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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Tablets, by Amos Bronson Alcott
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Tablets
+
+
+Author: Amos Bronson Alcott
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 23, 2011  [eBook #36825]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TABLETS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Edwards, Carol Ann Brown, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images
+generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
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+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
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+      http://www.archive.org/details/tabletsamos00alcorich
+
+
+
+
+
+TABLETS
+
+by
+
+A. BRONSON ALCOTT
+
+"For curious method expect none, essays for the most part
+not being placed as at a feast, but placing themselves as at
+an ordinary."
+_Thomas Fuller._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Boston
+Roberts Brothers
+1868.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
+A. Bronson Alcott,
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+Electrotyped and Printed by
+Alfred Mudge & Son,
+No. 34 School St., Boston.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+  BOOK I.--PRACTICAL.
+
+  I. THE GARDEN.                                PAGE.
+
+    1 Antiquity                                    5
+
+    2 Ornaments                                   11
+
+    3 Pleasures                                   14
+
+    4 Orchard                                     20
+
+    5 Sweet Herbs                                 25
+
+    6 Table Plants                                28
+
+    7 Rations                                     36
+
+    8 Economies                                   41
+
+    9 Rural Culture                               48
+
+
+  II. RECREATION.
+
+    1 The Fountains                               59
+
+    2 The Cheap Physician                         65
+
+
+  III. FELLOWSHIP.
+
+    1 Hospitality                                 69
+
+    2 Conversation                                75
+
+
+  IV. FRIENDSHIP.
+
+    1 Persons                                     81
+
+    2 Woman                                       88
+
+    3 Family                                      92
+
+    4 Children                                    95
+
+
+  V.  CULTURE.
+
+    1 Modern Teaching                            103
+
+    2 Socratic Dialectic                         108
+
+    3 Pythagorean Discipline                     113
+
+    4 Mother Tongue                              118
+
+
+  VI. BOOKS.                                     127
+
+
+  VII. COUNSELS.
+
+    1 Religious                                  139
+
+    2 Personal                                   145
+
+    3 Political                                  148
+
+    4 Soul's Errand                              151
+
+
+  BOOK II.--SPECULATIVE.
+
+  I. INSTRUMENTALITIES.
+
+    1 Tendencies                                 159
+
+    2 Method                                     162
+
+    3 Man                                        166
+
+
+  II. MIND.
+
+    1 Ideas                                      173
+
+    2 The Gifts                                  179
+
+    3 Person                                     181
+
+    4 Choice                                     184
+
+
+  III. GENESIS.
+
+    1 Vestiges                                   189
+
+    2 Serpent Symbol                             191
+
+    3 Embryons                                   193
+
+    4 Temperament                                195
+
+
+  IV. METAMORPHOSES.
+
+    1  Sleep                                     201
+
+    2  Reminiscence                              203
+
+    3  Immortality                               205
+
+
+
+
+TABLETS
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+  PRACTICAL
+
+    "Philosophy, the formatrix of judgment and manners, has the
+     privilege of having a hand in everything."--MONTAIGNE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE GARDEN.
+
+    "If Eden be on earth at all,
+    'Tis that which we the country call."
+                             HENRY VAUGHAN.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of bird among grapes and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDEN
+
+
+I.--ANTIQUITY.
+
+"I never had any desire so strong and so like to covetousness," says
+Cowley, "as that one which I have had always that I might be master at
+last of a small house and ample garden, with very moderate conveniences
+joined to them, and there to dedicate the remainder of my life to the
+culture of them and the study of nature. Virgil's first wish was to be a
+wise man, the second to be a good husbandman. But since nature denies to
+most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to very few
+the opportunities or possibility of applying themselves wholly to
+wisdom, the best mixture of human affairs we can make, are the
+employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, the nearest
+neighbor or next in kindred to philosophy. And Varro says the principles
+of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature;
+earth, water, air, and the sun. There is no other sort of life that
+affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist; the utility of it to
+a man's self, the usefulness or rather necessity of it to all the rest
+of mankind, the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity."
+
+This wish of the poet's appears to be nearly universal. Almost every one
+is drawn to the country, and takes pleasure in rural pursuits. The
+citizen hopes to become a countryman, and contrives to secure his
+cottage or villa, unless he fail by some reverse of fortune or of
+character. 'Tis man's natural position, the Paradise designed for him,
+and wherein he is placed originally in the Sacred Books of the
+cultivated peoples; their first man being conceived a gardener and
+countryman by inspiration as by choice.
+
+Gardens and orchards plant themselves by sympathy about our dwellings,
+as if their seeds were preserved in us by inheritance. They distinguish
+Man properly from the forester and hunter. The country, as discriminated
+from the woods, is of man's creation. The savage has no country. Nor are
+farms and shops, trade, cities, but civilization in passing and
+formation. Civilization begins with persons, ideas; the garden and
+orchard showing the place of their occupants in the scale; these dotting
+the earth with symbols of civility wherever they ornament its face. Thus
+by mingling his mind with nature, and so transforming the landscape into
+his essence, Man generates the homestead, and opens a country to
+civilization and the arts.
+
+In like manner, are the woods meliorated and made ours. Melancholy and
+morose, standing in their loneliness, we trim them into keeping with our
+wishes and so adopt them into our good graces, as ornaments of our
+estates, heraldries of our gentility.
+
+Our human history neither opens in forests nor in cities, but in gardens
+and orchards whose mythologies are woven into the faith of our race; the
+poets having made these their chosen themes from the beginning. And we
+turn, as with emotions of country and consanguinity to the classic
+pictures of the Paradise, "planted by the Lord God eastward in Eden, and
+wherein he put the man, whom he had formed to dress and keep it;" where,
+
+  "Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow
+  All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;
+  Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balms,
+  Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, Hung amiable,--
+  Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose;"--
+
+to this; or, of scarce inferior fame, to the gardens
+of the Hesperides with their golden apples;--or,
+to those other
+
+            "----gardens feigned
+  Or of revived Adonis, or renowned Alcinous,"
+
+whereof Homer sings:
+
+  "Without the hall and close upon the gate
+  A goodly orchard ground was situate
+  Of near ten acres, about which was led
+  A lofty quickset. In it flourished
+  High and broad fruit trees that pomegranates bore;
+  Sweet figs, pears, olives, and a number more
+  Most useful plants did there produce their store,
+  Whose fruits the hardest winter could not kill,
+  Nor hottest summers wither. There was still
+  Fruit in his proper season; all the year
+  Sweet zephyr breathed upon them blasts that were
+  Of varied tempers: these, he made to bear
+  Ripe fruits; these blossoms; pear grew after pear,
+  Apple succeeded apple, grape the grape,
+  Fig after fig; Time made never rape
+  Of any dainty there. A sprightly vine
+  Spread here her roots, whose fruit a hot sunshine
+  Made ripe betimes; there grew another green,
+  Here some were gathering; here some pressing seen;
+  A large allotted several each fruit had,
+  And all th' adorn'd grounds their appearance made
+  In flower and fruit."
+
+Or again to those preferred by the royal guest of Solomon above all
+other splendors of his court,
+
+  "Though she on silver floors did tread,
+  With bright Assyrian carpets on them spread,
+      To hide the metal's poverty;
+  Though she looked up to roofs of gold,
+  And naught around her could behold
+    But silk and rich embroidery,
+    And Babylonian tapestry,
+    And wealthy Hiram's princely dye;
+  Tho' Ophir's starry stones met everywhere her eye,
+    Though she herself and her gay host were drest
+    With all the shining glories of the East,--
+    When lavish art her costly work had done,
+    The honor and the prize of bravery
+    Was by the garden from the palace won;
+    And every rose and lily there did stand
+    Better attired by nature's hand;
+  The case thus judged against the king you see,
+  By one that would not be so rich, though wiser far than he."
+
+So the orchard of Academus suggests the ripest wisdom and most elegant
+learning of accomplished Greece.
+
+Thus we associate gardens and orchards with the perfect condition of
+mankind. Gardeners ourselves by birthright, we also mythologize and
+plant our Edens in the East of us, like our ancestors; the sacredness of
+earth and heaven still clinging to the tiller of the ground. Him we
+esteem the pattern man, the most favored of any. His labors have a
+charming innocency. They yield the gains of a self-respect denied to
+other callings. His is an occupation friendly to every virtue; the
+freest of any from covetousness and debasing cares. It is full of honest
+profits, manly labors, and brings and administers all necessaries; gives
+the largest leisure for study and recreation, while it answers most
+tenderly the hospitalities of friendship and the claims of home. The
+delight of children, the pastime of woman, the privilege of the poor
+man, as it is the ornament of the gentleman, the praise of the scholar,
+the security of the citizen, it places man in his truest relations to
+the world in which he lives. And he who is insensible to these
+pleasures, must lack some chord in the harp of humanity, worshipping, if
+he worship, at some strange shrine.
+
+  Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps;
+  Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.
+
+
+II.--ORNAMENTS.
+
+In laying out a garden there must be protection from the north winds,
+and if the hills are wooded thus much is gained for profit as for
+ornament. Every homestead supposes a wood-lot and forest paths for
+walking and meditation. So the garden claims some shading down from
+pasture fields and the wilder scenery skirting it. The orchard is an
+improvement on the garden, and holds a nobler relation to the house and
+its occupants. Without suitable ornaments and enclosures, these must be
+set to the side of the farm solely, not to the house, humanity, nor art.
+Eyes and feet have their claims along with the hands upon the landscape,
+beauty and convenience having one mind concerning the best ways of
+dealing with it. It is clear that art has an interest, and should have
+its hand, in a good well, wholesome cellar, as in the fertility of the
+soil, the modesty of the grasses and shrubbery. Alleys are best
+determined by the nature of the grounds. They have a picturesque effect;
+so have gates, especially when they open into a wood, or are seen in
+perspective at the end of an avenue or a lane. Winding paths give
+pleasing surprises, if accommodated to the grounds, take us by the most
+attractive route; slopes, swells, irregularities of surface, heightening
+the pleasure attending the prospect. There are spots, too, that plead
+for their clump of trees, for a single one, for an alcove, an arbor, a
+conservatory, for a fence,--structure of some sort, be it ever so
+plain--and these once there, please the eye as if grown there.
+
+Arbors are especially ornamental. No country residence is furnished
+without the embellishment of a summer-house. It may be constructed of
+the simplest stuff grown near at hand in the woods. For one shall not
+range far in that direction without falling soon upon every curve in the
+geometry of beauty, as if nature designing to surprise him anticipated
+his coming, and had grown his materials in the underwood along the lines
+especially of ancient fence rows, where young pines bent by the lopping
+of the axe, snow falls, or other accident, in seeking to recover their
+rectitude, describe every graceful form of curve or spiral suited to his
+rustic works. These may be combined in ways wonderfully varied; and the
+pleasure attending the working them into a shapely whole, has charms
+akin to the composing of poems and pictures. There is a delight, too, in
+surprising these stags of the woods in their coverts, of which only
+artists can speak.
+
+  Neath hemlocks dark and whispering pines,
+  Wandering he loiters curiously,
+  The forest Muse her searching sense combines
+  To range the shades their cunning curves to see--
+  Brackets grotesque, strange gnarled things,
+  Wreathed rails and balusters in twisted pairs,
+  Rhyming their rival coils for sportful stairs;
+  Scrolls, antlers, volutes--full-armed he brings
+  His fagot sheaf of spoils, and binds;
+  While frolic fancy sylvan serpents finds,
+  And Druid lyres for poet's pleasance strings.
+
+Then for rainy days, one has the choice of books, pen, or handicraft, to
+vary his pleasures. There is a charm in using tools to him who has
+cunning in his hands for converting woods to ornamental uses,--the
+simplest, roughest sticks even,--in setting trellises, hurdles,
+espaliers for vines,
+
+      "----auxiliary poles for hops,
+  Ascending spiral, ranged in meet array;"
+
+in making or mending articles and implements of any kind, for house or
+grounds, to be objects of interest whenever he views them afterwards.
+
+The eyes have a property in things and territories not named in any
+title deeds, and are the owners of our choicest possessions. Nor do we
+dwell in this emblematic world, and call it ours, any part of it,
+without using them: that is ours which they have assisted the hands in
+creating. Nature sketches rudely the outlines of her plans on the
+landscape; 'tis the artist's privilege to fill out and finish these
+draughts, improving upon her suggestions. Nor is there a spot which does
+not kindly take ornament, as if its canvas were spread awaiting the
+finishing touches. And had he a thousand hands, uninterrupted leisure,
+the taste and genius, what pleasure were comparable to that of devoting
+them to drawing lines thereon which shall survive him, to enrich every
+eye beholding them, though it were only in passing! So a good man
+impresses his image on the landscape he improves, and imparts qualities
+that perpetuate its occupant to after times.
+
+
+III.--PLEASURES.
+
+  "Days may conclude with nights, and suns may rest
+    As dead within the west,
+  Yet the next morn regilds the fragrant east."
+
+I know not how it is with others, to me the spring's invitations are
+irresistible. I may be scholarly inclined, and my tasks indoors
+delightful, yet my garden claims me, monopolizing all my morning hours;
+and I know for me has come the season's summons which I shall not set
+aside: no, not for studies nor hospitalities which become rivals for my
+time and attentions. My garden waits; is the civiller host, the better
+entertainer. Then I have a religion in this business, and duties must
+waive compliments. My tasks are not postponable during the summer days;
+if called away from these engagements, I shall first take counsel of my
+plants for leave of absence, with intent of hastening back.
+Importunities were impertinent while the spell is on me. Would the sun
+but shine all night long for my work to continue! Sure of gathering the
+better crop, I bend to my task, foreseeing the avails of leisure coming
+in at the close of my autumn rounds.
+
+    "Me, let my poverty to ease resign
+  When my bright hearth reflects its blazing cheer,
+    In season let me plant the pliant vine,
+  And, with light hand, my swelling apples rear."
+
+Such toils are wholesome. One cannot afford to dispense with their
+income of vigor. Then they fill the days with varied business, the mind
+gliding from head to hands, from hands to head, in pleasing interludes,
+to pour for him so deep a draught of Lethe, and so refreshing, that the
+morning breaks only to release the sleeper to begin anew his labors with
+the old enthusiasm. Even the stiffness of his fatigues promotes
+rectitude and probity of carriage: his hearty affection for his pursuit,
+shedding lustre on all he takes in hand. His garden is ever charming,
+always opportune. He walks there at all hours, at sunrise, noon,
+nightfall, finding more than he sought in it, each successive visit
+being as new as the first.
+
+"All living things," says the Bhagavad Gita, "are generated from the
+bread they eat; bread is generated from rain, rain from divine worship,
+and divine worship from good works." A creed dealing thus
+supersensibly with the elements must have fertilizing properties, and
+bring the gardener to his task little tinctured by noxious notions of
+any kind. If he fall short of being the reverent naturalist, the devout
+divine, surrounded thus by shapes of skill, types of beauty, tokens of
+design, every hue in the chromatic, every device in the symbolic gamut,
+I see not what shall make him these; nor why Newton, Goethe, Boëhme,
+should have published their discoveries for his benefit; why it should
+occur to him to use his eyes at all when he looks through this glass,
+regards these signatures, views these blooms, these clasping tendrils,
+laughing leaves, Tyrian draperies, the sympathies of his plants and
+trees with the weather, their sleep, their thirst for the mists, and
+worship of the East; as if
+
+    Moistures their mothers were,
+    Their fathers flames,
+
+and earth were virtually "wife of heaven," as Homer says.
+
+His is no mere cloud tillage, nor unproductive earth culture. The
+firmament overhead reflects its lustre in his mind, the mists ascend
+there from the watered ground beneath, and he sows the mingled sense and
+sunshine over his fields, enriching both them and himself. He takes
+account of the double harvest of profits: both rewarding him for his
+pleasures and painstakings. His faithful counsellor and genial moralist,
+the ground, holds strict terms with him; nor weeds nor nettles have
+tales to tell, since they cannot thrive under his shadow. He minds his
+proper affairs; is industrious, punctual; home keeper, and time keeper
+no less, taking his tasks diligently as they rise. His work begins with
+the spring, and continues till winter; nor has he many spare minutes;
+the slipping away of twelve hours being the loss of a twelvemonth,
+unless he do that instantly which ought to be done at the moment.
+
+Taking timely counsel of his experience, he adapts his labors to the
+seasons as they pass; has his eye on sun and soil at once. Nor shall I
+think the less of his piety, if he be touched a little with that amiable
+superstition concerning the planetary influences; since it ill becomes
+him to hold lightly any faith that serves to brighten his affections and
+establish sweet relationships between himself and natural things. In
+sympathy with earth and heaven, these conspire for his benefit: all
+helping to fructify and ripen his crops. It is unlawful to regard them
+as enemies of human tillage. Gracefully the seasons come round for
+weaving into his fancy, if not his faith, the old world's ritual as a
+religion of engagements. He is an ephemeris and weather-glass. He has
+his signs too, and aspects, his seasons, periods and stints. The months
+sway him. What if he sympathize with the year as it rolls; take
+equinoxially his March and September? Will his intermediate times be the
+less genial in consequence, or his April fail of distilling mystic moods
+with her fertilizing rains? His winter may come hoar with ideas, and
+brown October shall be his golden age of orchards and their ambrosia.
+And as June best displays the garden's freshness, so October celebrates
+the orchard's opulence, to crown the gardener for his labors. The golden
+days running fast and full have not run to waste. Orchards and gardens
+bloom again. He harvests the richer crop these have ripened; bright
+effluences of the stars, for the feast of thought and the flow of
+discourse. Having thus "gathered the first roses of spring and the last
+apples of autumn," he is ready to dispute felicity with the happiest man
+living, and to chant his pæan of praise for his prosperity:--
+
+  The earth is mine and mine the sheaves,
+  I'll harvest all her bounty leaves,
+  Nor stinted store she deals to me,
+  Gives all she has, and gives it free,
+  Since from myself I cannot stir
+  But I become her pensioner:
+  Sun, cloud, flame, atom, ether, sea,
+  Beauteous she buildeth into me,
+  Seasons my frame with flowing sense,
+  Insinuates intelligence;
+  Feeds me and fills with sweet contents,
+  Deals duteously her elements:
+  Dawn, day, the noon, the sunset clear,
+  Delight my eye; winds, woods, my ear,
+  While apple, melon, strawberry, peach,
+  She plants and puts within my reach;
+  Regales with all the garden grows,
+  Whate'er the orchard buds and blows;
+  Lifts o'er my head her sylvan screens,
+  And sows my slopes with evergreens,
+  While odorous roses, mint, and thyme,
+  Steep soul and sense in softer clime;
+  Preserves me when lapsed memory slips
+  Fading in sleep's apocalypse;
+  Surprising tasks and leisures sends,
+  And crowns herself to give me friends;
+  The morn's elixir pours for me,
+  And brims my brain with ecstasy.
+
+  Earth all is mine and mine the sheaves,
+  I harvest all her Planter leaves.
+
+
+IV.--THE ORCHARD.
+
+Orchards are even more personal in their charms than gardens, as they
+are more nearly human creations. Ornaments of the homestead, they
+subordinate other features of it; and such is their sway over the
+landscape that house and owner appear accidents without them. So men
+delight to build in an ancient orchard, when so fortunate as to possess
+one, that they may live in the beauty of its surroundings. Orchards are
+among the most coveted possessions; trees of ancient standing, and
+vines, being firm friends and royal neighbors forever. The profits, too,
+are as wonderful as their longevity. And if antiquity can add any worth
+to a thing, what possession has a man more noble than these? so unlike
+most others, which are best at first and grow worse till worth nothing;
+while fruit-trees and vines increase in worth and goodness for ages. An
+orchard in bloom is one of the most pleasing sights the eye beholds; as
+if the firmament had stooped to the tree-tops and touched every twig
+with spangles, and man had mingled his essence with the seasons, in its
+flushing tokens. And how rich the spectacle at the autumnal harvest:
+
+  "Behold the bending boughs, with store of fruit they tear,
+  And what they have brought forth, for weight, they scarce can bear."
+
+Apples are general favorites. Every eye covets, every hand reaches to
+them. It is a noble fruit: the friend of immortality, its virtues blush
+to be tasted. Every Muse delights in it, as its mythology shows, from
+the gardens of the Hesperides to the orchard of Plato. A basket of
+pearmains, golden russets, or any of the choice kinds, standing in
+sight, shall perfume the scholar's composition as it refreshes his
+genius. He may snatch wildness from the woods, get shrewdness from
+cities, learning from libraries and universities, compliments from
+courts. But for subtlety of thought, for sovereign sense, for color, the
+graces of diction and behavior, he best betakes himself
+
+  "Where on all sides the apples scattered lie,
+  Each under its own tree."
+
+Or to his bins, best, Columella says, when beechen chests, such as
+senators' and judges' robes were laid in in his day; these to be "placed
+in a dry place, free from frosts, where neither smoke, nor any thing
+noisome may come; the fruit spread on sawdust, and so arranged that the
+fleurets, or blossom ends, may look downwards, and the pedicles, or
+stalks, upwards, after the same manner as it grew upon the tree; and so
+as not to touch one another. And better if gathered a little green; the
+lids of the chests covering them close."
+
+The ancient rustic authors give very little information concerning the
+apples and pears of their time, thinking them too well known to be
+described, as an author writing of our time might of ours. Most of them
+had their names from men who brought them into Italy and there
+cultivated them, and, "by so small a matter," says Pliny, "have rendered
+their names immortal."
+
+Phillips thus describes the favorites of his time, most of which we find
+in our own orchards, and still in good repute:--
+
+  "Now turn thine eye to view Alcinous' groves,
+  The pride of the Phoeacian isle, from whence,
+  Sailing the spaces of the boundless deep,
+  To Ariconian precious fruits arrived:--
+  The pippin burnished o'er with gold, the moyle
+  Of sweetest honied taste, the fair pearmain,
+  Tempered, like comeliest nymph, with red and white;
+  Nor does the Eliot least deserve thy care,
+  Nor John's apple, whose withered rind, intrenched
+  With many a furrow, aptly represents
+  Decrepit age; nor that from Harvey named,
+  Quick relishing. Why should we sing the thrift,
+  Codling, or Pomroy, or of pimpled coat
+  The russet; the red-streak, that once
+  Was of the sylvan kind, uncivilized,
+  Of no regard, till Scudamore's skilful hand
+  Improved her, and by courtly discipline
+  Taught her the savage nature to forget:
+  Let every tree in every garden own
+  The red-streak as supreme, whose pulpous fruit
+  With gold irradiate, and vermilion spires,
+  Tempting, not fatal, as the birth of that
+  Primeval interdicted plant, that won
+  Fond Eve, in hapless hour, to taste and die."
+
+A quaint old Englishman, writing about orchards, quotes the proverb: "It
+will beggar a doctor to live where orchards thrive." So Cowley writes:--
+
+  "Nor does this happy place only dispense
+  Its various pleasures to the sense,
+  Here health itself doth live,
+  That salt of life which doth to all a relish give;
+  Its standing pleasure and intrinsic wealth,
+  The body's virtue, and the soul's good fortune, health.
+  The tree of life when it in Eden stood,
+  Did its immortal head to heaven rear;
+  It lasted a tall cedar till the flood,
+  Now a small thorny shrub it doth appear,
+  Nor will it thrive too everywhere;
+  It always here is freshest seen,
+  'Tis only here an evergreen:
+  If, through the strong and beauteous fence
+  Of temperance and innocence,
+  And wholesome labors and a quiet mind,
+  Diseases passage find,
+  They must fight for it, and dispute it hard
+  Before they can prevail;
+  Scarce any plant is growing here,
+  Which against death some weapon does not bear:
+  Let cities boast that they provide
+  For life the ornaments of pride;
+  But 'tis the country and the field
+  That furnish it with staff and shield."
+
+Nor can we spare his praises of budding and grafting from our account:--
+
+  "We nowhere art do so triumphant see,
+  As when it grafts or buds a tree;
+  In other things we count it to excel
+  If it a docile scholar can appear
+  To nature, and but imitates her well:
+  It overrules and is her master here:
+  It imitates her Maker's power divine,
+  And changes her sometimes, and sometimes does refine;
+  It does like grace, the fallen tree restore
+  To its blest state of Paradise before;
+  Who would not joy to see his conquering hand
+  O'er all the vegetable world command,
+  And the wild giants of the wood, receive
+  What laws he's pleased to give?
