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