And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,--came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, 1 "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! 2 The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the god deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune. 3 Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancelors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
FRIENDSHIP. 4
We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Barring all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth.
The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt toward others, are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good will, they make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness between pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is, what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best, he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more.
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which relume 5 a young world for me again? What is so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God, the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. 6 Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,--a possession for all time. Nor is nature so poor, but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by-and-by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims is a traditionary globe. My friends have come 7 to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me and in them, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex and circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard 8--poetry without stop--hymn, ode and epic, 9 poetry still flowing, Apollo 10 and the Muses 11 chanting still. Will these two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius 12 of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.
I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to "crush the sweet poison, 13 of misused wine" of the affections. A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have had such fine fancies lately about two or three persons, as have given me delicious hours, but the joy ends in the day: it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Yet the systole and diastole 14 of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality 15 of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterward worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? 16 Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amid these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. 17 A man who stands united with his thought, conceives magnificently to himself. He is conscious of a universal success, 18 even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty, more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee, also, in its pied and painted immensity,--thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,--thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts forth friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? 19 The law of nature is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this, to each new candidate for his love:--
DEAR FRIEND:--
If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles, in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.
Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, 20 instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.
I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one contest instantly, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum.
"The valiant warrior 21 famoused for fight, After a hundred victories, once foiled, Is from the book of honor razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."
Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit 22 which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.
The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, 23 to the great games, where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the hap in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, but diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who, 24 under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox 25 in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says, 26--"I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. 27 We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of plow-boys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which only celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, [^302] and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.
Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well-tempered, and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one, 28 peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals at once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
No two men but being left alone with each other, enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,--no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of the noblest benefits.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences, from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify but raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.
Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can be another's. There is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb;--you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos 29 inquinat, æquat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent,--so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say anything to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,--very late,--we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire,--but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, 30 of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as specters and shadows merely.
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me. I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced: 31 he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger 32 of a greater friend.
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover before me, far before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions, not with yourself but with your lusters, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. 33 It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.
HEROISM 34
"Paradise is under the shadow of swords," 35
_Mahomet._
- In the elder English dramatists, 36 and mainly in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, 37 there is a constant recognition of gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society of their age, as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro, or Valerio 38 enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,--and proffers civilities without end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of character and dialogue,--as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double Marriage, 39--wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial, and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts, take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered Athens--all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although assured, that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds.
"Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.
Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen, Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown. 40 My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
Dor. Stay, Sophocles--with this, tie up my sight; Let not soft nature so transformed be, And lose her gentler sexed humanity, To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well; Never one object underneath the sun Will I behold before my Sophocles: Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
Mar. Dost know what 'tis to die?
Soph. Thou dost not, Martius, And therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die Is to begin to live. It is to end An old, stale, weary work, and to commence A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave Deceitful knaves for the society Of gods and goodness. Thou, thyself, must part At last, from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.
Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?
Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent To them I ever loved best? Now, I'll kneel, But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty This trunk can do the gods.
Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius, Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth: This is a man, a woman! Kiss thy lord, And live with all the freedom you were wont. O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart, My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
Val. What ails my brother?
Soph. Martius, oh Martius, Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
Dor. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius, With his disdain of fortune and of death, Captived himself, has captived me, And though my arm hath ta'en his body here, His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul. By Romulus, 41 he is all soul, I think; He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved; Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free, And Martius walks now in captivity."
I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of "Dion," 42 and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott 43 will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley. 44 Thomas Carlyle, 45 with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns 46 has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies, 47 there is an account of the battle of Lutzen, 48 which deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley's 49 History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual valor with admiration, all the more evident on the part of the narrator, that he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford 50 requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, 51 who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, 52 the Dion, 53 the Epaminondas, 54 the Scipio 55 of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism 56 not of the schools, but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.
We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head back to his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes, insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily, almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.
Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behavior.
Toward all this external evil, the man within the breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat in great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience 57 to a secret impulse of an individual's character. Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man must be supposed to see a little further on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, 58 is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums, and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard, which rack the wit of all human society. What joys has kind nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be no interval between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the world then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. "Indeed, these humble considerations 59 make me out of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were the peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use!"
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display: the soul of a better quality thrusts back the unreasonable economy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal, 60 the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bokhar, 61 "When I was in Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which were open and fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years. Strangers may present themselves at any hour, and in whatever number; the master has amply provided for the reception of the men and their animals, and is never happier than when they tarry for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country." The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger--so it be done for love, and not for ostentation--do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe. In some way the time they seem to lose is redeemed, and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves. These men fan the flame of human love, and raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind. But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks 62 and fair water than belong to city feasts.