+  He bids the ill-natured crab produce
+  The gentle apple's winy juice,
+  The golden fruit that worthy is
+  Of Galatea's purple kiss;
+  He does the savage hawthorn teach
+  To bear the medlar and the pear;
+  He bids the rustic plum to rear
+  A noble trunk and be a peach;
+  Even Daphne's coyness he does mock,
+  And weds the cherry to her stock,
+  Though she refused Apollo's suit,
+  Even she, that chaste and virgin tree,
+  Now wonders at herself to see
+  That she's a mother made, and blushes in her fruit."
+
+
+V.--SWEET HERBS.
+
+  "Thick growing thyme, and roses wet with dew,
+  Are sacred to the sisterhood divine."
+
+As orchards to man, so are flowers and herbs to women. Indeed the garden
+appears celibate, as does the house, without womanly hands to plant and
+care for it. Here she is in place,--suggests lovely images of her
+personal accomplishments, as if civility were first conceived in such
+cares, and retired unwillingly, even to houses and chambers; something
+being taken from their elegancy and her nobleness by an undue absorption
+of her thoughts in household affairs. But there is a fitness in her
+association with flowers and sweet herbs, as with social hospitalities,
+showing her affinities with the magical and medical, as if she were the
+plant All-Heal, and mother of comforts and spices. Once the herb garden
+was a necessary part of every homestead; every country house had one
+well stocked, and there was a matron inside skilled in their secret
+virtues, having the knowledge of how her
+
+  "Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
+  Have their acquaintance there,"
+
+her memory running back to the old country from whence they first came,
+and of which they retained the fragrance. Are not their names
+refreshing? with the superstitions concerning the sign under which they
+were to be gathered, the quaint spellings;--mint, roses, fennel,
+coriander, sweet-cicely, celandine, summer savory, smellage, rosemary,
+dill, caraway, lavender, tanzy, thyme, balm, myrrh; these and many more,
+and all good for many an ail; sage, too, sovereign sage, best of
+all--excellent for longevity--of which to-day's stock seems running
+low,--for
+
+  "Why should man die? so doth the sentence say,
+  When sage grows in his garden day by day?"
+
+This persuasion that the things near us, and under our feet, stand in
+that relationship from some natural affinity they have to our welfare,
+appears to be most firmly rooted with respect to the medical herbs,
+whether growing wild in the fields and woods, or about the old
+homesteads, though the names of most of them are now forgotten. A slight
+reference to the herbals and receipt books of the last century would
+show the good uses to which they were applied, as that the virtues of
+common sense are also disowned, and oftentimes trodden under foot.
+Certainly, they are less esteemed than formerly, being superseded, for
+the most part, by drugs less efficacious because less related
+geographically to our flesh, and not finding acquaintance therewith.
+Doubtless many superstitions were cherished about them in ancient heads,
+yet all helpful to the cure. The sweet fennel had its place in the rural
+garden, and was valued, not as a spice merely, but as a sacred seed,
+associated with worship, sprigs of it, as of caraway and dill, being
+taken to the pews, for appetizing the service. So the balm and rue had
+their sacredness. Pliny commends these natives to every housekeeper. "A
+good housewife," he says, "goes to her herb garden, instead of a spice
+shop, for seasonings, and thus preserves the health of her family, by
+saving her purse." So the poet sends her there, too, for spouse-keeping.
+
+  "When Venus would her dear Ascanius keep,
+  A prisoner in the downy bands of sleep,
+  She odorous herbs and flowers beneath him spread,
+  As the most soft and sweetest bed,
+  Not her own lap would more have charmed his head."
+
+
+VI.--TABLE PLANTS.
+
+The last two centuries have added several plants of eminent virtues to
+the products of the orchard and garden. The cucumber, the potato, sweet
+corn, the melon, are the principal acquisitions, especially the last
+named, for that line of Marvell's--
+
+  "Stumbling on melons as I pass,"
+
+must be taken rhetorically, since Evelyn informs us, this fruit had but
+just been introduced into England from Spain, in the poet's time, and
+the others but a little before. He says, "I myself remember when an
+ordinary melon would have sold for five or six shillings. 'Tis a fruit
+not only superior to all of the gourd kind, but paragon with the noblest
+of the garden." And of the cucumber, "This fruit, now so universally
+eaten, was accounted little better than poison within my memory."
+Columella shows some good ones growing in the Roman gardens:--
+
+  "The crooked cucumber, the pregnant gourd,
+  Sometimes from arbors pendant, and sometimes
+  Snake-like, through the cold shades of grass they creep,
+  And from the summer's sun a shelter seek."
+
+Whittier has sung our sweet corn, as Marvell the melon for Old England.
+But Raleigh declined that service for his new Roanoke plant, the potato,
+leaving it for the books to give this prose version instead:--"Sir
+Walter gave some samples of it to his gardener as a fine fruit from
+Virginia, desiring him to plant them. The roots flowered in August, and
+in September produced the fruit; but the berries were so different from
+what the gardener expected, that, in ill-humor, he carried them to his
+master, asking, if this was the fine fruit which he had praised so
+highly? Sir Walter either was, or pretended to be ignorant of the
+matter, and desired the gardener, since that was the case, to dig up the
+weed and throw it away." It appears, however, that the gardener, who was
+an Irishman, and had the best of rights to christen it, soon returned
+with the good parcel of potatoes, from whose thrift his own country was
+supplied, and in time distributed so widely as almost to supersede the
+ancient turnips, once the favorite of husbandmen; the more religious of
+them, Columella tells us, in his time, "sprinkling the seed when they
+sowed it as if they meant to supply the King, and his subjects also."
+
+The turnip and the bean--this last held sacred by the Greeks, and which
+Pythagoras honored with a symbol--have lost much of the solid repute
+they once enjoyed here in New England and elsewhere. Good citizens and
+loyal republicans were fed chiefly from their stanch virtues, knowing
+how to prize their independence, and to secure it to their descendants.
+The great staples were grown on their farms and manufactured into
+substantial comforts without loss of self-respect. Bread was home-grown,
+kneaded of fresh flour, ground in the neighborhood; the grain sown in
+hope, their
+
+  "Six months' sunshine bound in sheaves,"
+
+being brought home in thankfulness. The grain harvesting was the pride
+and praise of the country round, as good to be sung as the Syrian
+pastoral of Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz. But this, and other
+customs, introduced with the cultivation of wheat into Britain, and
+brought here by the Puritan planters, are fast fading from memory, and
+the coming generation will need commentaries on Tusser and Thomson to
+make plain our reaping-idyl.
+
+          As kindles now the blazing East
+          Afield I haste,
+          Eager the sickle's feat to play,
+  Sweeping along the stalked fields my widening way;
+          Vexing the eared spires,
+          Pricked with desires,
+  My golden gavels on the stubble spend,
+  And to the fair achievement every member lend,
+  The laughing breeze my colleague in my forte,
+  While the grave sun beams zealous on the sport.
+  Nor doth penurious gain famish my fist,
+  As earing fast it sheds abundant grist,
+  And gleaning damsels kerchief all they list,--
+  Kindly conceive me friendliest of peers,
+  And glad my brows adorn with yellow ears;
+  The wide-spread field, its sheafed hoard,
+  The lively symbol of their liberal Lord,
+  Whose plenteous crop, and ripe supply
+  Areapéd is of every hand and eye--
+  An opulent shock for poor humanity.
+
+Their garments, too, were home-spun. Every house, the scene of sprightly
+industry, was Homeric as were the employments in the garden of Alcinous,
+
+  "Where to encounter feast with housewifery,
+  In one room, numerous women did apply
+  Their several tasks; some apple-colored corn
+  Ground in fair querns, and some did spindles turn;
+  Some work in looms; no hand least rest receives,
+  But all have motion apt as aspen leaves;
+  And from the weeds they wove, so fast they laid
+  And so thick thrust together thread by thread,
+  That the oil of which the wool had drank its fill,
+  Did with his moisture in bright dews distil."
+
+It was plain wool and flax which they spun and wove thus innocently, nor
+suspected the web of sophistries that was to be twisted and coiled about
+the countries' liberties from a coming rival. "The weed which, planted
+long ago by the kings of Tyre, made their city a great nation, their
+merchantmen princes, and spread the Tyrian dye throughout the world; of
+which Solomon obtained a branch, and made his little kingdom the
+admiration of surrounding nations; of which Alexander sowed the seed in
+the city to which he gave his name, and Constantine transplanted to
+Constantinople; which the first Edward sowed on the banks of the Thames,
+and Elizabeth lived to see blossom through the nourishment which her
+enlightened mind procured, not only from the original soil of the Levant
+but from the eastern and newly discovered western world, as well as from
+the North,"--this famous plant, thus cherished by kings, has now become
+KING, and wields its sceptre over the most cultivated and prosperous
+nations of the earth; its history for the last half century being more
+closely woven with civilization, than perhaps any other commodity known
+to commerce. And whether it shall be woven into robes of coronation or
+the shroud of freedom, for the freest of Republics, the fortunes of
+races, the present moment is determining.
+
+Lettuce has always been loyal. Herodotus tells us that it was served at
+royal tables some centuries before the Christian era, and one of the
+Roman families ennobled its name with that of Lactucinü. So spinach,
+asparagus and celery have been held in high repute among the eastern
+nations, as with us. And the parable of the mustard seed shows that
+plant was known in Christ's time. The Greeks are said to have esteemed
+radishes so highly that, in offering oblations to Apollo, they presented
+them in beaten gold. And the Emperor Tiberius held parsnips in such high
+repute that he had them brought annually from the Rhine for his table.
+The beet is still prized, but the carrot has lost the reputation it had
+in Queen Elizabeth's time, the leaves being used in the head-dresses of
+the ladies of her court, from whence the epithet applied to the hair is
+derived.
+
+Peas had scarcely made their appearance at the tables of the court of
+Elizabeth, "being very rare," Fuller says, "in the early part of her
+reign, and seldom seen except they were brought from Holland, and these
+were dainties for ladies, they came so far and cost so dear." Nor did
+the currant appear much earlier in European gardens, coming first under
+the name of the Corinthian grape: Evelyn calls the berries Corinths. So
+the damson took its name from Damascus; the cherry from Cerasus, a city
+of Pontus; and the peach from Persia. The quince, first known as the
+Cydonian apple, was dedicated to the goddess of love; and pears, like
+apples, are from Paradise.
+
+The apple is the representative fruit, and owes most to culture in its
+ancient varieties of quince, pear, pomegranate, citron, peach; as it
+comprehended all originally. Of these, pears and peaches have partaken
+more largely of man's essence, and may be called creations of his, being
+civilized in the measure he is himself; as are the apple and the grape.
+These last are more generally diffused over the earth, and their history
+embraces that of the origin and progress of mankind, the apple being
+coeval with man; Eve's apple preserving the traditions of his earliest
+experiences, and the grape appears in connection with him not long after
+his story comes into clearness from the dimness of the past.
+
+Fruits have the honor of being most widely diffused geographically,
+grown with the kindliest care, and of being first used by man as food.
+They still enter largely into the regimen of the cultivated nations, and
+are the fairest of civilizers; like Orpheus, they tame the human
+passions to consonance and harmony by their lyric influence. The use of
+them is of that universal importance that we cannot subsist in any
+plenty or elegance without them. And everywhere beside the cultivated
+man grows the orchard, to intimate his refinement in those excellences
+most befitting his race. The Romans designated the union of all the
+virtues in the word we render fruit; and bread comes from Pan, the
+representative of Nature, whose stores we gather for our common
+sustenance in our pantries. Biography shows that fruit has been the
+preferred food of the most illuminated persons of past times, and of
+many of the ablest. It is friendly to the human constitution, and has
+been made classic by the pens of poets who have celebrated its beauty
+and excellence.
+
+
+VII.--RATIONS.
+
+The food of a people may be taken as a natural gauge of their civility.
+In any scale of the relative virtues of plants, fruits take their place
+at the top, the grains next, then the herbs, last and lowest the roots.
+The rule seems this:
+
+_Whatever grows above ground, and tempered in the solar ray, is most
+friendly to the strength, genius and beauty proper to man._
+
+The poet has intimated the law:
+
+  "Plants in the root with earth do most comply,
+  Their leaves with water and humidity;
+  The flowers to air draw near and subtilty,
+  And seeds a kindred fire have with the sky."
+
+So the ancient doctrine affirms that the originals of all bodies are to
+be found in their food, every living creature representing its root and
+feeding upon its mother; and that from the food chosen, is derived the
+spirit and complexion of each; persons, plants, animals, being tempered
+of earth or sun, according to their likings.
+
+    Apollo feeds his fair ones, Ceres hers,
+  Pomona, Pan, dun Jove, and Luna pale;
+  So Nox her olives, so swarth Niobe.
+
+It was the doctrine of the Samian Sage, that whatsoever food obstructs
+divination, is prejudicial to purity and chastity of mind and body, to
+temperance, health, sweetness of disposition, suavity of manners, grace
+of form, and dignity of carriage, should be shunned. Especially should
+those who would apprehend the deepest wisdom and preserve through life
+the relish for elegant studies and pursuits, abstain from flesh,
+cherishing the justice which animals claim at man's hands, nor
+slaughtering them for food nor profit. And, anciently, there existed
+what is called the Orphic Life, men keeping fast to all things without
+life, and abstaining wholly from those that had.
+
+And, aside from all considerations of humanity for the animals, genius
+and grace alike enjoin abstinence from every indulgence that impairs the
+beauty and order of things. Our instincts instruct us to protect, to
+tame and transform, as far as may be, the animals we domesticate into
+the image of gentleness and humanity, and that these traits in ourselves
+are impaired by converting their flesh into ours. Nor do any pleas of
+necessity avail. Since the experience of large classes of mankind in
+different climates shows conclusively that health, strength, beauty,
+agility, sprightliness, longevity, the graces and attainments
+appertaining to body and mind, are insured, if not best promoted, by
+abstinence from animal food. Science, moreover, favors this experience,
+since it teaches that man extracts his bodily nourishment mediately or
+immediately from the vegetable kingdom, and thus lives at the cost of
+the atmosphere, needing not the interfusion of the spirit of beasts into
+his system to animalize and sustain him. "He feeds on air alone, springs
+from it, and returns to it again."
+
+A purer civilization than ours can yet claim to be, is to inspire the
+genius of mankind with the skill to deal dutifully with soils and souls,
+exalt agriculture and manculture into a religion of art; the freer
+interchange of commodities which the current world-wide intercourse
+promotes, spread a more various, wholesome, classic table, whereby the
+race shall be refined of traits reminding too plainly of barbarism and
+the beast. "Ye desire from the gods excellent health and a beautiful old
+age, but your table opposes itself, since it fetters the hands of
+Zeus."[A]
+
+     [Footnote A: Grillis having been transformed from a beast
+     into a man, used to discourse with his table companions,
+     about how much better he fed while in that state than his
+     present one, since he then took instinctively what was best
+     for him, avoiding what was hurtful; but now, he said, though
+     endowed with reason and natural knowledge to guide him in
+     the selection, he yet seemed to have fallen below the beast
+     he was, since he found he liked what did not like him, and
+     took it, moreover, without shame.]
+
+      "Time may come when man
+  With angels may participate and find
+  No inconvenient diet, no too light fare,
+  And, from these corporal nutriments, perhaps,
+  Their bodies may at last turn all to Spirit
+  Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend
+  Ethereal as they; or may at choice
+  Here, or in heavenly Paradises, dwell."
+
+An elegant abstinence is complimentary to any one, as, fed from the
+virgin essences of the season, his genius, dispositions, tastes, have no
+shame to blush for, and modestly claim the honor of being well bred. And
+one's table, like Apelles', may be fitly pictured with the beauty of
+sobriety on the one side, the deformity of excess on the other, the
+feast substantial as it is lyrical, praising itself and those who
+partake; and his guests as ready to compliment him, as Timotheus did
+Plato, when he said: "They who dine with the philosopher never complain
+the next morning."
+
+
+  THE SEER'S RATIONS.
+
+  Takes sunbeams, spring waters,
+  Earth's juices, meads' creams,
+  Bathes in floods of sweet ethers,
+  Comes baptized from the streams;
+  Guest of Him, the sweet-lipp'd,
+  The Dreamer's quaint dreams.
+
+  Mingles morals idyllic
+  With Samian fable,
+  Sage seasoned from cruets,
+  Of Plutarch's chaste table.
+
+  Pledges Zeus, Zoroaster,
+  Tastes Cana's glad cheer,
+  Suns, globes, on his trencher,
+  The elements there.
+
+  Bowls of sunrise for breakfast
+  Brimful of the East,
+  Foaming flagons of frolic
+  His evening's gay feast.
+
+  Sov'reign solids of nature,
+  Solar seeds of the sphere,
+  Olympian viand
+  Surprising as rare.
+
+  Thus baiting his genius,
+  His wonderful word
+  Brings poets and sibyls
+  To sup at his board.
+
+  Feeds thus and thus fares he,
+  Speeds thus and thus cares he,
+  Thus faces and graces
+  Life's long euthanasies,
+
+  His gifts unabated,
+  Transfigured, translated--
+  The idealist prudent,
+  Saint, poet, priest, student,
+  Philosopher, he.
+
+
+VIII.--ECONOMIES.
+
+    "----Much will always wanting be
+  To him who much desires. Thrice happy he
+  To whom the indulgency of heaven,
+  With sparing hand, but just enough has given."
+
+Life, when hospitably taken, is a simple affair. Very little suffices to
+enrich us. Being, a fountain and fireside, a web of cloth, a garden, a
+few friends, and good books, a chosen task, health and peace of
+mind--these are a competent estate, embracing all we need.
+
+  "Like to one's fortune should be his expense,
+  Men's fortunes rightly held in reverence."
+
+The country opens the best advantages for these enjoyments. And where
+one has the privilege of choosing for himself, he prefers the scope for
+seclusion and society that a homestead implies. For his human
+satisfactions, he draws upon his dispositions and gifts. His appetites
+he willingly digs for, nor cares to cherish any that he is ashamed to
+own. For nobler pleasures he delights to climb. His best estate is in
+himself. He needs little beside. With good sense for his main portion to
+make the most of that little, he may well consider Hesiod's opinion of
+weight:
+
+  "The half is better far than whole."
+
+If his house is an ancient one, or ancestral, by so much the stronger
+are the ties that bind his affections to it; especially if it stand in
+an orchard, and have a good garden. Even if inconvenient in some
+respects, he will hesitate about pulling it down in hopes of pleasing
+himself better in a new one. The genius that repairs an old house
+successfully may fail in building another. Besides, there were many
+comforts provided for by our ancestors, who were old Englishmen even
+here in New England, and knew well what a house was built for, and they
+built for that, against any odds of counsel or expense. Then 'tis fatal
+to take time out of a building, which so consecrates it.
+
+An old house, well built, pleases more with the repairs rendered
+necessary than a costlier new one. There are good points about it which
+have been proved by a century or two, and these may be adopted as parts
+for preserving, while any additions may be made for holding the whole in
+keeping with the orignal design, or as improvements on it. Perhaps there
+are snug recesses, and window-seats, spacious entries, hospitable
+stairways, wainscoting, finished summers running across the ceilings, a
+dry cellar, a good well, fence rows in natural places, shrubbery, which
+if not well set can be reset in the grounds; an orchard and garden whose
+mould is infused with the genius of years and humanized for culture.
+Then the tenement has its genealogy, and belongs to the race who have
+built into it a history. Trees, too, venerable with age it has, or it
+could not have been the residence of gentlemen. Outbuildings of any
+kind, useful or ornamental, have found their proper sites, and meet the
+eye as if they had always been there. It takes some generations to
+complete and harmonize any place with the laws of beauty, as these best
+honor themselves in that fairest of structures, a human mansion; which,
+next to its occupant, is the noblest symbol of the mind that art can
+render to the senses. One may spend largely upon it, if he have not
+ousted his manliness in amassing the money. That is an honest house
+which has the owner's honor built into its apartments, and whose
+appointments are his proper ornaments.
+
+Building is a severe schoolmaster, and gets the best and worst out of
+us, both, before it has done with us. I conclude no man knows himself on
+terms cheaper than the building of one house at least, and paying for it
+out of his pains. The proverb says:
+
+  "'Tis a sweet impoverishment, and a great waste of gall."
+
+Do we not build ourselves into its foundations, to stand or fall with
+its beams and rafters, every nail being driven in trouble from sills to
+roof-tree, and the whole proving often a defeat and disappointment: no
+one liking it, the builder least of all? One may thank heaven, and not
+himself, if he do not find
+
+  He builded costlier than he knew,
+  Unhoused himself and virtues too,
+
+at the dismission of his carpenters, and occupancy of it. Perhaps the
+idea of a house is too precious to be cut into shapes of comfort and
+comeliness on cheaper conditions than this trial of his manliness by the
+payment of his equanimity as the fair equivalent for the privilege. Nor
+is this the end of the matter, since it costs many virtues to deal
+dutifully by his household, by servants--if served by second hands--day
+by day, and come forth from the stewardship with credit and
+self-respect.
+
+But a garden is a feasible matter. 'Tis within the means of almost every
+one; none, or next to none, are so destitute, or indifferent, as to be
+without one. It may be the smallest conceivable, a flower bed only, yet
+is prized none the less for that. It is loved all the more for its
+smallness, and the better cared for. Virgil advises to
+
+  ----"Commend large fields,
+    But cultivate small ones."
+
+And it was a saying of the Carthaginians, that "the land should be
+weaker than the husbandman, since of necessity he must wrestle with it,
+and if the ground prevailed, the owner must be crushed by it." The
+little is much to the frugal and industrious; and the least most to him
+who puts that little to loving usury.
+
+  "We are the farmers of ourselves, yet may
+  If we can stock ourselves and thrive, repay
+  Much, much good treasure for the great rent day."
+
+'Tis a pity that men want eyes, oftentimes, to harvest crops from their
+acres never served to them from their trenchers. Civilization has not
+meliorated mankind essentially while men hold themselves to services
+they make menial and degrading. Æleas, king of Scythia, was wont to say
+ingeniously, that "while he was doing nothing, he differed in nothing
+from his groom," thus discriminating between services proper to freemen
+and slaves. The humblest labors may ennoble us. Honorable in themselves
+when properly undertaken, they promote us from things to persons. They
+give us the essential goods of existence as we deserve and can best
+enjoy them: order, namely, industry, leisure, of which idleness
+defrauds, and distraction deprives us. Labor suffices. Putting us, for
+the time, beyond anxiety and our caprices, it calls into exercise the
+sentiments proper to the citizen. It softens and humanizes other
+pleasures. Like philosophy, like religion, it revenges on fortune, and
+so keeps us by THE ONE amidst the multitude of our perplexities--against
+reverses, and above want. By making us a party in the administration of
+affairs, and superior to Fate, it puts into our hands the iron keys for
+unlocking her wards, and thus gives us to opulence and independence. We
+become, thereby, the subjects and friends of Saturn, ever known to be a
+person of so strict justice as he forces none to serve him unwillingly,
+and has nothing private to himself, but all things in common, as of one
+universal patrimony. And so, owning nothing, because wanting nothing, he
+had all things desirable to make life rich and illustrious.
+
+  ----"This Golden Age
+  Met all contentment in no surplusage
+  Of dainty viands, but, (as we do still,)
+  Drank the pure water of the crystal rill,
+  Fed on no other meats than those they fed--
+  Labor the salad that their stomachs bred."
+
+Labor saves us from the chaos of sloth, the pains of shiftlessness. It
+sweetens the fountains of our enjoyments; 'tis neighbor to the elements.
