which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his mag netic needle, which points always in one direction GREATNESS. 275 to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man's. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind. And in this self- respect, or hearkening to the privatest oracle, he consults his ease, I may say, or need never be at a loss. In morals this is conscience; in intellect, genius; in practice, talent; — not to imitate or sur pass a particular man in Ms way, but to bring out your own new way; to each his own method, style, wit, eloquence. 'T is easy for a commander to com mand. Clinging to Nature, or to that province of nature which he knows, he makes no mistakes, but works after her laws and at her own pace, so that his doing, which is perfectly natural, appears mi raculous to dull people. Montluc, the great Mar shal of France, says of the Genoese admiral, Andrew Doria, " It seemed as if the sea stood in awe of this man." And a kindred genius, Nelson, said, " I feel that I am fitter to do the action than to de scribe it." Therefore I will say that another trait of greatness is facility.
This necessity of resting on the real, of speaking your private thought and experience, few young men apprehend. Set ten men to write their journal for one day, and nine of them will leave out their thought, or proper result, — that is, their net experi- 276 GEEATNESS.
ence, — and lose themselves in misreporting the sup posed experience of other people. Indeed, I think it an essential caution to young writers, that they shall not in their discourse leave out the one thing which the discourse was written to say. Let that belief which you hold alone, have free course. I have observed that, in all public speaking, the rule of the orator begins, not in the array of his facts, but when his- deep conviction, and the right and necessity he feels to convey that conviction to his audience, — when these shine and burn in his ad dress; when the thought which he stands for gives its own authority to him, — adds to him a grander personality, gives him valor, breadth, and new in tellectual power, so that not he, but mankind, seems to speak through his lips. There is a certain trans figuration; all great orators have it, and men who wish to be orators simulate it.
If we should ask ourselves what is this self-re spect, — it would carry us to the highest problems. It is our practical perception of the Deity in man. It lias its deep foundations in religion. If you have ever known a good mind among the Quakers, you will have found that is the element of their faith. As they express it, it might be thus: " I do not pre tend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan-, propose a journey, or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obsta cle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very GREATNESS. 277 well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away, I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm."
You are rightly fond of certain books or men that you have found to excite your reverence and emulation. But none of these can compare with the greatness of that counsel which is open to you in happy solitude. I mean that there is for you the following of an inward leader, — a slow dis crimination that there is for each a Best Counsel which enjoins the fit word and the fit act for every moment. And the path of each pursued leads to greatness. How grateful to find in man or woman a new emphasis of their own.
But if the first rule is to obey your native bias, to accept that work for which you were inwardly formed, the second rule is concentration, which doubles its force. Thus if you are a scholar, be that. The same laws hold for you as for the laborer. The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else. Let the student mind his own charge; sedulously wait every morning for the news concerning the structure of the world which the spirit will give him.
278 GREATNESS.
278 GREATNESS.
No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was created as an audience for him; the atoms of which it is made are opportunities. Head the performance of Bentley, of Gibbon, of Cuvier, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Laplace. " He can toil terri bly," said Cecil of Sir Walter lialeigh. These few words sting and bite and lash us when we are friv olous. Let us get out of the way of their blows, by making them true of ourselves. There is so much to be done that we ought to begin quickly to bestir ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the annual ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of China. Let us make it an honest sweat. Let the scholar measure his valor by his power to cope with intel lectual giants. Leave others to count votes and cal culate stocks. His courage is to weigh Plato, judge Laplace, know Newton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, criticise Kant and Swedenborg, and on all these arouse the central courage of insight. The schol ar's coumge should be as terrible as the Cid's, though it grow out of spiritual nature, not out of brawn. Nature, when she adds difficulty, adds brain.
With this respect to the bias of the individ ual mind, add, what is consistent with it, the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others. The day will come when no badge, uniform, or GKEATNESS. 279 medal will be worn; when the eye, which carries in it planetary influences from all the stars, will indicate rank fast enough by exerting power. For it is true that the stratification of crusts in geol ogy is not more precise than the degrees of rank in minds. A man will say: ' I am born to this position; I must take it, and neither you nor I can help or hinder m,e. Surely, then, I need not fret myself to guard my own dignity.' The great man loves the conversation or the book that con victs him, not that which soothes or flatters him. He makes himself of no reputation; he conceals his learning, conceals his charity. For the highest wisdom does not concern itself with particular men, but with man enamored with the law and the Eternal Source. Say with Antoninus, " If the picture is good, who cares who made it? What matters it by whom the good is done, by yourself or another? " If it is the truth, what matters who said it? If it was right, what signifies who did it? All greatness is in degree, and there is more above than below. Where were your own intel lect, if greater had not lived? And do you know what the right meaning of Fame is? 'T is that sympathy, rather that fine element by which the good become partners of the greatness of their superiors.
Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility. No aristocrat, 230 GREATNESS.
no prince born to the purple, can begin to compare with the self-respect of the saint. Why is he so lowly, but that he knows that he can well afford it, resting on the largeness of God in him? I have read in an old book that Barceua, the Jesuit, con fessed to another of his order that when the Devil appeared to him in his cell, one night, out of his profound humility he rose up to meet him, and prayed him to sit down in his chair, for he was more worthy to sit there than himself.
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. The populace will say, with Home Tooke, " If you would be pow erful, pretend to be powerful." I prefer to say, with the old Hebrew prophet, " Seekest thou great things? — seek them not "; or, what was said of 'the Spanish prince, "The more you took from him, the greater he appeared," Plus on lui ote, plus il cst grand.
Scintillations of greatness appear here and there in men of unequal character, and are by no means confined to the cultivated and so-called moral class. 'T is easy to draw traits from Xapo- leon, who was not generous nor just, but was intel lectual, and knew the law of things. Napoleon commands our respect by his enormous self-trust, — the habit of seeing with his own eyes, never the surface, but to the heart of the matter, whether it GREATNESS. 281 was a road, a cannon, a character, an officer, or a king, — and by the speed and security of his action in the premises, always new. He has left a library of manuscripts, a multitude of sayings, every one of widest application. He was a man who always fell on his feet. When one of his favorite schemes missed, he had the faculty of taking up his genius, as he said, and of carrying it somewhere else. "Whatever they may tell you, believe that one fights with cannon as with fists; when once the fire is begun, the least want of ammunition renders •what you have done already useless." I find it easy to translate all his technics into all of mine, and his official advices are to me more literary and philosophical than the memoirs of the Academy. His advice to his brother, King Joseph of Spain, was: " I have only one counsel for 'you, — Be Master." Depth of intellect relieves even the ink of crime with a fringe of light. We perhaps look on its crimes as experiments of a universal student; as he may read any book who reads all books, and as the English judge in old times, when learning was rare, forgave a culprit who could read and write. Tis difficult to find greatness pure. Well, I please myself with its diffusion, — to find a spark of true fire amid much corruption. It is some guaranty, I hope, for the health of the soul which has this generous blood. How many men, detested in contemporary hostile history, of whom, 282 GREATNESS.
now that the mists have rolled away, we have learned to correct our old estimates, and to see them as, on the whole, instruments of great benefit. Diderot was no model, but unclean as the society in which he lived; yet was he the best-natured man in France, and would help any wretch at a pinch. His humanity knew no bounds. A poor scribbler who had written a lampoon against him, and wished to dedicate it to a pious Due d'Orleans, came with it in his poverty to Diderot, and Diderot, pitying the creature, wrote the dedication for him, and so raised five-and-twenty louis to save his famishing lampooner alive.
Meantime we hate snivelling. I do not wish you to surpass others in any narrow or professional or monkish way. We like the natural greatness of health and wild power. I confess that I am as much taken by it in boys, and sometimes in people not normal, nor educated, nor presentable, nor church-members, — even in persons open to the suspicion of irregular and immoral living, — in Bohemians, — as in more orderly examples. For we must remember that in the lives of soldiers, sailors, and men of large adventure, many of the stays and guards of our household life are wanting, and yet the opportunities and incentives to sublime daring and performance are often close at hand. We must have some charity for the sense of the people which admires natural power, and will elect GREATNESS. 283 GREATNESS. 283 it over virtuous men who have less. It has this excuse, that natural is really allied to moral power, and may always be expected to approach it by its own instincts. Intellect at least is not stupid, and will see the force of morals over men, if it does not itself obey. Henry VII. of England was a wise king. When Gerald, Earl of Kildare, who was in rebellion against him, was brought to London, and examined before the Privy Council, one said, "All Ireland cannot govern this Earl." " Then let this Earl govern all Ireland," replied the King.
'T is noted of some scholars, like Swift, and Gib bon and Donne, that they pretended to vices which they had not, so much did they hate hypocrisy. William Blake, the artist, frankly says, "I never knew a bad man in whom there was not something very good." Bret Harte has pleased himself with noting and recording the sudden virtue blazing in the wild reprobates of the ranches and mines of California.
