without the other. Truth is always holy, holiness alwayswise. I will that we keep terms with sin, and a sinful literatureand society, no longer, but live a life of discovery and performance.Accept the intellect, and it will accept us. Be the lowly ministersof that pure omniscience, and deny it not before men. It will burnup all profane literature, all base current opinions, all the falsepowers of the world, as in a moment of time. I draw from nature thelesson of an intimate divinity. Our health and reason as men needsour respect to this fact, against the heedlessness and against the contradiction of society. The sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force. His nobility needs the assurance of this in exhaustible reserved power. How great so ever have been itsbounties, they are a drop to the sea whence they flow. If you say,`the acceptance of the vision is also the act of God:' -- I shall not seek to penetrate the mystery, I admit the force of what you say. Ifyou ask, `How can any rules be given for the attainment of gifts so sublime?' I shall only remark that the solicitations of this spirit,as long as there is life, are never forborne. Tenderly, tenderly,they woo and court us from every object in nature, from every fact inlife, from every thought in the mind. The one condition coupled withthe gift of truth is its use. That man shall be learned who reducethhis learning to practice. Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed that it wasopened to him, "that the spirits who knew truth in this life, but didit not, at death shall lose their knowledge." "If knowledge," said Ali the Caliph, "calleth unto practice, well; if not, it goeth away."The only way into nature is to enact our best insight. Instantly weare higher poets, and can speak a deeper law. Do what you know, andperception is converted into character, as islands and continentswere built by invisible infusories, or, as these forest leaves absorblight, electricity, and volatile gases, and the gnarled oak to live athousand years is the arrest and fixation of the most volatile andethereal currents. The doctrine of this Supreme Presence is a cry of joy and exultation. Who shall dare think he has come late intonature, or has missed anything excellent in the past, who seeth the admirable stars of possibility, and the yet untouched continent ofhope glittering with all its mountains in the vast West? I praise with wonder this great reality, which seems to drown all things inthe deluge of its light. What man seeing this, can lose it from his thoughts, or entertain a meaner subject? The entrance of this into his mind seems to be the birth of man. We cannot describe thenatural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. I cannottell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mortalframe, shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, orwhether they have before had a natural history like that of this bodyyou see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe:before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar them out, or shutt hem in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space and time, form and essence, and hold the key to universal nature. I draw from thisfaith courage and hope. All things are known to the soul. It is notto be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater thanit. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in hernative realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide ashope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn: they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power.

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