+Coming in from July heats, we taste the sweetness of Pindar's line,
+
+  "Water with purest lustre flows,"
+
+of whose zest the idler knows nothing, and which the sensualist soils
+and spoils. Besides, there are advantages to be gained from intimacy
+with farmers, whose wits are so level with the world they measure and
+work in. We become one of them for the time, by sympathy of employment,
+and get the practical skill and adaptedness that comes from yoking our
+idealism in their harness of uses. Thus, too, we come to comprehend the
+better the working classes which minister so largely to the comforts of
+all men, and are so deserving of consideration for their services.
+Moreover, this laboring with plain men is the best cure for any
+foolishness one may have never sounded in the depths of his egotism, or
+scorn of persons in humbler stations than his own; and the swiftest leap
+across the gulf yawning between his pride and the humility gracing a
+gentleman in any walk of life.
+
+
+X.--RURAL CULTURE.
+
+  "Nor need the muse to palaces resort,
+  Or bring examples only from the court,
+  The country strives to do our subject right,
+  And gard'ning is the gentleman's delight."
+
+I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and
+brought up in the country; the arts of handicraft and husbandry coming
+by mother wit, like the best use of books, the language one speaks.
+There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields,
+streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that
+neither cities nor universities enjoy. Nor is it creditable to the
+teaching that so few college graduates take to husbandry and rural
+pursuits. Held subordinate to thought, as every calling should be, these
+promote intellectual freshness and moral vigor. They have been made
+classic by the genius of antiquity; are recreations most becoming to men
+of every profession and rank in life:--
+
+  "Books, wise discourse, garden and fields,
+  And all the joys that unmixed nature yields."
+
+Rural influences seem to be most desirable, if not necessary, for
+cherishing the home virtues, especially in a community like ours, where,
+by prejudices of tradition, we seek culture more through books and
+universities than from that closer contact with men and things to which
+newer communities owe so much, which agriculture promotes, and for which
+the classic authors chiefly deserve to be studied.
+
+Men follow what they love, and the love of rural enjoyments is almost
+universal. Every one likes the country whose tastes are cultivated in
+the least, and who enjoys what is primitive and pure. The citizen tires
+of city pleasures. He soon finds that there is no freedom comparable to
+that which the country affords; for though he dwell in the city for
+advantages of libraries, and social entertainments, he seeks the country
+for inspiration when these lose their attractions, his spirits as his
+friendships, crave refreshment and renewal.
+
+          "Who in sad cities dwell,
+  Are of the green trees fully sensible."
+
+We see how this appetite declares itself in the general swarming during
+the summer season from the cities to the suburban towns, if not to the
+hill countries, for the freedom, the health, found there; and how to
+gratify and meet the demand for more natural satisfactions, our Guide
+Books have become, not only the most attractive geographies of the
+territories therein described, but works of taste, combining some of the
+choicest illustrations of poetry and prose in our literature: sketches
+of such scenes and parties are sure of an eager reading. The rustic
+books, too, are beginning to be inquired after; translations of the
+ancient authors, which bring the sentiment of the originals within the
+grasp of the plainest minds. And we look forward to the time, when,
+according to the recommendation of Cowley and Milton,--poets who did so
+much for the culture of their time,--these authors will be studied in
+our schools and universities, as Virgil and Horace have been so long,
+for cultivating the love of nature, of rural pursuits, beauty of
+sentiment, the graces of style, without an acquaintance with which, the
+epithet of a liberal and elegant culture were misapplied on any
+graduate. Nor need the students be restricted to Greek and Roman
+pastoral poets, when some of our own authors have given charming
+examples of treating New England life and landscape in their pages. A
+people's freshest literature springs from free soil, tilled by free men.
+Every man owes primary duty to the soil, and shall be held incapable by
+coming generations if he neglect planting an orchard at least, if not a
+family, or book, for their benefit.
+
+"Agriculture, for an honorable and high-minded man," says Xenophon, "is
+the best of all occupations and arts by which men procure the means of
+living. For it is a pursuit that is most easy to learn and most pleasant
+to practise; it puts the bodies of men in the fairest and most vigorous
+condition, and is far from giving such constant occupation to their
+minds as to prevent them from attending to the interests of their
+friends or their country. And it affords some incitement to those who
+pursue it to become courageous, as it produces and sustains what is
+necessary for human life without the need of walls or fortresses. A
+man's home and fireside are the sweetest of all human possessions."
+
+I have always admired the good sense and fine ambition of a friend of
+mine, who, on quitting College, with fair prospects of winning respect
+in any of the learned professions, chose rather to step aside into the
+quiet retreat of a cottage, and there give himself to the pleasures and
+duties of cultivating his family and grounds. And this he did from a
+sense of its suitableness to promote the best ends and aims; esteeming
+his gifts and accomplishments due to pursuits which seemed the natural
+means of securing self-respect and independence. His first outlay was
+moderate--a sequestered field, on which he erected a comfortable
+dwelling, planned for convenience and hospitality. His grounds were laid
+out and planted with shrubbery, the slopes dotted with evergreens and
+shapely trees. A nursery was set; a conservatory, with suitable
+outbuildings and ornaments. As he gave himself personally to the work,
+everything prospered that he touched. A few years' profits paid for his
+investment, and his thrift soon enabled him to add an adjoining orchard
+to his first purchase. And so successful was his adventure, that his
+most sceptical neighbors, the old farmers, confessed him to be the
+better husbandman; his gold was ruddier than theirs; his fields the
+neater. Nor did our Evelyn disgrace social engagements. His friendships
+were kept in as good plight as his grounds. He was none the worse
+citizen for being the better neighbor and gentleman they found him to
+be, nor the less worthy of the honors of his college. "'Tis impossible
+that he who is a true scholar, and has attained besides the felicity of
+being a good gardener, should give jealousy to the State in which he
+lives." Civilization has a deeper stake in the tillage of the ground
+than in the other arts, since its roots are fast planted therein, and it
+thrives only as this flourishes. Omit the garden, degrade this along
+with the orchard to mere material uses, treat these as of secondary
+importance, and the State falls fast into worldliness and decay.
+
+  "Oh blessed shades! oh gentle, cool retreat
+    From all the immoderate heat
+  In which the frantic world does burn and sweat!
+  This does the Lion-star, Ambition's rage;
+  This Avarice, the Dog-star's thirst assuage;
+  Everywhere else their fatal power we see,
+  They make and rule man's wretched destiny;
+    They neither set, nor disappear,
+    But tyrannize o'er all the year,--
+  Whilst we ne'er feel their heat nor influence here.
+    The birds that dance from bough to bough,
+    And sing above in every tree,
+    Are not from fears and cares more free,
+    Than we who muse or toil below,
+    And should by right be singers too.
+  What Prince's quire of music can excel
+    That which within this shade does dwell?
+    To which we nothing pay or give?
+    They, like all other poets, live
+  Without reward or thanks for their obliging pains;
+    'Tis well if they become not prey:
+  The whistling winds add their less ardent strains,
+  And a grave bass the murmuring fountains play.
+    Nature does all this harmony bestow;
+    But, to our plants, arts, music, too,
+    The pipe, theorbo, and guitar, we owe,
+  The lute itself, which once was green and mute;
+    When Orpheus struck the inspired lute
+    The trees danced round and understood,
+    By sympathy, the voice of wood."
+
+  Methinks I see great Dioclesian walk
+    In the Salonian garden's noble shade,
+    Which by his own imperial hands was made;
+  I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk
+    With the ambassadors, who come in vain
+    To entice him to a throne again.
+  "If I, my friends," said he, "should to you show
+  All the delights that in these gardens grow,
+  'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,
+  Than 'tis that you should carry me away;
+  And trust me not, my friends, if every day
+    I walk not here with more delight
+    Than ever, after the most happy fight,
+    In triumph to the capitol I ride,
+  To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a god."
+
+Do we ask, on viewing the rural pictures which the Pastoral Poets afford
+us,--Whither is our modern civilization tending? What solid profits has
+it gained on the state of things they describe, seeing the primitive
+virtues and customs, once enjoyed by our ancestors, are fading,--the
+generosity, the cheer, the patriotism, the piety, the republican
+simplicity and heartiness of those times? Machinery is fast displacing
+the poetry of farm and fireside; the sickle, the distaff, the
+chimney-piece, the family institution, being superseded by prose powers;
+and, with their sway, have come slavery, pusillanimity, dishonor. I know
+there are reconciling compensations for all risks of revolution. For
+while the Demos thus takes his inch, Divinity secures his ell; so the
+garment of mankind comes the fuller from the loom in this transfer of
+labors. The fig leaf thus cunningly woven, costs fair honors,
+nevertheless, and we covet in our hearts the florid simplicity of times
+of sturdier virtues and unassailable integrity.[B]
+
+     [Footnote B: Evelyn draws a lively picture of those old
+     times, though not without sadness at the contrast with his
+     own. "The style and method of life are quite changed as well
+     as the language, since the days of our ancestors, simple and
+     plain as they were, courting their wives for their modesty,
+     frugality, keeping at home, good housewifery, and other
+     economical virtues then in reputation. And when the young
+     damsels were taught all these at home in the country at
+     their parents' houses; the portion they brought being more
+     in virtue than money, she being a richer match than any one
+     who could bring a million and nothing else to commend her.
+     The presents then made when all was concluded, were a ring,
+     a necklace of pearls, and perhaps the fair jewel, the
+     paraphernalia of her prudent mother, whose nuptial kirtle,
+     gown and petticoat, lasted as many anniversaries as the
+     happy couple lived together, and were at last bequeathed
+     with a purse of old gold, as an heir-loom to her
+     granddaughter. The virgins and young ladies of that golden
+     age, put their hands to the spindle, nor disdained the
+     needle; were obsequious and helpful to their parents,
+     instructed in the management of the family, and gave presage
+     of making excellent wives. Their retirements were devout and
+     religious books, their recreations in the distillery and
+     knowledge of plants, and their virtues for the comfort of
+     their poor neighbors, and use of the family, which wholesome
+     diet and kitchen physic preserved in health. Nor were the
+     young gentlemen, though extremely modest, at all melancholy,
+     or less gay and in good humor. They could touch the lute and
+     virginal, sing
+
+       "Like to the damask rose,"
+
+     and their breath was as sweet as their voices. Then things
+     were natural, plain and wholesome; nothing was superfluous,
+     nothing necessary wanting. Men of estate studied the public
+     good, and gave examples of true piety, loyalty, justice,
+     sobriety, charity; and the good of the neighborhood composed
+     most differences. Laws were reasons, not craft; men's
+     estates were secure: they served their generation with
+     honor, left patrimonial estates improved to a hopeful heir,
+     who, passing from the free school to the college, and thence
+     to Inns of Court, acquainting himself with a competent
+     tincture of the laws of his country, followed the example of
+     his worthy ancestors. And if he travelled abroad, it was not
+     to count steeples, and bring home feather and ribbon and the
+     sins of other nations, but to gain such experience as
+     rendered him useful to his Prince and his countrymen upon
+     occasion, and confirmed him in the love of both of them
+     above any other. Hospitality was kept up in town and
+     country, by which the tenants were enabled to pay their
+     landlords at punctual day. The poor were relieved
+     bountifully, and charity was as warm as the kitchen, where
+     the fire was perpetual."]
+
+[Illustration: Small decoration of a flower and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+RECREATION.
+
+     "Thou who wouldst know the things that be,
+     Bathe thy heart in the sunrise red,
+     Till its stains of earthly dross are fled."
+                             GOETHE.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of a beetle among flowers and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+RECREATION.
+
+
+I.--THE FOUNTAINS.
+
+Nature is wholesome. Without her elixirs daily taken we perish of
+lassitude and inanity. The fountains must be stirred to their depths and
+their torrents sent bounding along their sluices, else we sink presently
+into the pool of inertia, victims of indecision and slaves of fate. "Thy
+body, O well disposed man, is a meadow through which flow three hundred
+and sixty-five rivulets." Every pulse pushes nature's quaternion along
+life's currents recreating us afresh; the morn feeding the morn,
+Memnon's music issuing from every stop, as if the Orient itself had
+sung.
+
+Nature is virtuous. Imparting sanity and sweetness, it spares from
+decay, giving life with temperance and a continency that keeps our
+pleasures chaste and perennial. Nothing short of her flowing atmosphere
+suffices to refill our urns. Neither books, company, conversation,--not
+Genius even, the power present in persons, nature's nature pouring her
+floods through mind,--not this is enough. Nature is the good Baptist
+plunging us in her Jordan streams to be purified of our stains, and
+fulfil all righteousness. And wheresoever our lodge, there is but the
+thin casement between us and immensity. Nature without, mind within,
+inviting us forth into the solacing air, the blue ether, if we will but
+shake our sloth and cares aside, and step forth into her great
+contentments.
+
+        As from himself he fled,
+        Possessed, insane,
+  Tormenting demons drove him from the gate:
+        Away he sped,
+        Casting his woes behind,
+        His joys to find,
+        His better mind.
+
+        'Tis passing strange,
+        The glorious change,
+        The pleasing pain!
+
+            Recovered,
+        Himself again
+        Over his threshold led,
+        Peace fills his breast,
+        He finds his rest;
+  Expecting angels his arrival wait.
+
+If we cannot spin our tops briskly as boys do theirs, the wailers may
+chant their dirges over us. Enthusiasm is existence; earnestness, life's
+exceeding great reward. How busy then, and above criticism. Our cup runs
+over. But a parted activity, divorcing us from ourselves, degrades our
+noblest parts to the sway of the lowest and renders our task a drudgery
+and shame. For what avails, if while one's mind hovers about Olympus,
+his members flounder in Styx, and he is drawn asunder in the conflict?
+Let the days deify the days, the work the workman, giving the joyous
+task that leaves pleasant memories behind, and ennobles in the
+performance:
+
+      Tasked days
+      Above delays;
+      Hours that borrow
+      Speed of the morrow,
+      Light from sorrow:
+      Business bate not,
+      Want nor wait not,
+      Doubt nor date not;
+  Life from limb forbid to sever,
+  Recreate in rapt endeavor.
+
+We come as a muse to our toil and find amusement in it; to a taskmaster
+whose company never tires. 'Tis life, the partaking of immortality. A
+day lived so, glorifies all moments afterwards. Long postponed, perhaps,
+the hours wearisome, till broke this immortal morning with engagements
+that time can complete never, nor compel, and whose importunity outlasts
+the hours.
+
+Sleep, too, having the keys of life in its keeping. How we rise from its
+delectable divinations with eyes sovereign and anointed for the day's
+occupations. All our powers are touched with flame, all things are
+possible. But last night, the world had come to an end; the floods ebbed
+low, as if the fates were reversing the torch. How we blazed all the
+morning, to be cinders yesternight. Then came the god to re-kindle our
+faded embers, the Phoenix wings her way to meet the rising dawn and
+embrace the young world once more. Sleep took the sleep out of us. From
+forth the void there rises a roseate morn upon us.
+
+  The flattering East her gates impearled,
+  We hunt the morning round the world.
+
+Nor is a day lived if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it
+opens. Who speaks charmingly of nature or of mankind, like him who comes
+bibulous of sunrise and the fountains of waters?
+
+  "Mornings are mysteries, the first world's youth,
+  Man's resurrection, and the future's bud
+  Shown in their birth; they make us happy,
+  Make us rich."
+
+    Rise in the morning, rise
+    While yet the streaming tide
+    Flames o'er the blue acclivities,
+    And pours its splendors wide;
+    Kindling its high intent
+    Along the firmament,
+    Silence and sleep to break,
+    Imaginations wake,
+    Ideas insphere
+    And bring them here.
+    Loiter nor play
+    In soft delay;
+    Speed glad thy course along
+    The orbs and globes among,
+    And as yon toiling sun
+    Attain thy high meridian:
+    Radiant and round thy day;--
+    Speed, speed thee on thy way.
+
+"Every day is a festival, and that which makes it the more splendid is
+gladness. For as the world is a spacious and beautiful temple, so is
+life the most perfect institution that introduces us into it. And it is
+but just that it should be full of cheerfulness and tranquillity." Our
+dispositions are the atmosphere we breathe, and we carry our climate and
+world in ourselves. Good humor, gay spirits are the liberators, the sure
+cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the
+tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting
+imps into angels by the alchymy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight
+of these redeemers. And he who smiles never is beyond redemption. Once
+clothed in a suit of light we may cast aside forever our sables. Our
+best economist of this flowing estate is good temper, without whose
+presidency life is a perplexity and disaster. Luck is bad luck and
+ourselves a disappointment and vexation. Victims of our humors, we
+victimize everybody. How the swift repulsions play: our atoms all
+insular, insulating; demonized, demonizing, from heel to crown; at the
+mercy of a glance, a gesture, a word, and ourselves overthrown.
+Equanimity is the gem in Virtue's chaplet and St. Sweetness the
+loveliest in her calendar. "On beholding thyself, fear," says the
+oracle. Only the saints are sane and wholesome.
+
+
+  II.--THE CHEAP PHYSICIAN.
+
+  "That which makes us have no need
+  Of physic, that's physic indeed.
+  Hark, hither, reader, wilt thou see
+  Nature her own physician be?
+  Wilt see a man all his own wealth,
+  His own music, his own health,--
+  A man whose sober soul can tell
+  How to wear her garments well:
+  Her garments that upon her sit,
+  As garments should do, close and fit;
+  A well-clothed soul that's not oppressed,
+  Nor choked with what she should be dressed;
+  A soul sheathed in a crystal shrine,
+  Through which all her bright features shine,
+  As when a piece of wanton lawn,
+  A thin, aerial veil is drawn
+  O'er beauty's face, seeming to hide,
+  More sweetly shows the blushing bride:
+  A soul, whose intellectual beams
+  No mists do mask, no lazy streams:
+  A happy soul that all the way
+  To heaven rides in a summer's day?
+  Wouldst see a man whose well-warmed blood
+  Bathes him in a genuine flood,--
+  A man whose tuned humors be
+  A seat of rarest harmony?
+  Wouldst see blithe looks, fresh cheeks beguile
+  Age; wouldst see December smile?
+  Wouldst see nests of new roses grow
+  In a bed of reverend snow?
+  Warm thought, free spirits flattering
+  Winter's self into a spring?
+  In sum, wouldst see a man that can
+  Live to be old, and still a man
+  Whose latest and most leaden hours
+  Fall with soft wings, stuck with soft flowers;
+  And when life's sweet fable ends,
+  Soul and body part like friends;
+  No quarrels, murmurs, no delay,
+  A kiss, a sigh,--and so away,--
+  This rare one, reader, wouldst thou see?
+  Hark within, and thyself be he."
+
+[Illustration: Triangular decoration of two intertwined griffins]
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+FELLOWSHIP.
+
+     "Health is the first good lent to men,
+     A gentle disposition then,
+     Next competence by no by ways,
+     Lastly with friends to enjoy one's days."
+                             HERRICK.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of two birds among leaves and flowers]
+
+
+
+
+FELLOWSHIP.
+
+
+I.--HOSPITALITY.
+
+Evelyn writes of the manners and architecture of his times: "'Tis from
+the want of symmetry in our buildings, decorum in our houses, that the
+irregularity of our humors and affections may be shrewdly discerned."
+But not every builder is gifted with the genius and personal qualities
+to harmonize the apartments to the dispositions of the inmates. I
+confess to a partiality for the primitive style of architecture
+commended by Evelyn, and question whether in our refinements on these we
+have not foregone comforts and amenities essential to true hospitality.
+What shall make good to us the ample chimney-piece of his day, with the
+courtesies it cherished, the conversation, the cheer, the
+entertainments? Very welcome were the spacious yards and hospitable
+door-knockers on those ancestral mansions, fast disappearing from our
+landscape, supplanted by edifices and surroundings more showy and
+pretentious; yet, with all their costliness, looking somewhat asquint on
+the visitor, as if questioning his right to enter them; and, when
+admitted, seem unfamiliar, solitary, desolate, with their elaborate
+decorations and furnishings. Can we not build an elegant comfort,
+convenience, ease, into the walls and apartments, rendering the mansion
+an image of the nobilities becoming the residence of noblemen? To what
+end the house, if not for conversation, kindly manners, the
+entertainment of friendships, the cordialities that render the house
+large, and the ready receptacle of hosts and guests? If one's
+hospitalities fail to bring out the better qualities of his company, he
+fails of being the noble host, be his pretensions what they may. Let him
+entertain the dispositions, the genius, of his guests, the conversation
+being the choicer banquet; for, without baits for these, what were the
+table but a manger, alike wanting in elegancy as in hospitality, and the
+feast best taken in silence as an animal qualification, and no more.
+
+What solitude like those homes where no home is, no company, no
+conversation, into which one enters with dread, and from which he
+departs with sadness, as from the sight of hostile tribes bordering on
+civilization, strangers to one another, and of mixed bloods! Civility
+has not completed its work if it leave us unsocial, morose, insultable.
+Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the
+conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human
+communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
+
+  "Oh wretched and too solitary, he
+  Who loves not his own company;
+    He'll find the weight of it many a day,
+  Unless he call in sin and vanity,
+    To help to bear it away."
+
+The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself
+and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may number.
+
+Perhaps those most prize society who find the best in solitude, being
+equal to either; strong enough to enjoy themselves aside from companies
+they would gladly meet and repay by a freedom from prejudices and
+scruples in which these share and pride themselves, yet whose
+exclusiveness thrusts them out of their own houses and themselves also.
+
+                    "It ever hath been known,
+  They others' virtues scorn who doubt their own."
+
+If solitude makes us love ourselves, society gives us to others,
+peopling what were else a solitude. It takes us out of ourselves as from
+a multitude to partake of closer intimacies and satisfactions. Alone and
+apart, however well occupied, we lose the elasticity and dignity that
+come from sympathy with the aims and prospects of others. Nor has any
+been found equal to uninterrupted solitude. Our virtues need the enamel
+of intercourse. Exalting us above our private piques, prejudices,
+egotisms, into the commonwealth of charities, good company makes us
+catholic, courteous, sane; we retire from it with a new estimate of
+ourselves and of mankind. If intercourse have not this wholesome effect,
+it is dissipating and best shunned. Nor is fellowship possible without a
+certain delicacy and respect of diffidence. There hides a natural piety
+in this personal grace, while nothing good comes of brass, from whose
+embrasures there vollies forth but impudence, insolence, defiance. But
+the more influential powers are attended by a bashful genius, and step
+forth from themselves with a delicacy of boldness alike free from any
+blemishes of egotism or pretence. Nor do we accept as genuine the person
+not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of
+heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect.
+Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair
+minds. None are truly great without this ornament. A fine genius has the
+timidity, the graces of a virgin nature, whose traits are as transparent
+in the boldest flights of imagination as discernible in the stateliest
+tread of reason, the play of fancy: a pleasing hesitancy, a refrain,
+setting off the more boldly by such graceful carriage, the natural
+graces due to beauty and truth; and bearing down all else by its
+charming persuasions.
+
+Affinities tell. Every one is not for every one; nor any one good enough
+to flatter or scorn any; the kindly recognition being due to the
+meanest; even the humblest conferring a certain respect by his call. Yet
+one might as properly entertain every passing vagary in the presence
+chamber of his memory as every vagrant visitor seeking his acquaintance.
+Introductions are of small account. What are one's claims, a glance
+detects; if ours, he stays, and house and heart are his by silent
+understanding. If not ours, nor we his, the way is plain. He leaves
+presently as a traveller the innkeeper's door, an inmate for his meal
+only and the night.
+
+The heroic bearing is always becoming. Egotists of the amiable species,
+one kindly considers. But the sour malcontents, devastators of one's
+time and patience,--what to do with such? Summon your fairest sunshine
+forthwith: give your visitor's humors no quarters from the shafts; smite
+him with the kindly radiance for dissipating his melancholy, and so send
+him away the wholesomer, the sweeter for the interview, if not a convert
+to the sun's catholicism, the courtesies due to civility and good
+fellowship. So when X, your worst sample approaches, meet him blandly at
+your door, and ask him civilly to leave his dog outside. But if he
+persist in bringing him along into your parlor, never hesitate on
+setting the cur forthwith upon his master though you should find him at
+your throat straightways. It were giving your visitor the warmest
+reception possible under the circumstances, and an interview very
+memorable to all parties. One need not fear dealing his compliments
+short and significant on the occasion; the deer running down the dogs
+for a wonder.