The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, 63 the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine,--"It is a noble, generous liquor, and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it." Better still is the temperance of king David 64 who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.
It is told of Brutus, 65 that when he fell on his sword, after the battle of Philippi, 66 he quoted a line of Euripides, 67--"O virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade." I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the good humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, 68 charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates' 69 condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, 70 during his life, and Sir Thomas More's 71 playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his company,
Jul. Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.
Master. Very likely, 'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.
These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws 72 of the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences.
The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself is here;--and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas, 73 brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus 74 to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys 75 were handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. 76 A great man makes his climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest, which is inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination in reading the actions of Pericles, 77 Xenophon, 78 Columbus, 79 Bayard, 80 Sidney, 81 Hampden, 82 teach us how needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our days.
We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, or books, or religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an active profession, and the forming Colossus 83 shrinks to the common size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment they put their horses of the sun to plow in its furrow. They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations, is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho, 84 or Sévigné, 85 or De Staël, 86 or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis, 87 none can,--certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of each new experience, search, in turn, all the objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the charm of her new-born being which is the kindling of a new dawn in the recesses of space. The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.
Footnotes
Ali, Arabian caliph, surnamed the "Lion of God," cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed. He was assassinated about 661.
↩The county of Essex in England has several namesakes in America.
↩Fortune. In Roman mythology Fortune, the goddess of fortune or chance, is represented as standing on a ball or wheel.
↩Most of Emerson's Essays were first delivered as lectures, in practically the form in which they afterwards appeared in print. The form and style, it is true, were always carefully revised before publication; this Emerson called 'giving his thoughts a Greek dress.' His essay on Friendship, published in the First Series of Essays in 1841 was not, so far as we know, delivered as a lecture; parts of it, however, were taken from lectures which Emerson delivered on Society, The Heart, and Private Life.
↩Relume. Is this a common word? Define it.
↩Pass my gate. The walk opposite Emerson's house on the 'Great Road' to Boston was a favorite winter walk for Concord people. Along it passed the philosophic Alcott and the imaginative Hawthorne, as well as famous townsmen, and school children.
↩My friends have come to me, etc.: Compare with Emerson's views here expressed the noble passage in his essay on The Over-Soul: "Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one."
↩Bard. Poet: originally one who composed and sang to the music of a harp verses in honor of heroes and heroic deeds.
↩Hymn, ode, and epic. Define each of these three kinds of poetry.
↩Apollo. In classic mythology, the sun god who presided over music, poetry, and art; he was the guardian and leader of the Muses.
↩Muses. In classic mythology, the nine sisters who presided over music, poetry, art, and science. They were Clio the muse of history, Euterpe of music, especially the flute, Thalia of comedy, Melpomene of tragedy, Terpsichore of dancing, Erato of erotic poetry, mistress of the lyre, Polyhymnia of sacred poetry, Urania of astronomy, Calliope of eloquence and epic poetry.
↩Genius. According to an old belief, a spirit that watched over a person to control, guide and aid him.
↩"Crush the sweet poison," etc. This is a quotation from Comus, a poem by Milton.
↩Systole and diastole. (See note 98.)
↩Friendship, like the immortality, etc. See on what a high plane Emerson places this relation of friendship. In 1840 he wrote in a letter: "I am a worshiper of friendship, and cannot find any other good equal to it. As soon as any man pronounces the words which approve him fit for that great office, I make no haste; he is holy; let me be holy also; our relations are eternal; why should we count days and weeks?"
↩Elysian temple. Temple of bliss. In Greek mythology, Elysium was the abode of the blessed after death.
↩An Egyptian skull. Plutarch says that at an Egyptian feast a skull was displayed, either as a hint to make the most of the pleasure which can be enjoyed but for a brief space, or as a warning not to set one's heart upon transitory things.
↩Conscious of a universal success, etc. Emerson wrote in his journal: "My entire success, such as it is, is composed wholly of particular failures."
↩Extends the old leaf. Compare Emerson's lines:
↩A texture of wine and dreams. What does Emerson mean by this phrase? Explain the whole sentence.
↩"The valiant warrior," etc. The quotation is from Shakespeare's Sonnet, XXV.
↩Naturlangsamkeit. A German word meaning slowness. The slowness of natural development.