Men are ennobled by morals and by intellect; but those two elements know each other and always beckon to each other, until at last they meet in the man, if he is to be truly great. The man who sells you a lamp shows you that the flame of oil, which contented you before, casts a strong shade in the path of the petroleum which he lights behind it; and this again casts a shadow in the path of the electric light. So does intellect when brought into 284 GREATNESS.
the presence of character; character puts out that light. Goethe, in his correspondence with his Grand Duke of Weimar, does not shine. We can see that the Prince had the advantage of the Olym pian genius. It is more plainly seen in the corre spondence between Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia. Voltaire is brilliant, nimble, and various, but Fred erick has the superior tone. But it is curious that Byron writes down to Scott; Scott writes up to him. The Greeks surpass all men till they face the Ro mans, when Iioman character prevails over Greek genius. Whilst degrees of intellect interest only classes of men who pursue the same studies, as chemists or astronomers, mathematicians or lin guists, and have no attraction for the crowd, there are always men who have a more catholic genius, are really great as men, and inspire universal en thusiasm. A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him. We have had such ex amples in this country, in Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and the seamen's preacher, Father Taylor; in England, Charles James Fox; in Scotland, Kobert Burns; and in France, though it is less intelligible to us, Voltaire. Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most remarkable example of this class that we have seen, — a man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and with a spirit and a practical vein in the times of terror that commanded the admira- GEEATNESS. 285 tion of the wisest. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the mem ory of a wrong.
These may serve as local examples to indicate a magnetism which is probably known better and finer to each scholar in the little Olympus of his own favorites, and which makes him require genial ity and humanity in his heroes. What are these but the promise and the preparation of a day when the air of the world shall be purified by nobler soci ety; when the measure of greatness shall be use fulness in the highest sense, — greatness consisting in truth, reverence, and good-will?
Life is made of illusions, and a very common one is the opinion you hear expressed in every village: '0 yes, if I lived in New York or Philadelphia, Cambridge or New Haven or Boston or Andover there might be fit society; but it happens that there are no fine young men, no superior women in my town.' You may hear this every day; but it is a shallow remark. Ah! have you yet to learn that the eye altering alters all; "that the world is an echo which returns to each of us what we say "? 'T is not examples of greatness, but sen sibility to see them, that is wanting. The good botanist will find flowers between the street pave ments, and any man filled with an idea or a pur pose will find examples and illustrations and coad jutors wherever he goes. "Wit is a magnet to find 286 GREATNESS.
286 GREATNESS.
wit, and character to find character. Do you not know that people are as those with whom they converse? And it' all or any are heavy to me, that fact accuses me. "Why complain, as if a man's debt to his inferiors were not at least equal to his debt to his superiors? If men were equals, the waters would not move; but the difference of level which makes Niagara a cataract, makes eloquence, indignation, poetry, in him who finds there is much to communicate. With self-respect, then, there must be in the aspirant the strong fellow-feeling, the humanity, which makes men of all classes warm to him as their leader and representative.
We are thus forced to express our instinct of the truth, by exposing the failures of experience. The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded the adorer of the laws, — who by governing himself governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be himself in society; who car ries fate in his eye; — he it is whom we seek, en couraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall be found.
IMMORTALITY.
IMMORTALITY.
IN the year 626 of our era, when Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king, was deliberating on receiving the Christian missionaries, one of his nobles said to him: " The present life of man, 0 king, com pared with that space of time beyond, of which we have no certainty, reminds me of one of your winter feasts, where you sit with your generals and ministers. The hearth blazes in the middle and a grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain and snow are raging without. Driven by the chill ing tempest, a little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around us till it departs through the other. "Whilst it stays -in our mansion it feels not the winter storm; but when this short moment of happiness has been enjoyed, it is forced again into the same dreary tempest from which it had escaped, and we behold it no more. Such is the life of man, and we are as ignorant of the state which preceded our present existence as of that which will follow it. Things being so I feel that if this new faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be re ceived."