+
+Does it seem cold and unhandsome, this specular survey of persons? Yet
+all hearts crave eyes whereby to measure themselves. And what better
+foil for one's egotism than this reflection of himself in the mirror of
+another's appreciation? The frank sun withholds his beams from none for
+any false delicacy. Nor till one rejoices in being helped to discern
+excellence in another, desiring to comprehend and compliment his own
+therein, is he freed from the egotism that excludes him from the best
+benefits one can bestow. Happy if we have dissolved our individualism in
+the fluent affections, and so made intercourse possible and delightful
+between us.
+
+"We have three friends most useful to us; a sincere friend, a faithful
+friend, a friend that hears every thing, examines what is told him, and
+speaks little. But we have three also whose friendship is pernicious; a
+hypocrite, a flatterer, and a great talker. Contract friendship with the
+man whose heart is upright and sincere, who loves to learn and can teach
+you something in his turn. And in what part of the world soever thou
+chance to spend thy life, correspond with the wisest and associate with
+the best."
+
+
+II.--CONVERSATION.
+
+Good humor, flowing spirits, a sprightly wit, are essentials of good
+discourse. Add genial dispositions, graceful elocution, and to these
+accomplishments diffidence as the flower of the rest. There can be no
+eloquence where these are wanting. Any amount of sense, of logic,
+matter, leaves the discourse incomplete, interest flags, and
+disappointment ensues. None has command of himself till he can wield his
+powers sportfully, life sparkling from all his gifts and taking captive
+alike speaker and hearer, as they were docile children of his genius and
+surprised converts for the moment. "And I," says Socrates, "through my
+youth often change my mind, but looking to you and apprehending that you
+speak the things that are divine, I think so too." If one cannot inspire
+faith in what he says, no arts avail. Earnestness, sincerity, are
+orators whose persuasions are irresistible; they hold all gifts in
+fusion, magnetize, divinize, harmonize all. Good conversation is
+lyrical: a pentecost of tongues, touching the chords of melody in all
+minds, it prompts to the best each had to give, to better than any knew
+they had, what none claims as his own, as if he were the organ of some
+invisible player behind the scenes. What abandonments, reserves, which
+no premeditation, no cunning could have checked or called forth. What
+chasms are spanned with a trope, what pits forded, summits climbed,
+prospects commanded, perspectives gained,--the tour of the spheres made
+at a glance, a sitting; the circle coming safely out of the adventure.
+All men talk, few converse; of gossip we have enough, of argument more
+than enough, rhetoric, debate--omit these, speak from the heart to the
+heart underlying all differences, and we have conversation. For
+disputing there is the crowd; for ruminating, the woods; the clubs for
+wit and the superficial fellowship.
+
+Companionableness comes by nature. For though culture may mellow and
+refine, it cannot give the flush of nobility to the current wherein ride
+our credentials for the posts of persuasion and of power. We meet
+magically, and pass with sounding manners; else encounter repulses,
+strokes of fate; temperament telling against temperament, precipitating
+us into vortices from which the nimblest finds no escape. We pity the
+person who shows himself unequal to the occasion; the scholar, for
+example, whose intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet
+his company otherwise than critically; cannot descend to meet, through
+the senses or the sentiments, that common level where intercourse is
+possible with most. We pity him the more, who, from caprice or confusion
+can meet through these only. Still more, the case of him who can meet
+neither as sentimentalist nor idealist, or, rather, not at all in a
+human way. Intellect interblends with sentiment in the companionable
+mind, wit with humor. We detain the flowing tide at the cost of lapsing
+out of perception into memory, into the limbo of fools. Excellent people
+wonder why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot. No. Their wits
+have ebbed away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile
+temperaments, states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no
+conductor. One is individual, the other is individual no less.
+Individuals repel. Persons meet. And only as one's personality is
+sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the other's individualism, can the
+parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of
+the sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within
+themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof,
+are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having
+none in themselves. But the freed personal mind meets all, is
+apprehended by all, by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes
+all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of every one. We speak of
+sympathies, antipathies, fascinations, fates, for this reason.
+
+[Illustration: Small decoration of a leaf]
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+FRIENDSHIP.
+
+
+     "So great a happiness do I esteem it to be loved, that I
+     really fancy every blessing both from gods and men ready to
+     descend spontaneously upon him who is loved."--XENOPHON.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of two swans among flowers]
+
+
+
+
+FRIENDSHIP.
+
+
+I.--PERSONS.
+
+It was a charming fancy of the Pythagoreans to exchange names when they
+met that so they might partake of the virtues each admired in the other.
+And knowing the power of names they used only such as were musical and
+pleasing. The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship
+is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every
+age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly
+speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and
+maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship
+formed in childhood, in youth,--by happy accident at any stage of rising
+manhood,--becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. What
+aspirations it awakens! what prospects! To what advantages, adventures,
+sacrifices, successes, does it not lead its votaries! What if these
+early unions are sometimes less tempered with discretion than those
+formed later, if they maintain their freshness and open out sure
+prospects of an endless future? He surely has no future who is without
+friends to share it with him, and is wasting an existence meant to give
+him that assurance. With this sentiment there comes every felicity into
+the breasts of those who partake of it. How large the dividend of
+delight! how diffusive! We are the richer for every outlay. We dip our
+pitchers in these fountains to come away overspilling with satisfaction.
+And had we a thousand friends, every spring within us would gush forth
+at the touch of these wands of tenderness, and the days pass as
+uncounted moments in their company.
+
+  "O friend, the bosom said,
+  Through thee alone the sky is arched,
+  Through thee the rose is red;
+  All things through thee take nobler form,
+  And look beyond the earth,
+  And is the millround of our fate
+  A sunpath in thy worth:
+  Me, too, thy nobleness has taught
+  To master my despair;
+  The fountains of my hidden life,
+  Are through thy friendship fair."
+
+How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial
+potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to
+indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who
+has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not
+conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the
+recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral
+meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the
+image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget.
+
+Spectral and cold, indeed, were life surveyed from the senses alone, not
+from the soul, wanting the enthusiasm that persons inspire, the faith
+which exalts us above ourselves, giving us friends to love, and a God to
+adore. We enter heaven through the gates of friendship. 'Tis by some
+supreme fellowship that we complete ourselves, and are united to our
+kind.
+
+I esteem friendship the fairest as the eldest of religious faiths, being
+the worship of the unseen through the seen, and excusing many
+superstitions coloring the need of a personal object of worship. The
+love and service rendered to persons symbolizes love and service due the
+Supreme Person; and he must be pronounced deficient in piety who fails
+of winning the noblest of victories,--a friend. A need of the heart, the
+best of our life is embosomed in others, much of it taken upon trust in
+some one or more whom we call by tender names, and whose words accost us
+with persuasions irresistible. How affectionately one name is pronounced
+throughout a revering Christendom, because it symbolizes man's
+friend,--that fairest word in the human vocabulary.
+
+   "Fair flowery name, in none like thee
+    And thy nectareal fragrancy,
+      Hourly there meets
+    A universal synod of all sweets,
+    By whom it is defined thus:
+      That no perfume
+      May yet presume
+    To pass for odoriferous,
+  But such alone whose sacred pedigree
+  Can prove itself some kin, sweet name, to thee."
+
+We crave objects abreast and above us. And are bereft of ourselves
+without such. Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves
+than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs. The passionless
+laws that sway our unseen Personality are not made lovely to us till
+thus clothed in human attributes and brought near to our hearts, person
+embracing person. Not some _It_ in our friends, but the sentiment that
+transfigures the _It_ into _Him_, into _Her_,--this alone makes them
+ours personally and beloved. Theists in our faith, we pay our vows to
+the Friend in our friend, thus becoming personally One with the Three,
+and alone no longer.
+
+  Nor elsewise man shall fellow meet,
+  In public place, in converse sweet,
+  In holy aisles, at market gate,
+  In learning's halls, or courts of state,
+  Nor persons properly shall find,
+  Save in the commonwealth of Mind;
+  Fair forms herein their souls intrude,
+  Peopling what else were solitude.
+
+Persons are love's world. Our Paradise is too fair to be planted out of
+our breasts. We chase the fleeing beauty all our lives long;
+
+  "Nor is there near so brisk a fire
+  In fruition, as desire;
+  The niggard sense, too poor for bliss,
+  Pays us but dully with what is."
+
+On, onwards, ever onwards are we led. Our Edens abreast of us journeying
+with ever-opening prospects in the distance.
+
+
+  THE CHASE.
+
+  O'er earth and seas,
+  In sunshine, shade,
+  Blest Beauty crossed,
+  Nor stopt nor stayed,
+  Nor temples took,
+  Nor idols hewed,
+  Apart she dwelt
+  In solitude.
+
+  In solitude, Heart said:
+  "Where find the maid?
+  My bride's a fugitive,
+  From sight doth live,
+  And hearts are hunters of the game,
+  Pursuers of the same
+  Through every passing form,
+  The Beauty that all eyes do seek,
+  All eyes do but deform;
+  The love our faithless lips would speak
+  Dies on the listless air,
+  Nature befriends us not,
+  Nor hearthside doth prepare
+  In all her ample plot;
+  Life's but illusion,
+  Cunning confusion;
+  Flings shadows pale about our path,
+  She shadow is, and nothing hath;
+  Eyes are divorced from seeing,
+  Hearts cloven clean from being;
+  My bride I cannot find,
+  My love I cannot bind;
+  The thousand fair ones of our sphere,
+  Fond, false ones all, nor mine, nor dear;
+    The Paradise
+    I would surprise,
+  From all my following flies,
+  And I'm a thousand infidelities;
+  There's none for me
+  In all I see;
+  Surely the Fair One bides not here,
+  Where dwells she, where, in any sphere?"
+
+    "In any sphere?"
+  Love whispered: "Where, where, if not here?
+  Here in thy breast the maiden find,
+  Ideas sole imparadise the mind;
+  Here heart's hymeneals begin,
+  Here's ours and only ours housed here within:
+  Through parting gates of human kind
+  Enter thou blest the Unseen Mind."
+
+
+II.--WOMAN.
+
+                              "Virtue sure
+  Were blind as fortune, should she choose the poor
+  Rough cottage man to live in, and despise
+  To dwell in woman's stately edifice;
+  Woman's approved the fairer sex, and we
+  Mean men repent our pedigree.
+  Why choose the father's name, when we may take
+  The mother's a more honor'd blood to make,
+  Woman's of later, though of nobler birth,
+  For she of man was made, man made of earth,
+  The son of dust, and though her sin did breed
+  His fall, again she raised him in her seed;
+  Who had he not her blest creation seen,
+  An Anchorite in Paradise had been."
+
+Pythagoras said that only good things were to be predicted of women,
+since they were the mothers of ornaments, of conversation and of
+confidence, and that he who invented names, perceiving that women were
+adapted to piety and friendship, gave to each of their ages the name of
+some Deity--to a maiden, Core, or Proserpine, to a bride Nymphe, to a
+mother, Mater, to a grandmother, according to the Dorian dialect, Maia.
+And in accordance with the like persuasion the oracles were always
+unfolded into light by women. Tacitus tells us that the Northern nations
+also held women in high esteem, "believing ladies had something divine
+about them." And this faith has descended to men of the Saxon name, the
+best regarding her as endowed with magical properties, the type of the
+highest culture the advanced nations have attained. Endowed with
+magnetic gifts; by necessity of sex, a realist and diviner, she lives
+nearest the cardinal facts of existence, instinct with the mysteries of
+love and fate; a romance ever attaching itself to her name and destiny.
+Entering the school of sensibility with life, she seizes personal
+qualities by a subtlety of logic overleaping all deductions of the
+slower reason; her divinations touching the quick of things as if
+herself were personally part of the chemistry of life itself. We cannot
+conceive her as distinct, distant, unrelated, she seems so personal,
+concrete, so near; yet can never come quite up to her discernments, nor
+gainsay their delicacy and truthfulness. Then constancy, fidelity,
+fortitude, kindness, gratitude, grace, courtesy, discretion, taste,
+conversation, the adornments of life, were bare names without the
+splendor of illustration of which the history of the sex affords so many
+brilliant examples. It seems as if in moulding his world the Creator
+reserved his choicest work till the last, and consummated his art in her
+endowments. Shall our sex confess to some slight in not having been
+mingled more freely of her essence, that so we too might have had access
+to the crypts into which she is privileged by birthright to enter? Hers
+is the way of persuasion, of service, forbearance:
+
+  "If thou dost anything confer that's sweet,
+  In me a grateful relish it shall meet,
+  But if thy bounties thou dost take away,
+  The least repining word I will not say."
+
+As there was only solitude till she brought company, conversation,
+civility, so stooping still to conquer, she is fast gaining ascendancy
+over passions and prejudices that have held her subservient and their
+victim. Can we doubt the better rule will be furthered indefinitely by a
+partnership in power thus intimate and acknowledged by States? What
+ideal republics have fabled, ours is to be. Nor need we fear the boldest
+experiments which the moral sense of the best women conceive and
+advocate. Certainly liberty is in danger of running into license while
+woman is excluded from exercising political as well as social restraint
+upon its excesses. Nor is the state planted securely till she possess
+equal privileges with man of forming its laws and taking a becoming part
+in their administration. No jury of men, however honorable or wise, are
+equal to pronounce upon questions relating to woman; questions involving
+considerations that concern the whole structure, not only of society,
+but of humanity itself. The public morals are insecure till the family
+is chastely planted, the state guarded by the continency of its male
+members.
+
+A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of
+women. He cannot be any man's friend nor his own if not hers. Either
+nature dealt coldly by him in his descent, else he is the victim of
+vices which his passions have inflamed till they have their own way with
+him.
+
+  "They meet but with unwholesome springs,
+    And summers which infectious are;
+  They hear but when the mermaid sings,
+    And only see the falling star
+      Who ever dare
+  Affirm no woman chaste and fair."
+
+The very name of woman becomes soiled if we seek to be related to her by
+the coarse ties of appetite, instead of the tender threads of affection,
+the charm of ideas. There are pleasures for keeping as enjoying,--for
+using delicately, the zest lasting long, the more affluent when tasted
+with moderation and seldom.
+
+  "Who can to love more rich gift make
+  Than to love's self, for love's own sake?
+  Love, that imports in every sense delight,
+  Is fancied in the soul, not appetite:
+  Why love among the virtues is scarce known
+  Is that love is them all contract in one."
+
+
+III.--FAMILY.
+
+  "How fruitful may the smallest circle grow
+  When we the secret of its culture know."
+
+Here is room enough, however humble and unfurnished, for the most
+expansive friendships, the purest delights, the noblest labors; for
+where women are, there open forth all possibilities of culture.
+
+  Here high o'er head of spiteful fate,
+  Jove cradles safe the ideal state.
+
+"A married life is most beautiful. For what other thing can be such an
+ornament to a family as the association of husband and wife? For it must
+not be said that sumptuous edifices, walls covered with pictures, and
+piazzas adorned with stones,--so admired by those who are ignorant of
+the Good; nor yet painted windows, myrtle walks; nor anything else which
+is the subject of astonishment to the stupid,--are the ornaments of a
+family. But the beauty of a household consists in the conjunction of man
+and wife who are united to each other by destiny, are consociated to the
+gods who preside over nuptials, births, and houses; and who accord,
+indeed, with each other, and have all things in common as far as to
+their bodies, or rather their souls themselves;--who exercise a becoming
+authority over their house and servants, are properly solicitous about
+the education of their children and pay an attention to the necessaries
+of life, which is neither expensive nor negligent, but moderate and
+appropriate. For what can be better and more excellent, as the most
+admirable Homer says,
+
+  'Than when at home the husband and the wife
+  Unanimously live.'"
+
+
+  THE GOBLET.
+
+  I drank delights from every cup,
+  Arts, institutions, I drank up;
+  Athirst, I quaffed life's flowing bowls,
+  And sipped the flavors of all souls.
+
+  A sparkling cup remained for me,
+  The brimming fount of Family;
+  This I am still drinking,
+  Since, to my thinking,
+  Good wine beads here,
+  Flagons of cheer,
+  Nor laps the soul
+  In Lethe's bowl.
+
+  Wine of immortal power
+  Into my chalice now doth pour;
+  Prevailing wine,
+  Juice of the Nine,
+  Flavored of sods,
+  Vintage of gods;
+  Joyance benign
+  This wondrous wine
+    Ever at call;--
+  Wine maddening none,
+  Wine saddening none,
+    Wine gladdening all,
+  Makes love's cup ruddier glow,
+  Genius and grace its overflow.
+
+  I drained the drops of every cup,
+  Times, institutions I drank up:
+  Still Beauty pours the enlivening wine,
+  Fills high her glass to me and mine;
+  Her cup of sparkling youth,
+  Of love first found, and loyal truth:
+  I know, again I know,
+  Her fill of life and overflow.
+
+When I find my friends are not of the same age as when I first knew
+them, I may conclude myself, not them, to be decaying and losing flavor.
+Still youth and innocency are the sole solvents of all doubts and
+infidelities; the faiths of women and children in friendship, ever fresh
+demonstrations of life's sufficiency and imperishableness. Families
+never die, since they trace their pedigree to Adam the First, who is of
+immortal ancestry. First suckled at our mother's breast our faiths
+survive all subsequent modifications; embrace the friendships we form,
+and color the whole of life. Our intellectual creed may change;
+temperament, calling, social position, fortune, sect, may phrase
+differently the delightful lay she sang to us--its tone still lingers in
+the memory of our affections, holding the heart loyal, and if trusted to
+the end takes us triumphantly through life. "Ever the feminine leadeth
+us on." Every prospect the mother gains is soon commanded by her
+children: our comforts and satisfactions life-long having the voice and
+countenance of woman.
+
+
+IV.--CHILDREN.
+
+  "Heaven lies about us in our infancy."
+
+Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its centre and
+ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted till the children appear in
+the foreground to animate and complete the picture. Without these, the
+world were a solitude, houses desolate, hearts homeless; there were
+neither perspectives, nor prospects; ourselves were not ourselves, nor
+were there a future for us:
+
+  In their good gifts we hopeful see
+  The fairer selves we fain would be.
+
+Socrates comprised all objects of his search in
+
+  "Whate'er of good or ill can man befall
+  In his own house,"
+
+rightly conceiving this to be the seminary of the virtues and foundation
+of states. There it stands, the ornament of the landscape, and for the
+human hospitalities: we cannot render it too attractive. Let it be the
+home of beauty, the haunt of affection, of ideas. Let its chambers open
+eastward admitting the sunshine for our own and children's sake. Do they
+not covet the clear sky, delighting in the blue they left so lately, nay
+cannot wholly leave in coming into nature, whereof they are ever asking
+news? These gay enthusiasts must run eagerly, and never have enough of
+it. How soon the clouds clear away from their faces! How sufficient they
+are to the day, and the joy it brings them! Their poise and plenitude
+rebuke us.
+
+    "Happy those early days when I
+    Shined in my angel infancy;
+    Before I taught my soul to wound
+    My conscience with a sinful sound,
+    Or taught my soul to fancy aught
+    But a white celestial thought,
+    Or had the black art to dispense
+    A several sin to every sense,
+    But felt through all this fleshly dress
+    Bright shoots of everlastingness."
+
+Charming pictures these bright boys, confiding girls, as full of promise
+to themselves as we were at their age; are still, if faithful to the
+beautiful vision. Why else should the flame pale as we come up into
+life, we pleasing ourselves nor others more, perhaps despair of
+maintaining the virtues we espoused so eagerly in our youth? Must we
+
+  "When we've enjoyed our ends then lose them,
+  And all our appetites be but as dreams
+  To laugh at in our ages?"
+
+If this fresh score of years did not deceive us, shall a life of
+threescore, with its deeper glances into the mystery, lead us to doubt
+the longevity of a sentiment of whose imperishableness that life itself
+is the best evidence we need ask? Are we to be left orphans when taken
+from nature's arms, robbed of all that made life desirable before?
+Nature cared for us; Persons failed us, and all unawares we lapsed out
+of our paradise, its gates barred against us.
+
+  "I cannot reach it; and my striving eye
+  Dazzles at it, as at eternity.
+  Were now that chronicle alive,
+  Those white designs which children drive,
+  And the thoughts of each harmless hour,
+  With their content too in my power,
+  Quickly would I make my path even,
+  And by mere playing go to heaven.
+
+  Dear harmless age, the short, swift span
+  Where weeping virtue parts with man;
+  Where love without lust dwells, and bends
+  What way we please, without self-ends:
+  An age of mysteries! which he
+  Must live twice that would God's face see;
+  Where angels guard, and with it play,
+  Angels, which foul men drive away."
+
+'Tis sad to consider how long time is consumed in wiping away the stains
+which had been insinuated into the breast during these earlier years and
+up to coming manhood,--to what we call the maturity of our powers. Life
+is too much for most. So much of age, so little youth; living for the
+most part in the moment, and dating existence by the memory of its
+burdens. Men think they once were not, and fear the like fate may
+overtake them, as if time were older than their minds. 'Tis because we
+always were that we cannot trace our beginnings to the atheism of
+no-being and resolve ourselves into nothing. Children save us. Rather
+are we saved by remaining children, as Christ said.
+
+Have we forgotten how things looked to us when we were young; how the
+dull world the old people lived in seemed to us? 'Twas not ours, nor
+their dry theism; and our fresh hearts whispered reverently:
+
+"Is not your paradise an Inferno? Please never name it. While in Heaven
+I speak not of it: I hum that song to myself. Will you spoil my paradise
+too? Come with me, come, and I will show you Elysium; I know all about
+it; I am not deceived. I feel it to be solid, safe. It makes good its
+pledges always. I have a home of all delights--am admitted when I
+please, while you seem vagabonds and woebegones, bereft of friends, the
+Friend of friends. Am I to quit my present satisfactions for your
+promised joys. Unkind! this taking me from my paradise, unless you
+conduct me to a happier."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+CULTURE.
+
+
+     "O for the coming of that glorious time,
+     When, prizing knowledge as their noblest wealth
+     And best protection, liberal states shall own
+     An obligation on their part to teach
+     Them, who are born to serve her and obey;
+     Binding themselves by statute to secure
+     For all the children whom their soil maintains
+     The rudiments of letters; and to inform
+     The mind with moral and religious truth
+     Both understood and practised--so that none
+     However destitute, be left to drop
+     By timely culture unsustained, or run
+     Into a wild disorder; or be forced
+     To drudge through life without the aid
+     Of intellectual implements and tools;
+     A savage horde among the civilized,
+     A servile band among the lordly free."
+                  WORDSWORTH.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of thistle blooms and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+CULTURE.
+
+
+I.--MODERN TEACHING.
+
+Saxon Alfred decreed that every man who had so much as two hides of
+land, should bring up his children to learning till they were fifteen
+years of age at least, that they might be religious and live happily;
+else, he said, they were but beasts and sots, dangerous to themselves
+and the state. And the state's true glory lies in its calling forth into
+fullest exercise and giving scope and right direction to the gifts of
+its children; seeking out especially and fostering the best born as they
+rise, and training these for educators of the coming generations. The
+Parent of parents, the guardian of all gifts born into it, society
+should neglect none, sequester none from places and honors to which they
+are entitled by birthright of genius or acquirement. Every child, the
+gifted by divine right, is sent to cherish and redeem the race; whom to
+neglect or divert from its aim were base oversight and abuse of the race
+itself. Far too noble, too precious be any to be used for ends merely
+secondary, secular, and thus spoiled for their own and God's intents.
+
+Yet simple as this duty seems, society with all its aims and appliances,
+has not as yet attained the refinement of culture needful to the
+receiving of a child into its bosom, and of educating it to the full
+demands of its endowments. With the child comes the seed of states; the
+family being the nursery of the citizen, the measure of a people's
+civilization. As the homes, so the state; as the parents, so the
+children. Nor has society fathered its functions till all children,
+befriended from the first, are fashioned into the image each is capable
+of attaining. Other goods are but aids to this end; all are necessary
+for educating the human being, since the child is the summary of all
+gifts, and the most precious of all trusts committed to the state for
+trial and training.