↩Olympian. One who took part in the great Greek games held every four years on the plain of Olympia. The racing, wrestling and other contests of strength and skill were accompanied by sacrifices to the gods, processions, and banquets. There was a sense of dignity and almost of worship about the games. The Olympic games have been recently revived, and athletes from all countries of the world contest for the prizes--simple garlands of wild olive.
↩I knew a man who, etc. The allusion is to Jonas Very, a mystic and poet, who lived at Salem, Massachusetts.
↩Paradox. Define this word. Explain its application to a friend.
↩My author says, etc. The quotation is from A Consideration upon Cicero, by the French author, Montaigne. Montaigne was one of Emerson's favorite authors from his boyhood: of the essays he says, "I felt as if I myself, had written this book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke my thoughts."
↩Cherub. What is the difference between a cherub and a seraph?
↩This law of one to one. Emerson felt that this same law applied to nature. He wrote in his journal: "Nature says to man, 'one to one, my dear.'"
↩Crimen quos, etc. The Latin saying is translated in the preceding sentence.
↩Nonage. We use more commonly the word, "minority."
↩Janus-faced. The word here means simply two-faced, without the idea of deceit usually attached to it. In Roman mythology, Janus, the doorkeeper of heaven was the protector of doors and gateways and the patron of the beginning and end of undertakings. He was the god of the rising and setting of the sun, and was represented with two faces, one looking to the east and the other to the west. His temple at Rome was kept open in time of war and closed in time of peace.
↩Harbinger. A forerunner; originally an officer who rode in advance of a royal person to secure proper lodgings and accommodations.
↩Empyrean. Highest and purest heaven; according to the ancients, the region of pure light and fire.
↩Title. Probably this essay is, essentially at least, the lecture on Heroism delivered in Boston in the winter of 1837, in the course of lectures on Human Culture.
↩Motto. This saying of Mahomet's was the only motto prefixed to the essay in the first edition. In later editions, Emerson prefixed, according to his custom, some original lines;
↩Elder English dramatists. The dramatists who preceded Shakespeare. In his essay on Shakespeare; or, the Poet, Emerson enumerates the foremost of these,--"Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher."
↩Beaumont and Fletcher. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were two dramatists of the Elizabethan age. They wrote together and their styles were so similar that critics are unable to identify the share of each in their numerous plays.
↩Rodrigo, Pedro, or Valerio. Favorite names for heroes among the dramatists. Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, known usually by the title of the Cid, was the national hero of Spain, famous for his exploits against the Moors. Don Pedro was the Prince of Arragon in Shakespeare's play, Much Ado About Nothing.
↩Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, and Double Marriage. The first, third and fourth are names of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher. In the case of the second, Emerson, by a lapse of memory, gives the name of one of the chief characters instead of the name of the play--The Triumph of Honor in a piece called Four Plays in One. It is from this play by Beaumont and Fletcher that the passage in the essay is quoted.
↩Adriadne's crown. According to Greek mythology, the crown of Adriadne was, for her beauty and her sufferings, put among the stars. She was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete; she gave Theseus the clue by means of which he escaped from the labyrinth and she was afterwards abandoned by him.
↩Romulus. The reputed founder of the city of Rome.
↩Laodamia, Dion. Read these two poems by Wordsworth, the great English poet, and tell why you think Emerson mentioned them here.
↩Scott. Sir Walter Scott, a famous Scotch author.
↩Lord Evandale, Balfour of Burley. These are characters in Scott's novel, Old Mortality. The passage referred to by Emerson is in the forty-second chapter.
↩Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was a great admirer of heroes, asserting that history is the biography of great men. One of his most popular books is Heroes and Hero-Worship, on a plan similar to that of Emerson's Representative Men.
↩Robert Burns. A Scotch lyric poet. Emerson was probably thinking of the patriotic song, Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.
↩Harleian Miscellanies. A collection of manuscripts published in the eighteenth century, and named for Robert Harley, the English statesman who collected them.
↩Lutzen. A small town in Prussia. The battle referred to was fought in 1632 and in it the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus gained a great victory over vastly superior numbers. Nearly two hundred years later another battle was fought at Lutzen, in which Napoleon gained a victory over the allied Russians and Prussians.
↩Simon Ockley. An English scholar of the seventeenth century whose chief work was a History of the Saracens.
↩Oxford. One of the two great English universities.
↩Plutarch. (See note 264.)
↩Brasidas. This hero, described by Plutarch, was a Spartan general who lived about four hundred years before Christ.
↩Dion. A Greek philosopher who ruled the city of Syracuse in the fourth century before Christ.
↩Epaminondas. A Greek general and statesman of the fourth century before Christ.
↩Scipio. (See note 205.)