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In the first records of a nation in any degree thoughtful and cultivated, some belief in the life beyond life would of course be suggested. The Egyptian people furnish us the earliest details of an established civilization, and I read, in the second book of Herodotus, this memorable sentence: " The Egyptians are the first of mankind who have af firmed the immortality of the soul." Nor do I read it with less interest, that the historian connects it presently with the doctrine of metempsychosis; for I know well that, where this belief once existed, it would necessarily take a base form for the savage and a pure form for the wise; — so that I only look on the counterfeit as a proof that the genuine faith had been there. The credence of men, more than race or climate, makes their manners and customs; and the history of religion may be read in the forms of sepulture. There never was a time when the doctrine of a future life was not held. Morals must be enjoined, but among rude men moral judg ments were rudely figured under the forms of dogs and whips, or of an easier and more plentiful life after death. And as the savage could not detach in his mind the life of the soul from the body, he took great care for his body. Thus the whole life of man in the first ages was ponderously determined on death; and, as we know, the polity of the Egyptians, the by-laws of towns, of streets and houses, respected burial. It made every man an IMMORTALITY. 291 undertaker, and the priesthood a senate of sextons. Every palace was a door to a pyramid; a king or rich man was a pyramidaire. The labor of races was spent on the excavation of catacombs. The chief end of man being to be buried well, the arts most in request were masonry and embalming, to give imperishability to the corpse.
The Greek, with his perfect senses and percep tions, had quite another philosophy, He loved life and delighted in beauty. He set his wit and taste, like elastic gas, under these mountains of stone, and lifted them. He drove away the embalmers; he built no more of those doleful mountainous tombs. He adorned death, brought wreaths of parsley and laurel; made it bright with games of strength and skill, and chariot-races. He looked at death only as the distributor of imperishable glory. Nothing can excel the beauty of his sarcophagus. He carried his arts to Borne, and built his beautiful tombs at Pompeii. The poet Shelley says of these delicately carved white marble cells, "they seem not so much tombs, as voluptuous chambers for im mortal spirits." In the same spirit the modern Greeks, in their songs, ask that they may be buried where the sun can see them, and that a little win dow may be cut in the sepulchre, from which the swallow might be seen when it comes back in the spring.
Christianity brought a new wisdom. But learn- 292 IMMORTALITY.
ing depends on the learner. Xo more truth can be conveyed than the popular mind can bear; and the barbarians who received the cross took the doctrine of the resurrection as the Egyptians took it. It was an affair of the body, and narrowed again by the fury of sect; so that grounds were sprinkled with holy water to receive only orthodox dust; and to keep the body still more sacredly safe for resur rection, it was put into the walls of the church: and the churches of Europe are really sepulchres. I read at Melrose Abbey the inscription on the ruined gate: — " The Earth goes on the Earth glittering with gold; The Eartli goes to the Earth sooner than it should; The Earth builds on the Earth castles and towers; The Earth says to the Earth, All this is ours."
Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of eternity which dissolved the poor corpse and nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour. The most remarkable step in the re ligious history of recent ages is that made by the genius of Swedenborg, who described the moral fac ulties and affections of man, with the hard realism of an astronomer describing the suns and planets of our system, and explained his opinion of the his tory and destiny of souls in a narrative form, as of one who had gone in a trance into the society of other worlds. Swedenborg described an intelligible heaven, by continuing the like employments in the IMMORTALITY. 293 like circumstances as those we know, — men in so cieties, in houses, towns, trades, entertainments, — continuations of our earthly experience. We shall pass to the future existence as we enter into an agreeable dream. All nature will accompany us there. Milton anticipated the leading thought of Swedenborg, when he wrote, in " Paradise Lost," — "What if Earth "What if Earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to the other like more than on earth is thought? " Swedenborg had a vast genius, and announced many things true and admirable, though always clothed in somewhat sad and Stygian colors. These truths, passing out of his system into general circu lation, are now met with every day, qualifying the views and creeds of all churches, and of men of no church. And I think we are all aware of a revo lution in opinion. Sixty years ago, the books read, the sermons and prayers heard, the habits of thought of religious persons, were all directed on death. All were under the shadow of Calvinism and of the Ro man Catholic purgatory, and death was dreadful. The emphasis of all the good books given to young people was on death. We were all taught that we were born to die; and over that, all the terrors that theology could gather from savage nations were added to increase the gloom. A great change has occurred. Death is seen as a natural event, and is met with 294 IMMORTALITY.
294 IMMORTALITY.
firmness. A wise man in our time caused to be writ ten on his tomb, " Think on living." That inscrip tion describes a progress in opinion. Cease from this antedating of your experience. Sufficient to to-day are the duties of to-day. Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.
" The name of death was never terrible To him that knew to live."