+
+Yet still the decease of gifts follows fast on their birth, and parents
+are oftener called beside the bier of these children of the sun than to
+their nuptials or coronation. They hold their jubilees in weeds rather;
+and the untimeliness of genius is the tragedy of life as of letters.
+Amidst the sickliness and wane of things, neither poet nor saint
+survives his laurel for more than a day. Far from treating the human
+being with anything like the subtlety and skill displayed by the ancient
+masters, we wait for the first hint of an institution for training youth
+into the fulness of their powers, by the genial touch of sensibility,
+the magnetism of thought. Left instead to the superficial culture of the
+sects, the traditions of the elders, the guidance of worldlings, they
+slide soon into vague conjectures, run adrift on the sea of doubt, the
+shoals of expediency, bereft of faith in themselves as in things unseen
+and ideal.
+
+  "See gifted youths rush out to feed on whims;
+  Fashion craves their hours, low hopes their aim,
+  To win not noble women for their brides,
+  But titled slaves, heirs to some teasing caste,
+  For beauty without culture seems mere show;
+  As if great nature laid not on her tints
+  With more contrivance than the brush of art;
+  Or schools where grammars hide the place of sense,
+  And shallow stammering drowns the native voice."
+
+Not letters but life chiefly educate if we are educatable. But
+experience follows oftenest too late for most and too distant from the
+work to help us directly without an interpreter to assist in making
+timely use of it. Fortunate will it be, if by instinct and mother wit we
+take life at first hand, converting it forthwith into thought and habit.
+Character comes of temperament far more than of acquirement. And the
+most that culture performs is the drawing forth, fashioning and
+polishing the natural gifts. But we cannot create what is not inborn. A
+fine brain is a spiritual endowment, as from the head of Jove sprang
+Minerva. Centuries of culture pass into pure power; piety and genius are
+parents of piety and genius. But less discriminating than were the
+ancient carvers in wood and ivory, who, when they had an order for a
+head of Hermes, or any ordinary god even, searched carefully for
+substances adapted to receive the proper form, states attempt to fashion
+saints and rulers out of any materials that chance brings to hand.
+Omitting mind, or overriding it in our haste to come at immediate and
+superficial results, we ignore ideas and principles altogether. Aiming
+at little we attain little. For while our country opens the freest scope
+for the exercise of the higher gifts of genius and character, we cherish
+these but feebly in our public or private training. The highest prizes
+held forth to youth are not only beneath the aims of a noble ambition,
+but the stimulus for their attainment is wanting. Even in New England,
+culture is external, provincial; neglectful of the better parts of body
+and mind; behind the old countries, that of the ancient states. We cram
+the memory with the lore of foreign tongues, the understanding with a
+medley of learning, leaving fancy, imagination, the moral sentiment,
+mainly to shift for themselves--the forming of the manners, motives,
+aims and aspirations. Then what substitutes have we, for the falconry,
+archery, the hunting, fishing, of earlier and what we deem barbarous
+times? Yet these were sports, heroic and wholesome, giving a national
+coloring and strength of character: the wrestling too, throwing the
+quoit, and other manly games, horsemanship, boating, swimming, were a
+natural gymnastic for body and mind. War also had its advantages. So the
+plays and games were schools of genius and valor: the people were
+refined by contact with the refinements of the best citizens, the
+guardians of public taste and honor providing hereby a polite and manly
+culture suited to the needs of the state. Education extended into the
+age of ripe maturity. Nor was the disciple committed to himself till he
+became the master. And through life he was prompted by incentives of
+virtue and fame. The state was venerable, ennobled as it was by the
+genius and services of great men; great men earning honorably their
+renown by teaching.
+
+  'Tis noble minds who noble men create,
+  And they who have great manners form mankind.
+
+Happy the man who wins the confidence of the rising youth of his time.
+He becomes priest and professor elect without degrees of synods or
+universities. He shapes the future of the next generation as of the
+succeeding. A noble artist he cherishes visions of excellence not easily
+impersonated or spoken. His life and teachings are studies for high
+ideals.
+
+
+II.--SOCRATIC DIALECTIC.
+
+The highest end of instruction is to discipline and liberalize mind and
+character by familiarizing the thoughts with those of the learned and
+wise. Character is inspired by admiration of character, intellect by
+participating in intellect. The masters form masters. And had I the
+choice of my class, I would put Plato's works at once into its hands.
+And, for a beginning,--say the Alcibiades of the earlier Dialogues. I
+know of no discipline under the care of a thoughtful instructor so
+fitting for educating the reason, quickening the moral sense, refining
+the sensibilities, fashioning the manners, ennobling the character, as
+exercises in the Socratic dialectic: opening the whole armory of gifts,
+it sharpens and polishes these for the victories of life. The youth who
+masters Plato wins fairly his degree alike in humanity and divinity. He
+has the key to the mysteries, ancient and modern.[C]
+
+     [Footnote C: "It might be thought serious trifling," says
+     the accomplished Bishop Berkeley, "to tell my readers that
+     the greatest of men had ever a high esteem of Plato, whose
+     writings are the touchstone of a hasty and shallow mind,
+     whose philosophy has been the admiration of ages; which
+     supplied patriots, magistrates and lawgivers to the most
+     flourishing states, as well as fathers of the church and
+     doctors of the schools. Albeit, in these days, the depths of
+     that old learning are rarely fathomed. And yet it were happy
+     for these lands if our young nobility and gentry, instead of
+     modern maxims would imbibe the notions of the great men of
+     antiquity. But in these loose times many an empty head is
+     shook at Aristotle and Plato, as well as the Holy
+     Scriptures. Certainly, where a people are well educated, the
+     art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of
+     Plato."]
+
+Take the following as an example of the pure dialectic method as of
+metaphysic;
+
+     "In what way, asks Socrates, may we attain to know the soul
+     itself with the greatest clearness? for when we know this,
+     it seems we shall know ourselves. Now, in the name of the
+     gods, whether are we not ignorant of the right meanings of
+     that Delphic inscription just now mentioned, 'Know
+     thyself?'"
+
+     _Alcibiades._ What meaning? what have you in your thoughts,
+     Socrates, when you ask the question?
+
+     _Socrates._ I will tell you what I suspect this inscription
+     means, and what particular thing it advises us to do. For a
+     just resemblance of it is, I think, not to be found wherever
+     one pleases, but in only one thing, the sight.
+
+     _Alcibiades._ How do you mean?
+
+     _Socrates._ Consider it jointly with me. Were a man to
+     address himself to the outward human eye, as it were some
+     other man; and were he to give it this counsel, "See
+     yourself," what particular thing should we suppose that he
+     advises the eye to do? Should we not suppose that it was to
+     look at such a thing as that the eye by looking at it, might
+     see itself?
+
+     _Alcibiades._ Certainly we should.
+
+     _Socrates._ What kind of thing then do we think of by
+     looking at which we see things at which we look, and at the
+     same time see ourselves?
+
+     _Alcibiades._ 'Tis evident, Socrates, that for this purpose
+     we must look at mirrors and other things of like kind.
+
+     _Socrates._ You are right. And has not the eye itself, with
+     which we see, something of the same kind belonging to it?
+
+     _Alcibiades._ Most certainly it has.
+
+     _Socrates._ You have observed then, that the face of the
+     person who looks in the eye of another person, appears
+     visible to himself in the eye of the person opposite to him,
+     as in a mirror. And we therefore call this the pupil,
+     because it exhibits the image of that person who examines
+     it.
+
+     _Alcibiades._ What you say is true.
+
+     _Socrates._ The eye beholding an eye and looking in the most
+     excellent part of it in that which it sees, may thus see
+     itself?
+
+     _Alcibiades._ Apparently so.
+
+     _Socrates._ But if the eye look at any other part of the
+     man, or at anything whatever, except what this part of the
+     eye happens to be like, it will not see itself.
+
+     _Alcibiades._ It is true.
+
+     _Socrates._ If therefore the eye would see itself, it must
+     look in an eye, and in that place of the eye, too, where the
+     virtue of the eye is naturally seated; and the virtue of the
+     eye is sight.
+
+     _Alcibiades._ I am aware that it is so.
+
+     _Socrates._ Whether then is it not true, my friend
+     Alcibiades, that the soul if she know herself, must look at
+     soul, and especially at that place in the soul in which
+     wisdom, the virtue of the soul, is ingenerated, and also at
+     whatsoever else this virtue of the soul resembles?
+
+     _Alcibiades._ To me, Socrates, it seems true.
+
+     _Socrates._ Do we know of any place in the soul more divine
+     than that which is the seat of knowledge and intelligence?
+
+     _Alcibiades._ We do not.
+
+     _Socrates._ This, therefore, in the soul resembles the
+     divine nature. And a man, looking at this, and realizing all
+     that which is divine and God and wisdom, would gain the most
+     knowledge of himself.
+
+     _Alcibiades._ It is apparent.
+
+     _Socrates._ And to know one's self we acknowledge to be
+     wisdom.
+
+     _Alcibiades._ By all means.
+
+     _Socrates._ Shall we not say, therefore, that as mirrors are
+     clearer, purer, and more splendid than that which is most
+     analogous to a mirror in the eye, in like manner, God is
+     purer and more splendid than that which is best in our soul?
+
+     _Alcibiades._ It is likely, Socrates.
+
+     _Socrates._ Looking therefore at God, we should make use of
+     him as the most beautiful mirror, and among human concerns
+     we should look at the virtue of the soul, and thus by so
+     doing shall we especially see and know our very self.
+
+     _Alcibiades._ Yes.
+
+And yet knowing the fascinations that beset gifted young men, one might
+say to them at parting, as Socrates did to the accomplished Alcibiades,
+when the latter intimated that he would begin thenceforward to cultivate
+the science of justice:
+
+     "I wish you may persevere. But I am terribly afraid for you;
+     not that I in the least distrust the goodness of your
+     disposition; but perceiving the torrent of the times, I fear
+     you may be borne away with it, in spite of your own
+     resistance and all my endeavors in your aid."
+
+
+III.--PYTHAGOREAN DISCIPLINE.
+
+Let us see, too, how wisely the great master Pythagoras went to his
+work.
+
+"He prepared his disciples for learning by many trials; for he did not
+receive into the number of his associates any who came to him till he
+had subjected them to various examinations. In the first place, he
+inquired after what manner they associated with their parents and
+relations generally; next, he surveyed their unreasonable laughter,
+their silence, their speaking when it was not proper; and farther,
+still, what were their desires, their intimacies with their companions,
+their conversation; how they employed their leisure time, and what were
+the subjects of their joy and grief. He likewise surveyed their form,
+their gait, gestures and whole motion of their body, their voice,
+complexion and physiognomy, considering all these natural indications to
+be the manifest signs of the unapparent manners of the soul.
+
+Having thus subjected them to this scrutiny, he next suffered them to
+pass a good while seemingly unobserved by him, that he might the better
+judge of each one how he was disposed towards stability and a love of
+learning, and whether he was sufficiently fortified against the
+flatteries of popularity and false honor and glory. After this, he
+advised such to maintain a long silence, that he might observe how far
+they were disposed towards continence in speech, and that most difficult
+of all victories--the victory over the tongue. Thus practically he made
+trial of their aptitudes to be educated, for he was as anxious that they
+should be modest and discreet, as that they should not speak
+unadvisedly. He likewise directed his attention to every other
+particular, such as whether they were astonished at the outbreaks of
+immoderate passion and desire. Nor did he superficially consider how
+they were affected by these; or whether they were contentious or
+ambitious, or how they were disposed as to friendship and strife. And if
+on his surveying all these particulars accurately, they appeared to him
+endued with worthy manners, he next directed his attention to their
+facility in learning and memory; first whether they were able to follow
+what was said with rapidity and perspicuity; and in the next place,
+whether a certain love and temperance attracted them to the disciplines
+by which they were taught; whether they loved to learn and to be
+governed; also how they were disposed as to gentleness, which he called
+elegance of manners; conceiving all ferocity of temper as hostile to his
+mode of education. For impudence, shamelessness, intemperance,
+slothfulness, slowness of learning, unrestrained licentiousness,
+disgrace and the like, are attendants of savage manners, but the
+contrary of these are gentleness and mildness.
+
+Of food he held that whatsoever obstructs divination should be shunned.
+And that the juvenile age should make trial of temperance--this being
+alone of all the virtues alike adapted to youths and maidens, and
+comprehends the good both of body and mind, and also the desire for the
+most excellent studies and pursuits. Boys he thought were especially
+dear to divinity, and he exhorted women to use words of good omen
+through the whole of life, and to endeavor that others may predict good
+things of them. He paid great attention to the health of body and mind,
+using unction and the bath often, wrestling, leaping with weights in the
+hands, also pantomimes with a view to strengthening the body, selecting
+for this purpose opposite exercises.
+
+Music he thought contributed greatly to health, as well as to purifying
+the heart and manners, and he called it a medicine when he so used it,
+conceiving that each faculty had its particular melody. He placed in the
+middle a player on the lyre, and seated around him were those who were
+able to sing. And when the person struck the lyre, they sang certain
+pæans, through which they were sure to be delighted, and to become
+orderly and graceful, and he had melodies devised as remedies against
+the passions, as anger, despondency, complaint, inordinate desire and
+the rest, which afforded the greatest relief to these distempers of the
+soul. He likewise used dancing, walking and conversation.
+
+Rulers, who received their country from the multitude of citizens as a
+common deposit, were to transmit it faithfully to their posterity as a
+hereditary possession; their language was to be such as to render them
+worthy of belief without an oath. And as parents, they were so to manage
+their domestic affairs as to make the government of them the object of
+deliberate choice, being kindly disposed towards their offspring, as
+they were the only animals that were susceptible of moral obedience. And
+they were to associate with their wives as companions for life, being
+mindful that other compacts were engraved on tablets and pillars, but
+those with wives were inserted in children, and that they should
+endeavor to be beloved by them, not through nature alone, of which they
+were not the causes, but through choice; for this was voluntary
+beneficence; they remembering, also, that they received their wives from
+the vestal hearth with libations, and brought them home as if they were
+suppliants of the gods themselves.
+
+By orderly conduct and temperance, they were to be examples both to
+their families and the city in which they lived, revering beautiful and
+worthy manners, expelling sluggishness from all their actions,
+opportunity being the chief good in all. Separation of parents and
+children from one another was the greatest of injuries both to
+themselves and the State. Youths and virgins were to be educated in
+labor and exercises conducing to health, using food convenient thereto,
+and in a temperate and tolerant life. Of things in human life, there
+were many in which to be late conversant was best. A boy was to be so
+educated and fed, as not to have the desires awakened till the nuptial
+hour. Parents benefited their children prior to their birth, and were
+the causes of their good conduct afterwards. Hence the children owed
+them as many thanks as a dead man would owe to him who should be able to
+restore him back to life. And they were to associate with one another in
+such a manner as not be in a state of hostility, and be easily
+reconciled after any disputes, exhibiting a modesty of behavior to their
+elders, benevolent dispositions towards parents and love and regard to
+all deserving these. All who aspired after true glory, were to be such
+in reality as they wished to appear to be to others. The most pure and
+unadulterated character was that of him who gave himself to the
+contemplation and practice of the most beautiful things, and was a lover
+as well as student of wisdom.
+
+It was by disciplines and inventions like these that he sought to heal
+and purify the soul, to revive and save its divine part, and thus
+conduct to the intelligible One its divine Eye, which is better worth
+saving than ten thousand corporeal eyes: since by its sight alone when
+thus strengthened and clarified, the truth pertaining to all beings is
+clearly perceived."
+
+
+IV.--MOTHER TONGUE.
+
+  "Let foreign nations of their language boast
+    What fine variety each tongue affords,
+  I like our language as our men and coast,
+    Who cannot dress it well want wit not words."
+
+"Great, verily," says Camden, "was the glory of our tongue before the
+Norman conquest, in this, that the old English could express most aptly
+all the conceptions of the mind in their own speech without borrowing
+from any."
+
+We still draw from the same wells of meaning as did Chaucer and Camden;
+the language, by additions from foreign sources, as by native growth,
+having now become the most composite of any; it is the one we speak, and
+affect to teach. If we have few masters, it is because we yet cultivate
+other tongues at its cost. Scholars praise the exceeding richness and
+beauty of the best writers of the age of Elizabeth, but fail to inform
+us by what happy chances, whether by force of genius altogether, or more
+natural methods of study, the language and literature came to its prime
+in that period. Meanwhile it were not amiss for us to listen to the
+great authors and teachers of those golden days when our tongue had the
+sweep and splendor, the force, depth, accuracy, the grace and
+flexibility proper to its genius and idiom, if we may learn from these
+authorities by what method they attained to their proficiency in its
+use; instructors of Princes, as they were, and inspirers of those who
+made the literature.
+
+Roger Ascham--Queen Elizabeth's school-master--proposed after teaching
+the common rudiments of grammar to begin a course of double translation,
+first from Latin into English, and shortly after from English into
+Latin, correcting the mistakes of the student and leading to the
+formation of a classical style, by pointing out the differences between
+the re-translation and the original, and explaining their reasons. "His
+whole system is built upon the principle of dispensing as much as
+possible with the details of grammar, and he supports his theory by a
+triumphant reference to its practical effects, especially as displayed
+in the case of Queen Elizabeth, whose well known proficiency in Latin,
+he declares to have been obtained without grammatical rules, after the
+very simplest had been mastered."
+
+Sir Philip Sidney, whose opinions are of the highest importance in these
+matters, speaking in his "Defence of Poesie," says:
+
+"Another will say that English wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that
+praise that it wants not grammar; for grammar it might have, but needs
+not, being so easie in itselfe and so void of those cumbersome
+differencies of cases, genders, moods and tenses, which I think was a
+piece of the tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to
+schoole to learn his mother tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and
+properly the conceit of the minde which is the end of speech, that it
+hath equally with any other tongue in the world."[D]
+
+     [Footnote D: "We learn languages," says Luther, "much better
+     by way of mouth at home, in the street, than out of books.
+     Letters are dead words; the utterances of the mouth, are
+     living words, which in writing can never stand forth so
+     distinct and excellent, as the soul of man bodies them forth
+     through the mouth. Tell me where was there ever a language,
+     which men could learn to speak with correctness and
+     propriety by the rules of grammar. Yet let none think or
+     conclude from all this, that I would reject the grammars
+     altogether."]
+
+Milton, to whom, next to Shakespeare our tongue owes most, and who spent
+much time in compiling an English Dictionary, writes in one of his
+Italian Letters:
+
+"Whoever in a state, knows how to form wisely the manners and men and to
+rule them at home and in war, by excellent institutions, him in the
+first place above all others I should esteem worthy of honor. But next
+to him, the man who strives in maxims and rules the method and habit of
+speaking and writing derived from a good age of the nation, and as it
+were to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, the daring to
+overleap which a law only short of that of Romulus should be used to
+prevent. Should we choose to compare the two in respect to utility, it
+is the former alone that can make the social existence of the citizens
+just and holy, but it is the latter that makes it splendid and
+beautiful, which is the next thing to be desired. The one, as I believe,
+supplies a noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy invading
+the territory; the other takes to himself the task of extirpating and
+defeating by means of a learned detective police of ears, and a
+light-infantry of good authors, that barbarism which makes large inroads
+upon the minds of men and is a destructive intestine enemy to genius.
+Nor is it to be considered of small importance what language, pure or
+corrupt, a people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in
+speaking it--a matter which oftener than once was the salvation of
+Athens. Nay, as it is Plato's opinion, that, by a change in the manner
+and habit of dress, serious commotions and mutations are portended in a
+commonwealth, I, for my part, would rather believe that the fall of that
+city, and low and obscure condition, followed on the general vitiation
+of its usage in the matter of speech. For let the words of a country be
+in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear,
+and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare but by no light
+indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent,
+idly-yawning race, with minds already prepared for any amount of
+servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any
+state, did not flourish in at least a middling degree as long as its
+liking and care for its language lasted."
+
+Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very
+remarkable felicities of expression. If we consult our experience we
+shall find that we owe much to the home dialect, the school, the books
+we read, the letters we write; to our fellowships, the practice of such
+living speakers and writers as chance threw in our way, our habits of
+thinking, observations of life and things, the cultivation of the
+sensibilities, imagination, the common sense, more than all else
+besides. A man's speech is the measure of his culture; a graceful
+utterance the first born of the arts.
+
+Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly; books and
+colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon, of
+mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars: actual contact
+with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as these rise and roll. And
+whoever will strike bold strokes for institutions and literature, must
+be often afoot with nature and thought in his eye for grasping the
+select rhetoric for his theme.
+
+[Illustration: Small decoration of a mask]
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+BOOKS.
+
+
+                     "As great a store
+     Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more,
+     And the great task to try them, know the good,
+     To discern weeds and judge of wholesome food,
+     Is a rare scant performance."
+                             DANIEL.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of a bee among flowers and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS.
+
+
+Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select the
+more enjoyable; and like these are approached with diffidence, nor
+sought too familiarly nor too often, having the precedence only when
+friends tire. The most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times,
+in all moods, they frankly declare the author's mind, without giving
+offence. Like living friends they too have their voice and
+physiognomies, and their company is prized as old acquaintances. We seek
+them in our need of counsel or of amusement, without impertinence or
+apology, sure of having our claims allowed. A good book justifies our
+theory of personal supremacy, keeping this fresh in the memory and
+perennial. What were days without such fellowship? We were alone in the
+world without it. Nor does our faith falter though the secret we search
+for and do not find in them will not commit itself to literature, still
+we take up the new issue with the old expectation, and again and again,
+as we try our friends after many failures at conversation, believing
+this visit will be the favored hour and all will be told us. Nor do I
+know what book I can well spare, certainly none that has admitted me,
+though it be but for the moment and by the most oblique glimpse, into
+the mind and personality of its author; though few there are that prefer
+such friendly claim to one's regard, and satisfy expectation as he turns
+their leaves. Our favorites are few; since only what rises from the
+heart reaches it, being caught and carried on the tongues of men
+wheresoever love and letters journey.
+
+Nor need we wonder at their scarcity or the value we set upon them;
+life, the essence of good letters as of friendship, being its own best
+biographer, the artist that portrays the persons and thoughts we are,
+and are becoming. And the most that even he can do, is but a chance
+stroke or two at this fine essence housed in the handsome dust, but too
+fugitive and coy to be caught and held fast for longer than the passing
+glance; the master touching ever and retouching the picture he leaves
+unfinished.
+
+  "My life has been the poem I would have writ,
+  But I could not both live and utter it."
+
+I find books like persons more attractive as they are the more
+suggestive, more mythical and difficult to render at once to the senses,
+and enjoy them the more for this blending of nature with mind,--the text
+sparkling with the author's personality. What is thus implied is more
+gracefully delivered than if written literally; it piques then the fancy
+more and calls the higher gifts into play; and an author best serves me
+who, speaking alike to imagination and reason, arms with figures apt for
+occasions, thus pluming the genius for discourse. And the like may be
+said of the dictionaries: opened at hazard in lively moods, the columns
+become charged with thought, as if each word were blood-wise and fleshed
+with meaning. Again, books professing system and completeness are wont
+to be dry and unprofitable save for their facts and inferences; truth
+the flowing essence of things, the substance of being, accosting the
+mind most gracefully as a flowing form, fixed for the moment of passing
+only in the mind's eye, and is studied to best advantage rather in books
+of biography and poetry than of history or science, wherein the
+personality is oftenest lost in abstractions of fact. Reading, like
+conversation, is an idealism most profitable as it calls imagination
+into play, and thus leads forth all other gifts.
+
+Books of table-talk have this advantage over most others; being the best
+companions for the moment, they can be taken up and laid down without
+loss, and when sensible are best whetstones for the wits. With the
+essayists, the poets, books of letters and lives, one's library were
+always alive and inviting. Good for moments these are always good: we
+may open by chance, dip anywhere, read in any order, begin at the last
+paragraph and read backward as well; obvious consecutiveness being of
+less consequence. Nor do I find the logic the worse when thus seemingly
+broken and obscure, since each paragraph is a unit standing apart yet
+all related in the perspective which the reader commands. We could not
+spare from our galaxy the great essayists and moralists, Pliny,
+Plutarch, Xenophon, Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,
+Montaigne, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne Cowley, Coleridge, and the rest;
+each delineating in his proper way that antique faith in man and the
+world, which being one and universal in essence, unites all mankind. We
+know the history of these pieces of life, these experiences recorded for
+us by their inspired authors, as if themselves were scribes of the
+spirit and committed it to letters for our especial benefit.