↩Stoicism. The stern and severe philosophy taught by the Greek philosopher Zeno; he taught that men should always seek virtue and be indifferent to pleasure and happiness. This belief, carried to the extreme of severity, exercised a great influence on many noble Greeks and Romans.
↩Heroism is an obedience, etc. In one of his poems Emerson says:
↩Plotinus. An Egyptian philosopher who taught in Rome during the third century. It was said that he so exalted the mind that he was ashamed of his body.
↩Indeed these humble considerations, etc. The passage, like many which Emerson quotes, is rendered inexactly. The Prince says to Poins: "Indeed these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness. What a disgrace it is to me to remember thy name! or to know thy face to-morrow! or to take note how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, that is, these and those that were thy peach-colored ones! or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as, one for superfluity and another for use!" Shakespeare's Henry IV., Part II. 2, 2.
↩Ibn Hankal. Ibn Hankul, an Arabian geographer and traveler of the tenth century. He wrote an account of his twenty years' travels in Mohammedan countries; in 1800 this was translated into English by Sir William Jones under the title of The Oriental Geography of Ibn Hankal. In that volume this anecdote is told in slightly different words.
↩Bokhara. Where is Bokhara? It corresponds to the ancient Sogdiana.
↩Bannocks. Thick cakes, made usually of oatmeal. What does Emerson mean by this sentence? Probably no person ever met his visitors, many of whom were "exacting and wearisome," and must have been unwelcome, with more perfect courtesy and graciousness than Emerson.
↩John Eliot. Give as full an account as you can of the life and works of this noble Apostle to the Indians of the seventeenth century.
↩King David, etc. See First Chronicles, 11, 15-19.
↩Brutus. Marcus Junius Brutus, a Roman patriot of the first century before Christ, who took part in the assassination of Julius Cæsar.
↩Philippi. A city of Macedonia near which in the year 42 B.C. were fought two battles in which the republican army under Brutus and Cassius was defeated by Octavius and Antony, friends of Cæsar.
↩Euripides. A Greek tragic poet of the fifth century before Christ.
↩Scipio. (See note 205.) Plutarch in his Morals gives another version of the story: "When Paetilius and Quintus accused him of many crimes before the people; 'on this very day,' he said, 'I conquered Hannibal and Carthage. I for my part am going with my crown on to the Capitol to sacrifice; and let him that pleaseth stay and pass his vote upon me.' Having thus said, he went his way; and the people followed him, leaving his accusers declaiming to themselves."
↩Socrates. (See note 187.)
↩Prytaneum. A public hall at Athens.
↩Sir Thomas More. An English statesman and author who was beheaded in 1535 on a charge of high treason. The incident to which Emerson refers is one which showed his "pleasant wit" undisturbed by the prospect of death. As the executioner was about to strike, More moved his head carefully out of reach of the ax. "Pity that should be cut," he said, "that has never committed treason."
↩Blue Laws. Any rigid Sunday laws or religious regulations. The term is usually applied to the early laws of New Haven and Connecticut which regulated personal and religious conduct.
↩Epaminondas. (See note 329.)
↩Olympus. A mountain of Greece, the summit of which, according to Greek mythology, was the home of the gods.
↩Jerseys. Consult a history of the United States for a full account of Washington's campaign in New Jersey.
↩Milton. (See note 151.)
↩Pericles. A famous Greek statesman of the fifth century before Christ, in whose age Athens was preëminent in naval and military affairs and in letters and art.
↩Xenophon. A Greek historian of the fourth century before Christ.
↩Columbus. Give an account of his life.
↩Bayard. Chevalier de Bayard was a French gentleman of the fifteenth century. He is the French national hero, and is called "The Knight without fear and without reproach."
↩Sidney. Probably Sir Philip Sidney, an English gentleman and scholar of the sixteenth century who is the English national hero as Bayard is the French; another brave Englishman was Algernon Sidney, a politician and patriot of the seventeenth century.
↩Hampden. John Hampden was an English statesman and patriot who was killed in the civil war of the seventeenth century.
↩Colossus. The Colossus of Rhodes was a gigantic statue--over a hundred feet in height--of the Rhodian sun god. It was one of the seven wonders of the world; it was destroyed by an earthquake about two hundred years before Christ.
↩Sappho. A Greek poet of the seventh century before Christ. Her fame remains, though most of her poems have been lost.
↩Sevigné. Marquise de Sevigné was a French author of the seventeenth century.
↩De Staël. Madame de Staël was a French writer whose books and political opinions were condemned by Napoleon.
↩Themis. A Greek goddess. The personification of law, order, and justice.
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