+
+Any library is an attraction. And there is an indescribable delight--who
+has not felt it that deserves the name of scholar--in mousing at choice
+among the alcoves of antique book-shops especially, and finding the
+oldest of these sometimes newest of the new, fresher, more suggestive
+than the book just published and praised in the reviews. Nor is the
+pleasure scarcely less of cutting the leaves of the new volume, opening
+by preference at the end rather than title-page, and seizing the
+author's conclusions at a glance. Very few books repay the reading in
+course. Nor can we excuse an author if his page does not tempt us to
+copy passages into our common places, for quotation, proverbs,
+meditation, or other uses. A good book is fruitful of other books; it
+perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its
+readers.
+
+One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books,
+though preparation is necessary to profitable reading; and the less
+reading is better than more;--book-struck men are of all readers least
+wise, however knowing or learned.
+
+          "Books cannot make the mind,
+    Which we must bring apt to be set aright,
+  Yet do they rectify it in that kind
+    And touch it so as that they turn that way
+  Where judgment lies. And though we may not find
+    The certain place of truth, yet do they stay
+  And entertain us near about the same,
+    And give the soul the best delight that may
+  Encheer it most, and make our spirits enflame
+    To thoughts of glory and to worthy deeds."
+
+Moreover for gifts, what so gracefully bestowed as fitting books
+conveying what no words of the giver could convey? Were the history of
+the few books of the heart published, what more enduring compliment
+would this confer on their authors! Perhaps the finest books have least
+fame and find but a few choice readers. 'Tis high praise bestowed on an
+author that his book is taken up with love and expectation, we coming to
+his page again and again without disappointment. To be enjoyable a book
+must be wholesome like nature, and flavored with the religion of wisdom.
+
+Books of letters bring the reader nearest to the life and personality of
+the writer:
+
+  "For more than kisses letters mingle souls,
+  For then friends absent meet."
+
+Written with this advantage of perspective, the epistle is oftentimes
+more acceptable than were the interview, more discreet and opportune,
+since committing ourselves to the writing with a kind of reserved
+abandonment, if I may thus characterize our mood, which in conversation
+we might naturally overleap, we give that only in which another may
+modestly sympathize and share--so shading our egotism as to tell all
+about ourselves with the delicacy of self-respect without wounding that
+of others. Epistolary correspondence is the most difficult and delicate
+of all composition. And this perhaps accounts for the few books of the
+kind in our or any language; and the best of these mostly written by
+women who give themselves heartily to sentiment. One may think himself
+fortunate if the gift be his, and his experience find expression in his
+correspondence. Perhaps the diary has this advantage over letters; we
+make it our confidant committing to its leaves what we would not to
+another; sure of the sacred trust being kept for us. And the most
+interesting biographies are composed largely of these. The more
+autobiographical the more attractive. The keeping of a journal is an
+education. Let every one try his hand at one and begin young. If it get
+the best of his hours and an autobiography out of him, neither his time
+has been misspent nor has he lived in vain. A life worth living is worth
+recording. To what end lives any, if he fail of getting apparent order
+at least into it; living in a manner worthy of celebrity? Life were poor
+enough that does not organize the chaos and bring the joy of creation,
+pronouncing it and all things good, excellence ever falling naturally
+into order and melody. Let one value above all literary fame the gift of
+seizing and portraying his privatest thought,--the homely furnitures and
+primogenitures,--and if but partially successful consider himself as
+having attained the fairest laurels the muse has to bestow. As the best
+fruits of the season fall latest and keep the longest, so those of a
+lifetime; and fortunate is he whose genius thus gathers his choicest
+samples housed carefully in a book for any who may relish their flavor.
+
+One cannot be well read unless well seasoned in thought and experience.
+Life makes the man. And he must have lived in all his gifts and become
+acclimated herein to profit by his readings. Living at the breadth of
+Shakspeare, the depth of Plato, the height of Christ, gives the mastery,
+or if not that, a worthy discipleship. Life alone divines life. We read
+as we live; the book being for us the deeper or the shallower as we are.
+If read from the reason, it answers to the reason, but fails of finding
+imagination, the moral sentiment, the affections, fails of making valid
+its claims upon the deepest instincts of the heart,--those critics of
+inspiration and interpreters,--all books owing their credibility to the
+fact of being written from, and addressed to these, as eye-witnesses and
+sponsors. Mothers of our mothers we are ever at their teats. Most owe
+more to tradition than to culture or literature; the best of literature
+as of nurture, being still largely tinctured with tradition. Our debt to
+the Hebrew scriptures has been greater doubtless than to any literature
+hitherto accessible to us of the Saxon stock; greater than to all
+foreign literatures besides. And now the instincts prompt thoughtful
+minds as never before to explore the prime sources and drink freely at
+the fountains.
+
+  "Are mouldy records now the living springs,
+  Whose healing waters slake the thirst within?
+        Oh! never yet hath mortal drank
+        A draught restorative
+  That well'd not from the depths of his own soul."
+
+Very desirable it were since the gates of the East are now opening wide
+and giving the free commerce of mind with mind, to collect and compare
+the Bibles of the races for general circulation and careful reading. For
+still out of the Theban night rays the light of our day and blends with
+all our thinking and doing--China, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Palestine,
+Greece, Rome, Britain--the christendom and world of to-day.
+
+  Why nibbling always where
+  Ye nothing fresh can find
+    Upon those rocks?
+
+  Lo! meadows green and fair!
+  Come pasture here your mind,
+    Ye bleating flocks.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+COUNSELS.
+
+
+     "Counsel is not so sacred a thing as praise, since the
+     former is only useful among men, but the latter is for the
+     most part reserved for the gods."--PYTHAGORAS.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of a butterfly among leaves]
+
+
+
+
+COUNSELS.
+
+
+I.--RELIGIOUS.
+
+  "Who shapes his Godhead out of flesh or stone,
+  Knows not a God; but he who lives like one."
+
+Know, that seeing you, I divine your gods also. Why name them then one
+by one so sentimentally and so often? Being yours individually, so
+unmistakably in your image, surely none needs question or desire them. A
+thousand thanks if you will lisp never a syllable more about them. As I
+treat them civilly by my silence, why persist thus pertinaciously in
+thrusting their claims upon my attention and then questioning my piety
+for not christening them? O! rare respecting silence, deep is the
+religion that fathoms thine; speaking most reverently when deepest, and
+divining mysteries that none names devoutly. What if the sacred name
+were the silent syllable in the saint's devotions, and he
+
+  "One of the few, who in his town
+  Honors all preachers, is his own?
+  Sermons ne'er hears, or not so many
+  As leaves no time to practise any?--
+  Hears, ponders reverently, and then
+  His practice preaches o'er again.
+  His parlor sermons rather are
+  Those to the eye than to the ear;
+  His prayers taking price and strength
+  Not from their loudness nor their length:
+  His murmurs have their music too,
+  Ye mighty pipes, as well as you;
+    Nor yields the noblest nest
+  Of warbling seraphim to the ears of love
+  A choicer lesson, than the joyful breast
+    Of some poor panting turtle dove."
+
+One sometimes thinks silence for a century were most worshipful since
+speech babbles so badly. Has not harlequin in bands and book played out
+his part the world over?--the drawl of sacred names been heard till
+sacred names seem profane, and it were devout to fall into silence about
+them more eloquent than any speeches about sanctity? If infidelity,
+indifference, scepticism, sweep secretly the breadth and depths of
+Christendom, 'tis but the binding spell of these superstitions about the
+name of One whom the love and admiration of all good men hold precious
+and will not let perish from love and remembrance.
+
+  What were Christ Jesus' life and gospel sweet,
+  If not in loving hearts he fix his holy seat?
+
+If one's life is not worshipful, no one cares for his professions. Piety
+is a sentiment: the more natural it is, the wholesomer. Nor is there
+piety where charity is wanting. "If one love not his brother whom he
+hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen." None are deceived
+as to the spirit of their acquaintances: the instinct of every village,
+every home, intimates true character. We recognize goodness wherever we
+find it. 'Tis the same helpful influence, beautifying the meanest as the
+greatest service by its manners, doing most when least conscious, as if
+it did it not.
+
+    "A man's best things are nearest him,
+        Lie at his feet;
+    It is the distant and the dim
+        That we are sick to greet."
+
+Let us have unspoken creeds and these quick and operative. I wish mine
+to be so, for though it embosoms doctrines fit to shine in words, it
+seems most becoming to publish truths thus vital by example rather,
+sentiments so private shrinking from the frost of distrust, the heat of
+controversy. Personal in their traits and colored with individual hues,
+they court the confidences of silence, and are unspeakable.
+
+One needs but brighten his eyes to look deep into the depths of his
+heart and settle all disputes. Enlarge by a thought our view, exalt it
+by a sentiment, we find all men of our creed; or, far better, superior
+to party or creed. The uprise of an idea, perception of a principle,
+makes many one and inseparable. The liberal mind is of no sect; it shows
+to sects their departures from the ideal standard, and thus maintains
+pure religion in the world. But there are those whose minds, like the
+pupil of the eye, contract as the light increases. 'Tis a poor egotism
+that sees only its own image reflected in its vision. "Only as thou
+beest it thou seest it." How differently the different sects interpret
+the scriptures, each according to its light and training! I imagine our
+Bible is more loosely read, least understood of any book in the English
+tongue: conceive a fresh generation coming to its perusal as to a volume
+just issued in modern type from a popular bookstore and reviewed in the
+journals. How better acquit ourselves to the Bibles of the world than by
+fairly measuring our private convictions with their spirit and
+teachings? Let us first acquaint ourselves with these Records of
+Revelation before we claim for ours the merit of being the only inspired
+volume; ourselves the favored people--as if the Truth were a
+geographical resident dwelling in our neighborhood only.
+
+    When thou approachest to The One,
+      Self from thyself thou first must free,
+    Thy cloak duplicity cast clean aside,
+      And in the Being's Being Be.
+
+One does not like to disturb the faith of his neighbors, yet cannot
+speak truly on religious themes without touching the sensibilities of
+the weak, and sometimes wounding where he sought sympathy and support.
+It takes a good man to speak tenderly of matters of faith and practice
+in which good people have been bred, their hearts being prompt to feel
+and act without questioning the head. Precious souls, if not overwise,
+or strong for reform; the weak saints being as formidable impediments as
+the strong sinners, both blocking the ways to amendment. But
+temperament, inborn tendencies, predispositions, determine one's cast of
+thinking or no-thinking, and go far to shape his religious opinions. Our
+instincts, faithfully drawn out and cherished by purity of life, lead to
+Theism as their flower and fruit. If swayed by the senses we are natural
+Pantheists, at best idolaters and unbelievers in the Personal Mind. The
+passions prevailing, incline us to Atheism, or some superstition ending
+in scepticism, and indifference to all religious considerations.
+
+  "Some whom we call virtuous, are not so
+  In their whole substance, but their virtues grow
+  But in their humors, and at seasons show.
+
+  For when through tasteless, flat humility,
+  In dough-baked men some harmlessness we see,
+  'Tis but his phlegm that's virtuous and not he.
+
+  So is the blood sometimes: whoever ran
+  To danger unimportuned, he was then
+  No better than a sanguine, virtuous man.
+
+  So cloistered men, who, on pretence of fear
+  All contributions to this world forbear,
+  Have virtue in melancholy, and only there.
+
+  Spiritual, choleric critics, who in all
+  Religions find fault, and forgive no fall,
+  Have through their zeal virtue but in their gall.
+
+  We're thus but parcel gilt, to gold we're grown
+  When virtue is our soul's complexion--
+  Who knows his virtue's name or place has none."
+
+
+II.--PERSONAL.
+
+Persist in being yourself, and against fate and yourself. Faith and
+persistency are life's architects, while doubt and despair bury all
+under the ruins of any endeavor. You may pull all your paradises about
+your ears save your earliest; that is to be yours sometime. Strive and
+have; still striving till striving is having. We mount to heaven mostly
+on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were
+successes. Nor need we turn sour if we fail to draw the prizes in life's
+lottery. It were the speck in the fruit, the falling of our manliness
+into decay. These blanks were all prizes had we the equanimity to take
+them without whimpering or discontent. The calamities we suffer arise
+not from circumstances chiefly, but from ourselves. If the dose is
+nauseous or bitter, 'tis because we are, else it were not drank off with
+the disgust we manifest. Sweet, bitter or sour,--we taste one thing in
+everything tasted, and that is ourselves. Could each once be clean
+delivered of himself how salutary were all things and sufficing. "'Tis
+in morals as in dietetics, one cannot see his fault till he has got rid
+of it."
+
+Only virtue is fame; nor is it forward in sounding its own praises,
+being sure that merit never sleeps untold, nor dies without honors. It
+cannot: once lived and whispered ever so faintly in private places, it
+publishes itself in spite of every concealment and sometime blazes its
+fame abroad by myriads of trumpets. The light trembling in the socket of
+bashfulness, or hidden under the bushel of misapprehension, or
+inopportunity, flames forth at fitting moment, irradiates the world
+thereafter forever, streaks the dawn, as a visitation of the day-spring
+from on high.
+
+It is as ignoble to go begging conditions as to go begging bread. If too
+feeble, too proud or unapt to create these, one may make up his mind to
+dispense with any advantage that power on that side of life confers. Not
+a circumstance, like the animal whose place in nature is determined, but
+a creator of circumstances, man brings to his help freedom, opportunity,
+art, to build a world out of the world in harmony with his wants. If his
+occupation is spoiling him 'tis the dictate of virtue as of prudence, to
+quit it for one that in maintaining shall enrich him also. He must be a
+bad economist who squanders himself on his maintenance; wasting both his
+days and himself. His gifts are too costly for such cheap improvidence.
+One's character is the task allotted him to form, his faculties the
+implements, his genius the workman, life the engagement, and with these
+gifts of nature and of God, shall he fail to quarry forth from his
+opportunities a man for his heavenly task-master? "The wise man does not
+submit to employments which he may undertake, but accommodates and lends
+himself to them only."
+
+Nor is any man greatest standing apart in his individualism; his
+strength and dignity come by sympathy with the aims of the best men of
+the community of which he is a member. Yet whoever seeks the crowd,
+craving popularity for propping repute, forfeits his claim to reverence
+and expires in the incense he inhales. The truly great stand upright as
+columns of the temple whose dome covers all, against whose pillared
+sides multitudes lean; at whose base they kneel in times of trouble.
+Stand fast by your convictions and there maintain yourself against every
+odds. One with yourself, you are one with Almighty God, and a majority
+against all the world:
+
+     Vox priva, vox Dei.
+
+
+III.--POLITICAL.
+
+  "To God, thy country, and thyself be true,
+   If priest and people change, keep thou thy guard."
+
+Both conformity and nonconformity are alike impracticable. When the
+conformist can stay clean in his conformity, the nonconformist come
+clean out of his nonconformity, it will be time to plead
+self-consistency. Nor let any stay to make proselytes. I have never
+known the followers of either to come clean out of themselves even, but
+casting their tributes to expediency or authority, surrender
+unreservedly to party or sect and sink the man. Born free into free
+institutions, it behooves all to preserve that freedom unimpaired,
+neither intimidated nor bribed by persons or parties: see that these
+take nothing of theirs with consent, least of all that which gives
+consent its dignity and worth,--one's integrity. Good men should not
+obey bad laws too well, lest bad men taking courage from the precedent,
+disobey good ones.
+
+  "Know there's on earth a yet auguster thing,
+  Veiled though it be, than President or King."
+
+The honorable man prefers his privilege of standing uncommitted to
+parties when these fail to represent the whole of honor and justice for
+the state. But when politics become attractive by being principled,
+senates and cabinets the legislators and executives of justice and
+common rights, servants of the High Laws, then, as an honorable man and
+faithful citizen, he is won to the polls to cast a pious and patriotic
+suffrage for having affairs administered through the best men, whom best
+men promote to offices to which their virtues give dignity and
+distinction. There are times nevertheless in one's history when
+abstinence from this first privilege of a freeman and republican, seems
+a duty best performed in its non-performance, the true means of
+preserving self-respect, by standing magnanimously as a protest for the
+right against the wrong--a vote less on the wrong side of a mixed issue,
+being as two cast on the right side, the silent significance of a name
+known as the representative of honor and justice, showing where lies the
+wrong and the shame--the blush of a defeat on the cheek of an ill-gotten
+victory. Of no party properly, a good man votes by his virtues for
+mankind, too just to be claimed by any unless to save it from dishonor.
+
+At best the state's polity is deliberative, ruling the right as far as
+is practicable under the circumstances. Of mixed elements, it contents
+itself with mixed results,--the best permitted under the mixed
+conditions. But the statesman may not compromise principle for the sake
+of accommodating legislation to suit the interests of party. If he ride
+that horse too fearlessly, he is sure to be overthrown. General
+intelligence interposes the effective check upon political ambition and
+carries forward state affairs. But if, unequal to self-government, the
+people have attained to that sense of freedom and no more, which renders
+liberty a snare, then the state stumbles towards a despotism, call the
+rule by any fine name you please. No greater calamity can befall a
+people than that of deliberating long on issues imperilling liberty; any
+impotency of indecision betraying a lapse into slavery from which the
+gravest deliberative wisdom cannot rescue them. Knowingly to put on the
+yoke and wear it restively meanwhile, were a servitude that only slavery
+itself can cure.
+
+          Where sleep the gods
+  There mob-rule sways the state,
+  Treason hath plots and fell debate,
+  Brother doth brother darkly brand,
+  Few faithful midst sedition's storm do stand,
+  The whole of virtue theirs to stay the reeling land.
+
+"States are destroyed, not so much from want of courage as for want of
+virtue, and the most pernicious of all ignorance is, when men do not
+love what they approve; written laws being but images of, or substitutes
+for those true laws which ought to be present in every human soul
+through a perfect insight into good."
+
+
+  THE SOUL'S ERRAND.
+
+  "Go, Soul, the Body's guest,
+    Upon a thankless errand;
+  Fear not to touch the best,
+    The truth shall be thy warrant;
+      Go, since all else must die,
+      And give all else the lie.
+
+  Go tell the Court it glows
+    And shines like rotten wood;
+  Go tell the Church it shows
+    What's good, but does not good:
+      If Court and Church reply,
+      Give Court and Church the lie.
+
+  Tell Potentates they live
+    Acting, but base their actions;
+  Not loved, unless they give,
+    Nor strong, save by their factions:
+      If Potentates reply,
+      Give Potentates the lie.
+
+  Tell men of high condition,
+    That rule affairs of state,
+  Their purpose is ambition,
+    Their practice chiefly hate:
+      And if they do reply,
+      Then give them all the lie.
+
+  Tell those that brave it most,
+    They beg for more by spending;
+  Who, in their greatest cost,
+    Seek nothing but commending:
+      And if they make reply,
+      Spare not to give the lie.
+
+  Tell Zeal it lacks devotion;
+    Tell Love it is but lust;
+  Tell Time it is but motion;
+    Tell Help it is but dust:
+      And wish them no reply,
+      For thou must give the lie.
+
+  Tell Age it daily wasteth;
+    Tell Honor how it alters;
+  Tell Beauty that it blasteth;
+    Tell Favor that she falters:
+      And as they do reply,
+      Give every one the lie.
+
+  Tell Wit how much she wrangles
+    In fickle points of niceness;
+  Tell Wisdom she entangles
+    Herself in over niceness;
+      And if they do reply
+      Then give them both the lie.
+
+  Tell Physic of her boldness;
+    Tell Skill it is pretension;
+  Tell Charity of coldness;
+    Tell Law it is contention;
+      And if they yield reply,
+      Then give them all the lie.
+
+  Tell Fortune of her blindness;
+    Tell Nature of decay;
+  Tell Friendship of unkindness;
+    Tell Justice of delay;
+      And if they do reply,
+      Then give them still the lie.
+
+  Tell Arts they have no soundness,
+    But vary by esteeming;
+  Tell Schools they lack profoundness
+    And stand too much on seeming:
+      If Arts and Schools reply,
+      Give Arts and Schools the lie.
+
+  Tell Faith it's fled the city;
+    Tell how the country erreth;
+  Tell manhood, shakes off pity,
+    Tell Virtue least preferreth;
+      And if they do reply,
+      Spare not to give the lie.
+
+  So when thou hast, as I
+    Commanded thee, done blabbing;
+  Although to give the lie
+    Deserves no less than stabbing;
+      Yet stab at thee who will,
+      No stab the soul can kill."
+
+[Illustration: Small triangular decoration of two stylized fish]
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+SPECULATIVE
+
+
+     "Philosophy is one of the richest presents that man ever
+     received from heaven, being that which raises the mind into
+     the contemplation of eternal things, and is the science
+     which of all others affords the most agreeable
+     entertainment."--EVELYN.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+INSTRUMENTALITIES.
+
+
+     "The age, the present times, are not
+     To snudge in, and embrace a cot;
+     Action and blood now get the game,
+     Disdain treads on the peaceful name:
+     Who sits at home, too, bears a load
+     Greater than those that gad abroad."
+                             HENRY VAUGHAN.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of two mythical animals among leaves]
+
+
+
+
+INSTRUMENTALITIES.
+
+
+I.--TENDENCIES.
+
+Our time is revolutionary. It drifts strong and fast into unitarianism
+and the empire of ideas. All things are undergoing reform and
+reconstruction; the fellowship of all souls intent on laying broad and
+deep the foundations of the new institutions. The firm of Globe Brothers
+& Co., prospers in both hemispheres, every citizen being a partner in
+the concern. The nations are leagued together on the basis of mutual
+assistance, finding the old alliances founded on force and fear to be
+insecure; the people seeing it best to be friends and copartners in
+conducting the world's affairs;--trade the natural knot tying them
+by the coarser wants only; world-politics their bond of union and
+prosperity. No longer playing independent parts safely, they co-operate
+and conspire for the common welfare, interposing such checks as
+each individually requires for his security. Ruling is conducted
+not by legislation nor diplomacy, but by social and commercial
+inter-communication; every man opening out for himself the sphere suited
+to his gifts, and taking his thinking and doing into head and hands as a
+loyal man and citizen. Power is stealing with a speed and momentum
+unprecedented from the few to the many; is played out on a theatre
+world-wide, whole populations taking part in affairs; the distance once
+separating extremes being bridged; middle men with human sympathies and
+broad common-sense taking the lead and setting the old pretensions
+aside. A daring realism overleaping the old barriers gives government
+into the hands of the whole people, rulers being their servants, not
+masters; presidents and kings the representatives of ideas and paying
+loyal homage to these crowned heads; the old virtues of reverence for
+man, fidelity to principle, so venerable and sacred in private stations,
+seeking reappearance in public life.
+
+If once the great, the wise, were in the minority, and none dreamed of
+reason becoming popular, reason is fast becoming republicanized; from
+being the exclusive property of the few is diffusing itself universally
+as the common possession of the multitude.
+
+  Imperial thought now holds her powerful sway,
+  And drives the peoples on their prosperous way.
+
+The freshest, best thoughts of the best minds of all times are claimed
+by the community; itself the awakened critic and prompter of the best;
+all thirsting for information,--world-wisdom,--and drinking off eagerly
+the lore of centuries. Knowledge everywhere diffused is accessible to
+all, rolls with the globe, dashes against the shores of every sea,
+delves the caverns, climbs the hill-tops with sun and moon, for the
+common benefit. If Hesiod wrote for his times that
+
+    "Riches are the soul of feeble men,"
+
+our time is fast translating his line practically:
+
+    Riches are the hand of able men;
+
+Capitalists holding kings and presidents in check while playing the
+better game of civilization, equalizing indirectly by legislative
+philanthropies the extremes--every man's needs being taken as drafts
+drawn by Providence on opulence, to be honored at sight:
+
+    "Stewards of the gods alone
+    Are we; have nothing of our own
+    Save what to us the gods commit,
+    And take away when they see fit."
+
+Once all crimes were capital and punished with death. Now this Draconian
+code has been so meliorated and softened by the diffusion of mercy and
+humanity as to take life for life only; is pleading powerfully for the
+abolition of the death-penalty altogether.
+
+The sects are losing their monopoly in the heavenly luminary, closing no
+longer their brazen cope of darkening doctrines on the religious horizon
+to vitiate the social and political morals of mankind. The faiths of the
+cultivated nations are being revised, Christendom itself drifting with
+irresistible speed and momentum into a world-religion, commensurate with
+the advancing thought of advancing minds everywhere. As the Greeks
+received their Gods from Egypt and Phoenicia, Rome hers from Greece, and
+we ours from Rome, Judea and Britain, by the law of interfusion we are
+ripening into a cosmopolitan faith, with its Pantheon for all races.
+
+
+II.--METHOD.
+
+Ours were a trivial time if busied in building solely from the senses in
+facts of understanding, having nothing ideal to enshrine. Without
+symbols, peoples perish. Things must be exalted into some fair image of
+mind, the senses and gifts magnetized to body forth thoughts; the eye
+beholding these in what the hands fashion. Ideas supplement and
+symbolize facts: the field of realities lying behind unseen; the paddock
+of the common sense being but an enclosure within the immeasurable
+spaces of which thought is royal ranger,--owner of domains far larger
+and richer than these confine or survey, ideal estates which only mind
+can claim; quarries out of which nature itself is hewn, eye and hand are
+shapen. Head and hand should go abreast with thought. If the age of iron
+and bronze has been welding chains and fetters about the forehead and
+limbs, here, too, is the Promethean thought, using the new agencies let
+loose by the Dædalus of mechanic invention in the service of soul as of
+the senses. Having recovered the omnipotence in nature, the
+omnipresence, graded space, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land
+by living wires, stolen the chemistry of the solar ray, made light our
+painter, the lightning our runner, discovered the polar axis, set matter
+on fire, thought is pushing its inquiries into the hitherto unexplored
+regions of man's personality, for whose survey and service every modern
+instrumentality lends the outfit and means--facilities ample,
+unprecedented--new instruments for the new discoveries--new eyes for the
+new spectacles. Using no longer contentedly the fumbling fingers of the
+old circuitous logic, the genius takes the track of the creative
+thought,--intuitively, cosmically, ontologically. A subtler analysis is
+finely discriminated, a broader synthesis generalized from the materials
+accumulated in the mind during the centuries, the globe's contents being
+gathered in from all quarters, the Book of Creation illustrated anew,
+and posted to date. The new calculus is ours. An organon alike
+serviceable to metaphysician and naturalist--whereby things answer to
+thought, facts are resolved into truths, images into ideas, matter into
+mind, power into personality, man into God; the One soul in all souls
+revealed as the Creative Spirit pulsating in all breasts, immanent in
+all atoms, prompting all wills, and personally embosoming all persons in
+one unbroken synthesis of Being.[E]
+
+     [Footnote E: "Truth can be known by the thinking reason. It
+     has been known by speculative thinkers scattered through the
+     ages. Their systems exist and may be mastered. Their
+     differences are not radical, but lie rather in the mode of
+     exposition--the point of departure, the various obstacles
+     overcome, and the character of the _technique_ used. Their
+     agreement is central and pervading. The method of
+     speculative cognition is to be distinguished from that of
+     sensuous certitude, and from the reflection of the
+     understanding by the exhaustive nature of its procedure. It
+     considers its subject in a universal manner and its steps
+     are void of all arbitrariness.
+
+     In order to detect a speculative system, ask the following
+     questions of it: 1. "Is the highest principle regarded as a
+     fixed, abstract, and rigid one, or as a concrete and
+     self-moving one?" 2. "Is the starting point of the system
+     regarded as the highest principle, and the onward movement
+     of the same merely a result deduced analytically; or is the
+     beginning treated as the most abstract and deficient, while
+     the final result is the basis of all?" In other words, "Is
+     the system a descent from a first principle or an ascent to
+     one?" This will detect a defect of the method, while the
+     former question, (1,) will detect defects in the content or
+     subject matter of the system."--WILLIAM T. HARRIS.]
+
+"It has hitherto, unhappily, been the misfortune of the mere
+materialist, in his mania for matter on the one hand and dread of ideas
+on the other, to invert this creative order, and thus hang the world's
+picture as a man with his heels upwards"--a process conducting of
+necessity to conclusions as derogatory to himself as to Nature's author.
+Assuming matter as his basis of investigation, force as father of
+thought, he confounds faculties with organs, life with brute substance,
+piles his atom atop of atom, cements cell on cell, in constructing his
+column, sconce mounting sconce aspiringly as it rises, till his shaft of
+gifts crown itself surreptitiously with the ape's glorified effigy, as
+Nature's frontispiece and head--life's atomy with life omitted
+altogether, man wanting. Contrarywise reads the ideal naturalist the
+book of lives. Opening at Spirit, and thence proceeding to ideas, he
+finds their types in matter, life unfolds itself naturally in organs,
+faculties begetting forces, mind moulding things substantially, its
+connections and interpendencies appear in series and degrees as he
+traces the leaves, thought the key to originals, man connexus,
+archetype, and classifier of things; he, straightway, leading forth
+abreast of himself the animated creation from the chaos,--the primeval
+Adam naming his mates, himself their ancestor, contemporary and
+survivor.[F]
+
+     [Footnote F: "There are four modes of knowledge which we are
+     able to acquire in the present life:
+
+     1. The first of these results from opinion, by which we
+     learn that a thing is, without knowing the why; and this
+     constitutes that part of knowledge which was called by
+     Aristotle and Plato, erudition; and which consists in moral
+     instructions for the purpose of purifying ourselves from
+     immoderate desires.
+
+     2. But the second is produced by the sciences, which from
+     establishing certain principles as hypotheses, conduct to
+     necessary conclusions whereby we arrive at the knowledge of
+     the why, as in the mathematical sciences, but at the same
+     time are ignorant with respect to the principles of these
+     conclusions, because they are merely hypothetical.
+
+     3. The third species of knowledge is that which results from
+     Plato's dialectic; in which by a progression through ideas,
+     we arrive at the first principles of things, and at that
+     which is no longer hypothetical, and thus dividing some
+     things and analyzing others, by producing many things from
+     one, and one from many.
+
+     4. But the fourth species is still more simple than this;
+     because it no longer uses analyses or compositions, but
+     whole things themselves by intuition, and becomes one with
+     the object of its perception; and this energy is the Divine
+     Reason, which Plato speaks of, and which far transcends
+     other modes of knowledge."--THOMAS TAYLOR.]
+
+
+III.--MAN.
+
+  "Imago Dei in animo; mundi, in corpore."
+
+Man is a soul, informed by divine ideas, and bodying forth their image.
+His mind is the unit and measure of things visible and invisible. In him
+stir the creatures potentially, and through his personal volitions are
+conceived and brought forth in matter whatsoever he sees, touches, and
+treads under foot, the planet he spins.
+
+    He omnipresent is,
+    All round himself he lies,
+    Osiris spread abroad,
+    Upstaring in all eyes:
+    Nature his globed thought,
+    Without him she were not,
+    Cosmos from chaos were not spoken,
+    And God bereft of visible token.
+
+A theometer--an instrument of instruments--he gathers in himself all
+forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being the Spirit's
+acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator
+between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of
+souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and
+wherein he embosoms his essence. Not elemental, but fundamental,
+essential, he generates elements and forces, perpetually replenishing
+his waste;--the final conflagration a current fact of his existence.
+Does the assertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous
+and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is a blaze
+refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life,
+its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born
+Phoenix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light is its
+resolvent emblem.[G]
+
+     [Footnote G: "Man feeds upon air, the plant collecting the
+     materials from the atmosphere and compounding them for his
+     food. Even life itself, as we know it, is but a process of
+     combustion, of which decomposition is the final conclusion.
+     Through this combustion all the constituents return back
+     into air, a few ashes remaining to the earth from whence
+     they came. But from these embers, slowly invisible flames
+     arise into regions where our science has no longer any
+     value."--SCHLEIDEN.]
+
+  "Thee, eye of heaven, the great soul envies not,
+  By thy male force is all we have, begot."
+
+"This kindles the fire which exists in every thing, is received by every
+thing. While it sheds a full light, it is itself hidden. Its presence is
+unknown, unless some material be given to induce the exertion of its
+power. It is invisible, as well as unquenchable; and it has the faculty
+of transforming into itself every thing it touches. It renovates every
+thing by its vital heat, it illumines every thing by its flashing beams;
+it can neither be confined nor intermingled; it divides and yet is
+immutable. It always ascends, it is constantly in motion; it moves by
+its own will and power, and sets in motion every thing around it. It has
+the power of seizing, but cannot itself be grasped. It needs no aid. It
+increases silently and breaks forth in majesty upon all. It generates,
+it is powerful, invisible, and omnipotent. If neglected, its existence
+might be forgotten, but on friction being applied, it flashes out again
+like the sword from its scabbard, shines resplendently by its own
+natural properties, and soars into the air. Many other powers may yet be
+noticed as belonging to it. For this reason theologians have asserted
+that all substances being formed of fire, are thus created as nearly as
+possible in the image of God."
+
+[Illustration: Small decoration of a flower and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+MIND.
+
+
+     "But all the Gods we have are in The Mind,
+     By whose proportions only we redeem
+     Our thoughts from out confusion, and do find
+     The measure of ourselves and of our powers,
+     And that all happiness remains confined
+     Within the kingdom of this breast of ours,
+     Without whose bounds all that we look on lies
+     In others' jurisdiction, others' powers,
+     Out of the circuit of our liberties."
+                             DANIEL.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of a grasshopper among greenery]
+
+
+
+
+MIND.
+
+
+I.--IDEAS.
+
+The Ancients had a happy conception of mind in their Pantheon of its
+Powers. They fabled these as gods celestial, mundane, infernal,
+according to their several prerogatives and uses. It appears their ideal
+metaphysic has not as yet been surpassed or superseded altogether, as
+the classic mythology still holds its high place in modern thought and
+the schools as a discipline and culture. And for the reason that thought
+is an Olympian, and man a native of the cloudlands, whatever his
+metaphysical pretensions. It is only as we sit aloft that we oversee the
+world below and comprehend aright its drift and revolutions. Ixion
+falling out of the mist, which he illicitly embraced, is the visionary
+mistaking images for ideas, and thus paying the cost in his downfall.
+Plumage, wings or none, imagination or understanding, the fledged idea
+or the footed fact, the fleet reason or slow--these distribute mankind
+into thinkers or observers. Only genius combines the double gifts in
+harmonious proportions and interplay, possessing the mind entire, and is
+a denizen of both hemispheres. The idealist is the true realist,
+grasping the substance and not its shadow. The man of sense is the
+visionary or illusionist, fancying things as permanencies, and thoughts
+as fleeting phantoms. A Ptolemaist in theory, and earth-bound, he fears
+to venture above his terra firma into the real firmament whereinto mind
+is fashioned to spring, and command the wide prospect around.
+
+  "Things divine are not attained by mortals who understand body merely,
+  But only those who are lightly armed arrive at the summit."
+
+Thought is the Mercury; and things are caught on the wing, and by the
+flying spectator only. Nature is thought in solution. Like a river whose
+current is flowing steadily, drop displacing drop, particle following
+particle of the passing stream, nothing abides but the spectacle. So the
+flowing world is fashioned in the idealist's vision, and is the reality
+which to slower wits seems fixed in space and apart from thought,
+subsisting in itself. But thought works in the changing and becoming,
+not in the changed and become; all things sliding by imperceptible
+gradations into their contraries, the cosmos rising out of the chaos by
+its agency. Nothing abides; all is image and expression out of our
+thought.
+
+So Speech represents the flowing essence as sensitive, transitive; the
+word signifying what we make it at the moment of using, but needing
+life's rounded experiences to unfold its manifold senses and shades of
+meaning.[H] Definitions, however precise, fail to translate the sense.
+They confine in defining; good for the occasion, but leaps in the dark;
+at best, guesses at the meanings we seek; parapets built in the air, the
+lighter the safer; mere ladders of sound, whose rounds crumble as we
+tread. We write as we speak. The silence bars away the sense, closing
+shape and significance from us. Here is the mind facing its image the
+world, and wishing to see the reflection at a glance, a trope. No. The
+world is but the symbol of mind, and speech a mythology woven of both.
+Each thing suggests the thought imperfectly, and thought is translatable
+only by thought. Our standards are ideas, those things of the mind and
+originals of words.
+
+     [Footnote H: CATEGORIES OF SPEECH,
+
+                  BEING:
+     _Flowing_,                           _Fixed_,
+     Subjective.                        Objective.
+
+        I.             III.                 II.
+
+     _Actions_,    _Participles_,       _Things_,
+      Verbs.                              Nouns.
+
+                       IV.
+                  _Qualities_,
+              Adverbs, Adjectives.
+
+                        V.
+                   _Relations_,
+         Prepositions, Conjunctions, Pronouns.]
+
+    Thought's winged hand,
+    Marshals in trope and tone
+    The ideal band.
+    Genius alone
+    Holds fast in eye
+    The fleeing God--
+    Brings Beauty nigh--
+    Senses descry
+    Footsteps he trod,
+    Figures he drew,
+    Shapes old and new,
+    The fair, the true,
+    In soul and sod.
+
+Nature is thought immersed in matter, and seen differently as viewed
+from the one or the other. To the laborer it is a thing of mere uses; to
+the scholar a symbol and a muse. The same landscape is not the same as
+seen by poet and plowman. It stands for material benefit to the one,
+immaterial to the other. The artist's point of view is one of uses seen
+as means of beauty, that being the complement of uses. His faculties
+handle his organs; the hands, like somnambulists, playing their under
+parts to ideas; these, again, serving uses still higher. The poet,
+awakened from the sleep of things, beholds beauty in essence and form,
+being thus admitted to the secret of causes, the laws of pure Being.
+
+The like of Persons. Every one's glass reflects his bias. If the thinker
+views men as troglodytes--like Plato's groundlings, unconscious of the
+sun shining overhead; men of the senses, and mere makeweights--they in
+turn pronounce him the dreamer, sitting aloof from human concerns, an
+unproductive citizen and waste power in the world. Still, thought makes
+the world and sustains it; atom and idea alike being its constituents.
+Nor can thought, from its nature, at once become popular. It is the
+property and delight of the few fitted by genius and culture for
+discriminating truth from adhering falsehood, and of setting it forth in
+its simplicity and truth to the understandings of the less favored.
+Apart by pursuit from the mass of mankind, or at most taking a separate
+and subordinate part in affairs that engage their sole attention, the
+thinker seems useless to all save those who can apprehend and avail
+themselves of his immediate labors; and the less is he known and
+appreciated as his studies are of lasting importance to his race. Yet
+time is just, and brings all men to the side of thought as they become
+familiar with its practical benefits, else the victory were not gained
+for philosophy, and wisdom justified in him of her chosen children.
+
+Ideas alone supplement nature and complement mind. Our senses neither
+satisfy our sensibility nor intellect. The mind's objects are mind
+itself; imagination the mind's eye, memory the ear, ideas of the one
+imaging the other, and the mind thus rounding its history. And hence the
+pleasurable perspective experienced in surveying our personality from
+obverse sides in the landscape of existence--culture, in its inclusive
+sense, making the tour of our gifts, and acquainting us with ourselves
+and the world we live in. All men gain a residence in the senses and the
+family of natural things; few come into possession of their better
+inheritance and home in the mind--the Palace of Power and Personality.
+Sons of earth rather by preference, and chiefly emulous for their little
+while of its occupancy, its honors, emoluments, they here pitch their
+tents, here plant fast their hopes, and roll through life they know not
+whither.
+
+
+II.--THE GIFTS.
+
+Instinct is the fountain of Personal power, and mother of the Gifts.
+With instinct there may be an embryo, but sense must be superinduced to
+constitute an animal--memory, moral sentiment, reason, imagination,
+personality, to constitute the man. The mind is the man, not the outward
+shape: all is in the Will. The animal may mount to fancy in the grade of
+gifts; but reason, imagination, conscience, choice--the mediating,
+creative, ruling powers--the personality--belong to man alone. But not
+to all men, save in essence and possibility. Man properly traverses the
+hierarchy of Powers--spiritual, intellectual, moral, natural,
+animal--their full possession and interplay enabling him to hold free
+colloquy with all, giving the whole mind voice in the dialogue. Thus:
+
+  Asking for
+  The Who?        Will          responds,   The Person.
+  The Ought?      Conscience        "       The Right.
+  The How?        Imagination       "       The Idea.
+  The Why?        Reason            "       The Truth.
+  The Thus?       Fancy             "       The Image.
+  The Where?      Understanding     "       The Fact.
+  The When?       Memory            "       The Event.
+  The Which?      Sense             "       The Thing.
+  The What?       Instinct          "       The Life.
+
+In accordance with this gradation of gifts, man and animals may be
+classified as to their measures of intelligence respectively; instinct
+being taken as the initial gift and prompter of the rest in their order
+of genesis, growth and adaptability: man alone, when fully unfolded in
+harmony, being capable of ranging throughout the entire scale.[I]
+
+     [Footnote I: "One would think nothing were easier for us
+     than to know our own mind, discern what was our main scope
+     and drift, and what we proposed to ourselves as our end in
+     the several occurrences of our lives. But our thoughts have
+     such an obscure, implicit language, that it is the hardest
+     thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly; and
+     for this reason the right method is to give them voice and
+     accent. And this, in our default, is what the philosophers
+     endeavor to do to our hand, when, holding out a kind of
+     vocal looking-glass, they draw sound out of our breast, and
+     instruct us to personate ourselves in the plainest
+     manner."--LORD SHAFTESBURY.]
+
+Thus:
+
+[Illustration: Sketch of human head marked with Instinct, Sense, Memory,
+Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination, Conscience, Personality]
+
+  CLASS
+  I.    Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason,
+          Imagination, Conscience, Personality.
+  II.   Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason,
+          Imagination, Conscience.
+  III.  Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason,
+          Imagination.
+  IV.   Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason.
+  V.    Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy.
+  VI.   Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding.
+  VII.  Instinct, Sense, Memory.
+  VIII. Instinct, Sense.
+
+  MAN IS
+  Spiritual as he experiences, Personality, Thought
+  Moral               "        Choice, Conscience.
+  Intellectual        "        Imagination, Reason.
+  Natural             "        Fancy, Understanding.
+  Brute               "        Memory, Sense.
+  Demonic             "        Appetite, Passion.
+
+Nature does not contain the Personal man. He is the mind with the brute
+omitted, or, conversely, the animal transfigured and divinized by the
+Spirit. It is a slow process; long for the individual, longeval for the
+race. Centuries, millenniads elapse, mind meanwhile travailing with man,
+the birth arrested for the most part, or premature, the translation from
+germ to genius being supernatural, thought hardly delivered from spine
+and occiput into face and forehead, the mind uplifted and crowned in
+personality.
+
+    Pure mind alone is face,
+      Brute matter surface all;
+    As souls immersed in space,
+      Ideal rise, or idol fall.
+
+
+III.--PERSON.
+
+The lapsed Personality, or deuce human and divine, has played the prime
+part in metaphysical theology of times past, as it does still. But
+rarely has thought freed itself from the notion of duplicity,
+triplicity, and grounded its faith in the Idea of the One Personal
+Spirit, as a pure theism, and planted therein a faith and cultus. If we
+claim this for the Hebrew thought, as it rose to an intuition in the
+mind of its inspired thinker, it passed away with him; since Christendom
+throughout mythologizes, rather than thinks about his attributes; is
+divided, subdivided into sects, schools of doctrine; each immersed so
+deeply in its special individualism as to be unable to rise to the
+comprehension of the Personal One. Nor, considering the demands mind
+makes upon the senses,--these inclining always to idolatry,--is it
+surprising that this spiritual theism, seeking its symbols in pure
+thought, without image graven or conceived, should find any considerable
+number of followers. Yet a faith less supersensuous and ideal, any
+school of thought, code of doctrine, creed founded on substance, force,
+law, tradition, authority, miracle, is a covert superstition, ending
+logically in atheism, necessity, nihilism, disowning alike personality,
+free agency. Nature is sufficient for the creature, but person alone for
+man, without whose immanency and inspirations, man were heartless and
+worshipless. The Person wanting all is wanting. For where God is
+disembosomed, spectres rule the chaos within and without.[J]
+
+     [Footnote J: "The first principle of all things is Living
+     Goodness, armed with Wisdom and all-powerful Love. But if a
+     man's soul be once sunk by evil fate or desert, from the
+     sense of this high and heavenly truth into the cold conceit
+     that the original of all lies either in shuffling chance or
+     in the stark root of unknowing nature and brute necessity,
+     all the subtle cords of reason, without the timely recovery
+     of that divine torch within the hidden spirit of his heart,
+     will never be able to draw him out of that abhorred pit of
+     atheism and infidelity. So much better is innocency and
+     piety than subtle argument, and sincere devotion than
+     curious dispute. But contemplations concerning the dry
+     essence of the Godhead have for the most part been most
+     confusing and unsatisfactory. Far better is it to drink of
+     the blood of the grape than to bite the root of the grape,
+     to smell the rose than to chew the stalk. And blessed be
+     God, the meanest of men are capable of the former, very few
+     successful in the latter; and the less, because the reports
+     of those that have busied themselves that way have not only
+     seemed strange to most men, but even repugnant to one
+     another. But we should in charity refer this to the nature
+     of the _pigeon's neck_ than to mistake and contradiction.
+     One and the same object in nature affords many different
+     aspects. And God is infinitely various and simple; like a
+     circle, indifferent whether you suppose it of one uniform
+     line, or an infinite number of angles. Wherefore it is more
+     safe to admit all possible perfections of God than rashly to
+     deny what appears not to us from our particular
+     posture."--HENRY MORE.]
+
+  "Make us a god," said man:
+    Power first the voice obeyed,
+  And soon a monstrous form
+    Its worshippers dismayed;
+  Uncouth and huge, by nations rude adored,
+  With savage rites and sacrifice abhorred.
+
+  "Make us a god," said man:
+    Art next the voice obeyed,
+  Lovely, serene, and grand,
+    Uprose the Athenian maid:
+  The perfect statue, Greece with wreathed brows,
+  Adores in festal rites and lyric vows.
+
+  "Make us a god," said man:
+    Religion followed art,
+  And answered, "Look within;
+    Find God in thine own heart--
+  His noblest image there, and holiest shrine,
+  Silent revere--and be thyself divine."
+
+
+IV.--CHOICE.
+
+      Heaven hell's pit copes:
+  Nor fathoms any sin's abyss, or clambers out,
+  Save by the steps his choice hath delved.
+
+The gods descend in the likeness of men, and ascending transfigure the
+man into their Personal likeness. Descending below himself he debases
+and disfigures this image; as by choice he leaps upwards, so by choice
+he lapses downwards. Yet, while free to choose, he sinks himself never
+beneath himself absolutely, his _beneath_ subsisting by his election
+only. His choices free or fetter, elevate or debase, deify or demonize
+his humanity. Superior to all forces is the Spirit within, doing or
+defying his determinations, ever holding him fast to the consequences.
+Obeying its dictates or disobeying, frees or binds. It has golden chains
+for the good, for others iron. Love is its soft, yet mighty curb;
+freedom its easy yoke; fate its fetter.
+
+  Nor man in evil willingly doth rest,
+  Nor God in good unwillingly is blest.
+
+There is no appeal from the decisions of this High Court of Duty in the
+breast. The Ought is the Must and the Inevitable. One may misinterpret
+the voice, may deliberate, disobey the commandment, but cannot escape
+the consequences of his election. The deed decides. Nor is the
+Conscience appeased till sooner or later our deserts are pronounced--The
+welcome "well done," or the dread "depart."
+
+  "'Tis vain to flee till gentle mercy show
+  Her better eye. The further off we go
+  The swing of justice deals the mightier blow."
+
+Only the repenting consciousness of freedom abused restores the lost
+holiness, redeems from the guilty lapse--the sin that in separating us
+from the One, revealed the fearful Doubleness within, opening the
+yawning pit down which we stumbled, to become the prey of the undying
+worm.
+
+  "Meek love alone doth wash our ills away."
+
+And with love enough, knowledge were useless. It comes in defect of
+love. Exhaustless in its sources, love supersedes knowledge, being the
+proper intellect of spirit and spring of intuition--God being very God,
+because his love absorbs all knowledge and contains his Godhead. Knowing
+without loving is decease from love, and lapse from pure intellect into
+sense. Knowledge is not enough. The more knowledge, the deeper the
+depths left unsounded, the more exacting our faith in the certainty of
+knowing. Our faith feels after its objects, if haply by groping in the
+darkness of our ignorance we may fathom its depths, and find ourselves
+in Him who is ever seeking us. "Although no man knoweth the spirit of a
+man save The Spirit within him, yet is there something in him that not
+even man's spirit knoweth."
+
+  "WHO placed thee here, did something then infuse
+  Which now can tell thee news."
+
+[Illustration: Small decoration of a flower and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+GENESIS.
+
+
+     "Had man withstood the trial, his descendants would have
+     been born one from another in the same way that Adam--i. e.,
+     mankind--was, namely, in the image of God; for that which
+     proceeds from the Eternal has eternal manner of
+     birth."--BEHMEN.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of a beetle among flowers and leaves]
+
+
+
+
+GENESIS.
+
+
+I.--VESTIGES.
+
+Boehme, the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Moses, conceives that
+nature fell from its original oneness by fault of Lucifer before man
+rose physically from its ruins; and moreover, that his present
+existence, being the struggle to recover from nature's lapse, is
+embarrassed with double difficulties by defection from rectitude on his
+part. We think it needs no Lucifer other than mankind collectively
+conspiring, to account for nature's mishaps, or man's, since, assuming
+man to be nature's ancestor, and nature man's ruins rather, himself were
+the impediment he seeks to remove; nature being the child of his
+choices, corresponding in large--or macrocosmically--to his intents.
+Eldest of creatures, the progenitor of all below him, personally one and
+imperishable in essence, if debased forms appear in nature, these are
+consequent on man's degeneracy prior to their genesis. And it is only as
+he lapses out of his integrity, by debasing his essence, that he impairs
+his original likeness, and drags it into the prone shapes of the animal
+kingdom--these being the effigies and vestiges of his individualized and
+shattered personality. Behold these upstarts of his loins, everywhere
+the mimics jeering at him saucily, or gaily parodying their fallen lord.
+
+  "Most happy he who hath fit place assigned
+  To his beasts, and disafforested his mind;
+  Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast,
+  And is not ape himself to all the rest."
+
+It is man alone who conceives and brings forth the beast in him that
+swerves and dies. Perversion of will by mis-choice precipitates him into
+serpentine form, duplicated in sex,
+
+  "Parts of that Part which once was all."
+
+'Tis but one and the same soul in him, entertaining a dialogue with
+himself, that is symbolized in the Serpent, Adam, and the woman; nor
+needs there fabulous "Paradises Lost or Regained," for setting in relief
+this serpent symbol of temptation, this Lord or Lucifer in our spiritual
+Eden:
+
+  "First state of human kind,
+  Which one remains while man doth find
+  Joy in his partner's company;
+  When two, alas! adulterate joined,
+  The serpent made the three."
+
+
+II.--SERPENT SYMBOL.
+
+Better is he who is above temptation, than he who, being tempted,
+overcomes, since the latter but suppresses the evil inclination stirring
+in his breast which the former has not. Whoever is tempted has so far
+sinned as to entertain the tempting lust within, betraying his lapse
+from singleness or holiness. The virtuous choose, are virtuous by
+choice; the holy, being one, deliberate not--their volitions answering
+spontaneously to their desires. It is the cleft personality, or _other_
+within, which seduces the Will, and is the Adversary and Deuce we become
+individually, and impersonate in the Snake.
+
+  Chaste love's a maid,
+  Though shapen as a man.
+
+But one were an OEdipus to expound this serpent mythology; whereby is
+symbolized the mysteries of genesis, and of The One rejoining man's
+parted personality, and thus recreating mankind. Coeval with flesh, the
+symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist; a remnant of it in
+the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our Mayday
+dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent
+symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that
+it became associated with those "traditionary teachers of mankind whose
+genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors." An early Christian sect,
+called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge.
+So the injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves,"
+becomes the more significant when we learn that _seraph_ in the original
+means a serpent; _cherub_, a dove. And these again symbolize facts in
+osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the
+vertebrated cranium,[K] which view Nature as ophiomorphous--a series of
+spines, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure--set erect,
+prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man,
+holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or
+losing his prerogative as lapsed from his integrity--hereby debasing his
+form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed
+throughout nature's kingdoms. Or, again as aspiring for lost supremacy,
+he uplift and crown his fallen form with forehead, countenance,
+speech,--thus liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods,
+and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal
+arts.
+
+     [Footnote K: "Spix, in his 'Cephalogenesis,' aids Oken's
+     theory of the spinal cranium in endowing the artist's symbol
+     of the cherub with all that it seemed to want before that
+     discovery; namely: with a thorax, abdomen and pelvis, arms,
+     legs, hands and feet."--OWEN.]
+
+  "Unless above himself he can
+  Erect himself, how poor a thing is man."
+
+
+III.--EMBRYONS.
+
+     "The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work,
+     in the divine mind before it exists in the creature."
+
+As the male impregnates the female, so mind charges matter with form and
+fecundity; the spermatic world being life in transmission and body in
+embryo; the egg a genesis and seminary of forms, the kingdoms of
+animated nature sleeping coiled in its yolk, and awaiting the quickening
+magnetism that ushers them into light. Herein the human embryon unfolds
+in series the lineaments of all forms in the living hierarchy, to be
+fixed at last in its microcosm, unreeling therefrom its faculties into
+filamental organs, spinning so minutely the threads, "that were it
+physically possible to dissolve away all other members of the body,
+there would still remain the full and perfect figure of a man. And it is
+this perfect cerebro-spinal axis, this statue-like tissue of filaments,
+that, physically speaking, is the man."[L] The mind contains him
+spiritually, and reveals him physically to himself and his kind. Every
+creature assists in its own formation, souls being essentially creative
+and craving form.
+
+     [Footnote L: "Thou hast possessed my reins, thou hast
+     covered me in my mother's womb. My substance was not hid
+     from thee when I was made in a secret place, and there
+     curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth: there
+     thine eyes did see my substance yet being imperfect: and in
+     thy Book were all my members written, which in continuance
+     were fashioned when as yet there was none of them."--PSALM
+     cxxxix: 13, 15, 16.]
+
+  "The creature ever delights in the image of the Creator;
+  And the soul of man will in a manner clasp God to herself;
+  Having nothing mortal, she is wholly inebriated of God;
+  For she glories in the harmony under which the human body exists."
+
+Throughout the domain of spirit desire creates substance wherein all
+creatures seek conjunction, lodging and nurture. Nor is there anything
+in nature save desire holding substances together, all things being
+dissolvable and recombinable in this spiritual menstruum.
+
+  "'Tis the blossom whence there blows
+  Everything that lives and grows;
+  It doth make the heavens to move
+  And the sun to burn in love:
+  The strong to weak it seeks to yoke,
+  And makes the ivy climb the oak,
+  Under whose shadows lions wild,
+  Softened thereby grow tame and mild.
+  It all medicine doth appease,
+  It burns the fishes in the seas,
+  Not all the skill its wounds can stanch,
+  Not all the sea its thirst can quench:
+  It did make the bloody spear
+  Once a leafy coat to wear,
+  While in his leaves there shrouded lay
+  Sweet birds for love that sing and play;
+  And of all the joyful flame,
+  Bud and blossom this we name."
+
+
+IV.--TEMPERAMENT.
+
+Temperament is a fate, oftentimes, from whose jurisdiction its victims
+hardly escape, but do its bidding herein, be it murder or martyrdom.
+Virtues and crimes are mixed in one's cup of nativity, with the lesser
+or larger margin of choice. Unless of chaste extraction, his
+regeneration shall be wrought with difficulty through the struggling
+kingdom of evil into the peaceful realm of good. Blood is a destiny.
+One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry, from
+fountains whence rose Adam the first and his Eve. The oldest and most
+persistent of forces, if once ennobled by virtue and refined by culture,
+it resists base mixtures long, preserving its purity and power for
+generations. All gifts descend in the torrent; all are mingled in the
+ecstasy, as purity or passion prevail; genius being the fruit of chaste
+conjunctions, brute force of adulterous--the virgin complexions or the
+mixed.[M]
+
+     [Footnote M: Boehme thus classifies and describes the
+     temperaments:
+
+     "Lapsing out of her innocency, man's soul enters into a
+     strange inn or lodging, wherein he is held sometime captive
+     as in a dungeon, wherein are four chambers or stories, in
+     one of which she is fated to remain, though not without
+     instincts of the upper wards (if her place be the lowest)
+     and hope of finding the keys by which she may ascend into
+     these also. These chambers are the elements of his
+     constitution, and characterized as the four temperaments or
+     complexions, namely:
+
+       I. The melancholic or earthy.
+       II. The phlegmatic oraqueous.
+       III. The choleric or fiery.
+       IV. The sanguine or ethereal.
+
+     I. The splenetic or melancholic partakes of the properties
+     of the earth, being cold, dark, and hungry for the light. It
+     is timid, incredulous, empty, consuming itself in corrosive
+     cares, anxieties and sorrows, being sad when the sun shines,
+     and needs perpetual encouragement. Its color is dark.
+
+     II. The phlegmatic being nourished from the earth's
+     moisture, is inclined to heaviness; is gross, effeminate,
+     dull of apprehension, careless, indifferent. It has but
+     faint glimpses of the light, and needs much inculcation from
+     without. Its color is brown.
+
+     III. The choleric is of the fiery temper, inclined to
+     violence, wrath, obstinacy, irreverence, ambition. It is
+     impulsive, contentious, aspires for power, and authority. It
+     is greedy of the sun, and glories in its blazing beams. Its
+     color is florid.
+
+     IV. The sanguine, being tempered of ether, and the least
+     imprisoned, is cheerful, gentle, genial, versatile,
+     naturally chaste, insinuating, searching into the secret of
+     things natural and spiritual, and capable of divining the
+     deepest mysteries. It loves the light, and aspires toward
+     the sun. Its complexion is fair."]
+
+    "Our generation moulds our state,
+    Its virtues, vices, fix our fate;
+    Nor otherwise experience proves,
+    The unseen hands make all the moves,
+    If some are great, and some are small,
+  Some climb to good, some from good fortune fall,--
+  Not figures these of speech,--forefathers sway us all.
+
+    Me from the womb the midnight muse did take,
+    She clothed me, nourished, and mine head
+    With her own hands she fashioned;
+    She did a cov'nant with me make,
+  And circumcised my tender soul, and thus she spake:
+  'Thou of my church shalt be,
+    Hate and renounce (said she)
+  Wealth, honour, pleasure, all the world for me.
+  Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,
+  Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar,
+  Content thyself with the small barren praise,
+    That neglected verse does raise.'
+
+  She spake, and all my years to come
+    Took their determined doom:
+  Their several ways of life, let others choose,
+    Their several pleasures let them use,
+  But I was born for love and for a muse.
+
+    With fate what boots it to contend?
+  Such I began, such am, and so shall end:
+    The star that did my being frame
+    Was but a lambent flame;
+    Some light indeed it did dispense,
+    But less of heat and influence.
+
+    No matter, poet, let proud fortune see
+  That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee;
+    Why grieve thyself or blush to be
+    As all the inspired tuneful seers,
+  And all thy great forefathers were from Shakspeare to thy peers."
+
+Yet, biassed by temperament as we may be, whether for good or for evil,
+such measure of freedom is ours, nevertheless, as enables us to free
+ourselves from its tendencies and temptations. In the breast of each is
+a liberating angel, at whose touch, when we will it persistently, the
+doors of our dungeon fly open and loose their prisoner.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+METAMORPHOSES.
+
+
+     "Generation is not a creation of life, but a production of
+     things to sense, and making them manifest. Neither is change
+     death, but a hiding of that which was."--HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decorative banner of two birds among leaves and flowers]
+
+
+
+
+METAMORPHOSES.
+
+
+I.--SLEEP.
+
+Life is a current of spiritual forces. In perpetual tides, the stream
+traverses its vessels to vary its pulsations and perspectives of things,
+receding from forehead and face into cerebellum and spine, to be
+replenished night by night from these springs of vigor. The Genius trims
+our lamps while we sleep. It plumbs us by day and levels us by night.
+Here recumbent as at nature's navel, her energies flood the spirits with
+puissance, restoring tone and tension for the coming day's occupations.
+Then what varying scenes rise to fancy's eye, while the mind lapses out
+of the globe of thought, the house of the senses, into the palaces of
+memory through the gate of dreams! Under the sway of occult forces we
+partake of preternatural insights, having access to sources of
+information unopened to us in our wakeful hours. Vast systems of
+sympathies, antedating and extending beyond our mundane experiences,
+absorb us within their sphere, relating us to other worlds of life and
+light; as if stirred by the nocturnal impulse we climbed the empyrean,
+still crediting the superstition of our affinities with the starry
+orbs--
+
+  "Eternal fathers of whate'er exists below."
+
+Or, pursuing our peregrinations, we plunge suddenly into the abyss of
+origins, transformed for the moment into slumbering umbilici, skirting
+the shores of our nativity; or, ascending spine-wise, traverse the
+hierarchy of gifts. How we grope strangely! Seeking the One amidst the
+many, we lose ourselves in finding the One we lost. We enter bodies of
+our bodies, souls of our soul, successively; each organ our prisoner, we
+in turn the prisoner of each, till by chance the bewildered occupant
+recover the key to the wards of his apartments, and forth issues into
+the haunts of his consciousness, the world of natural things. For never
+is the sleep so profound, the dream so distracting, as to obliterate all
+sense of the personality,--despite these vagaries of the night, these
+opiates of the senses, memory sometime dispels the oblivious slumber,
+and recovers for the mind recollections of its descent and destiny. Some
+reliques of the ancient consciousness survive, recalling our previous
+history and experiences.[N]
+
+     [Footnote N: "'Tis well known that according to the sense of
+     antiquity, these two considerations were always included in
+     that one opinion of the soul's immortality--namely; its
+     pre-existence as well as its post existence. Neither were
+     there ever any of the ancients before christianity, that
+     held the soul's future permanency after death, who did not
+     likewise assert its pre-existence,--they clearly perceiving
+     that if it was once granted that the soul was generated, it
+     could never be proved but that it might be also corrupted.
+     And therefore the asserters of its immortality commonly
+     began here--first, to prove its pre-existence, proceeding
+     thence afterwards to establish its permanency after
+     death."--CUDWORTH.]
+
+
+II.--REMINISCENCE.
+
+  "Heaven's exile straying from the orb of light."
+
+And but for our surface and distracted lives,--lived here for the most
+part in the senses,--we should have never lost the consciousness of our
+descent into mortality, nor have questioned our resurrection and
+longevity. But as in descending, all drink of oblivion--some more, some
+less--it happens that while all are conscious of life, by defect of
+memory, our recollections are various concerning it; those discerning
+most vividly who have drank least of oblivion, they more easily
+recalling the memory of their past existence. Ancients of days, we
+hardly are persuaded to believe that our souls are no older than our
+bodies, and to date our nativity from our family registers, as if time
+and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind by its advent
+into the flesh and decease out of it.
+
+  "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
+  The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
+      Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+      And cometh from afar;
+      Not in entire forgetfulness,
+      Nor yet in utter nakedness,
+  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+  From God who is our home."
+
+None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought,
+and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it
+dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest
+recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us
+babes, out of our bodies as into them; opening vistas alike into our
+past and coming existence. The thread of our experiences, it cannot be
+severed by any accidents of our mortality; time and space, earliest
+found and last to leave us, fading and falling away as we pass into
+recollections which these can neither date nor confine--the smiles that
+welcomed, the tears that dismiss us, being of no age, nor place nor
+time.
+
+  "O love! thou makest all things even
+    In earth and heaven:
+  Finding thy way through prison bars
+    Up to the stars:
+  That out of dust created man,
+  Thou lookest in a grave, to see
+    Thine immortality."
+
+
+III.--IMMORTALITY.
+
+If immortality inhere in objects known by us, these surely are persons;
+the ties of kindred being the liveliest, most abiding of any; our faith
+in the impossibility of being sundered forever, remaining unshaken to
+the last, and surviving all changes that our bodies may undergo.
+
+  "Deep love, the godlike in us, still believes
+  Its objects are immortal as itself."
+
+'Tis not our bodies that contain us but our souls. None beholds with
+bodily eyes the apparition of his person, sees and survives the ghost he
+provokes. The perturbed spirits alone linger about the tombs--dead
+before they die, dead burying their dead--comfortless because these are
+bereft of bodies, flesh being all of them they ever knew.[O]
+
+     [Footnote O: Let us remember that immortality signifies a
+     negative, or not having of mortality, and that a positive
+     term is required by which to express a change, since nature
+     teaches that whatever is, will abide with the being it is,
+     unless forced out of it by something positive. And as it
+     appears that man's soul has these grounds in her which make
+     all visible things to be perishable, it is obvious that his
+     soul is immortal and the cause of mortality itself.--SIR
+     KENELM DIGBY.]
+
+Moreover, the insatiableness of our desires asserts our personal
+imperishableness. Yearning for full satisfactions while balked of these
+perpetually, we still prosecute our search for them, our faith in their
+attainment remaining unshaken under every disappointment. Our hope is
+eternal as ourselves--a never ending, still beginning quest of our
+divinity. Infinite in essence, we crave it in potence. The boundlessness
+and elasticity of the mind, its power of self-recovery, uprise from
+temporary obstructions self-imposed, or from temperament, are assurances
+made doubly sure of our soul's infinitude and longevity. So the lives of
+empires, of men of genius and sanctity, are grand illustrations of its
+heroic strife for the largest freedom, the widest sway,--of instincts
+striving within, which these pent confines of time and space can neither
+subjugate nor appease.
+
+  "Take this, my child," the father said,
+  "This globe I give thy mind for bread;"
+  Eager we seize the proffered store,
+  The bait devour--then ask for more.
+
+"Everything aspires to its own perfection and is restless till it attain
+it, as the trembling needle till it find its beloved north. And the
+knowledge of this is innate as is the desire, else the last had been a
+torment and needless importunity. Nature shoots not at rovers. Even
+inanimate things, while ignorant of their perfection, are carried
+towards it by a blind impulse. But that which conducts them knows. The
+next order of beings have some sight of it, and man most perfectly till
+he touch the apple." Our delights suckle us life long, our desires being
+memories of past satisfactions, and we here but sip pleasures once
+tasted to satiety. The more exquisite our enjoyments, the more
+transient; the more eagerly sought, the more elusive. We cannot come out
+of our paradise, nor stay in it contentedly, the gates of bliss closing
+on opening.
+
+  "E'en as the amorous needle joys to bend
+    To her magnetic friend,
+  Or as the greedy lover's eyeballs fly
+    At his fair mistress' eye,
+  Eager we kindle life's illumined stuff,
+  Can tire, nor tease, nor kindle it enough."
+
+Still heaven is, our hearts affirm against every disappointment; and
+whether behind or before us, as memory or as hope, 'tis to be ours,--our
+port and resting place sometime in the stream of ages.
+
+  "All before us lies the way;
+    Give the past unto the wind;
+  All before us is the day,
+    Night and darkness are behind.
+
+  Eden with its angels bold,
+    Love and flowers and coolest sea,
+  Is less an ancient story told
+    Than a glowing prophecy.
+
+  In the spirit's perfect air,
+    In the passions tame and kind,
+  Innocence from selfish care,
+    The real Eden we shall find.
+
+  When the soul to sin hath died,
+    True and beautiful and sound,
+  Then all earth is sanctified,
+    Upsprings paradise around.
+
+  From the spirit-land, afar
+    All disturbing force shall flee;
+  Stir, nor toil, nor hope shall mar
+    Its immortal unity."
+
+
+
+
+_Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications._
+
+THE LAYMAN'S BREVIARY. A Selection for Every Day in the Year. Translated
+from the German of LEOPOLD SCHEFER, by Charles T. Brooks. In one square
+16mo. volume, bevelled cloth, gilt edges. Price, $2.50. A cheaper
+edition. Price, $1.50.
+
+     "The 'Layman's Breviary' will adorn drawing-room
+     centre-tables, boudoirs, library nooks; it will be a
+     favorite travelling companion, and be carried on summer
+     excursions to read under trees and on verandas. For every
+     day of the year there are thoughts, counsels,
+     aspirations--many of them Oriental in tone, or patriarchal
+     in spirit; there are delineations of nature, pure utterances
+     of faith; each page contains fresh and earnest expressions
+     of a poetic, believing, humane soul--often clad in exquisite
+     language. It is eminently a household book, and one to be
+     taken up and enjoyed at intervals."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+     "Each poem is in itself a sermon; not of dry, theological
+     dogmas, but the love and care of the Infinite, the yearning
+     and outreaching of the human to grasp the divine. It is a
+     book not to be lightly read and carelessly tossed aside, but
+     to be studied daily until the lessons it conveys are
+     learned, and its comforting words written on every heart. Of
+     the author's religious opinions we know nothing; what creed
+     he subscribes to we cannot tell; but we do know that he is a
+     true worshipper of God, and lover of his fellow-men. This
+     book should be on every table; all households should possess
+     it; we cannot too highly recommend it to the notice of all.
+     It has been truly said, that 'these blooming pictures of
+     Nature, praising the love, the goodness, the wisdom of the
+     Creator and His work, form in truth a poetical book of
+     devotion for the layman whom the dogma does not satisfy--a
+     _breviary_ for man.'"--_The Wide World._
+
+
+MY PRISONS. Memoirs of SILVIO PELLICO. With an Introduction by Epes
+Sargent, and embellished with fifty Illustrations from drawings by
+Billings. One square 12mo. volume, bevelled cloth, gilt edges. Price,
+$3.50. A cheaper edition. Price, $2.00.
+
+     "Some thirty-five years ago the publication of "My Prisons,
+     Memoirs of Silvio Pellico," first appealed to the sympathies
+     of the Italian people. The history of a martyr to freedom is
+     always entertaining, and the pathos and beauty which
+     surround the narrative in question have always kept alive
+     the interest of all intelligent nations. It ranks,
+     therefore, deservedly high in biographical literature. The
+     present edition is a very superior one, and is introduced by
+     Epes Sargent, who vigorously reviews the despotism of
+     Austria in the incarceration of Pellico, and the changes
+     which have since occurred in European politics."--_Chicago
+     Evening Journal._
+
+     "The story is simply told, for adventures like those of the
+     author need no graces of style or highly wrought figures.
+     The book has a charm which few novels possess; indeed, one
+     can hardly believe that it is true, and that so few years
+     have passed since men of noble birth and fine culture were
+     condemned to suffer for years in prison on account of their
+     political opinions."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+_Mailed, post paid, to any address, on receipt of the price, by the
+Publishers._
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Descriptions of illustrations were added for the convenience of readers.
+
+In the Table of Contents, section titles are in Arabic numbers, while in
+the text of the book, Roman numerals are used. Each is retained as
+printed.
+
+Footnotes are indented and placed following the paragraph to which they
+pertain.
+
+Alternate and obsolete spelling was retained.
+
+Other changes:
+
+  Added hyphen to self-respect, for consistency with remaining text.
+    ... without loss of self-respect....
+  "falcony" changed to "falconry"
+    ... for the falconry, archery, the hunting,...
+  "educuated" changed to "educated"
+    ... A boy was to be so educated and fed ...
+  "T'is" changed to "'Tis"
+    ... 'Tis but one and the same soul ...
+  Added close quote mark to end of Footnote M.
+  Footnote N, "acccording" changed to "according"
+    ... according to the sense of antiquity,...
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TABLETS***
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