are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so by sticking fast where they were, like an .axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into 10 foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not 15 like an interloper or a valet.

the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and 5 quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; yourself; never never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an ex

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or 20 temporaneous half possession. That does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in 25 youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first 30 journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea 35 and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and 40 suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is 45 vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Ou1 50 houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever 55 they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to

which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is

5

given something is taken. Society ac-
quires new arts and loses old instincts.
What a contrast between the well-clad,
reading, writing, thinking American, with
a watch, a pencil and a bill of exhange in
his pocket, and the naked New Zealander,
whose property is a club, a spear, a mat
and an undivided twentieth of a shed to
sleep under! But compare the health of
the two men and you shall see that the 10
white man has lost his aboriginal strength.
If the traveler tell us truly, strike the
savage with a broad-ax and in a day or
two the flesh shall unite and heal as if
you struck the blow into soft pitch, and 15
the same blow shall send the white to
his grave.

men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo,

with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill and bake his bread himself.'

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much 20 support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man 25 in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books 30 onward, but the water of which it is impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by re- 35 finement some energy, by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

40

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the 45 first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not 50 in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and 55 in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume and do not invigorate

Society is a wave. The wave moves

composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience dies with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental, - came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire; and what the man ac

5

quires, is living property, which does not,
wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or
revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bank-
ruptcies, but perpetually renews itself
wherever the man breathes. Thy lot
or portion of life,' said the Caliph Ali,
is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest
from seeking after it. Our dependence
on these foreign goods leads us to our
slavish respect for numbers. The politi- 10
cal parties meet in numerous conventions;
the greater the concourse and with each
new uproar of announcement, The dele-
gation from Essex! The Democrats from
New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! 15
the young patriot feels himself stronger
than before by a new thousand of eyes
and arms. In like manner the reformers
summon conventions and vote and resolve
in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the 20
God deign to enter and inhabit you, but
by a method precisely the reverse. It is
only as a man puts off all foreign support
and stands alone that I see him to be
strong and to prevail. He is weaker by 25
every recruit to his banner. Is not a man
better than a town? Ask nothing of men,
and, in the endless mutation, thou only
firm column must presently appear the
upholder of all that surrounds thee. He 30
who knows that power is inborn, that he
is weak because he has looked for good
out of him and elsewhere, and, so perceiv-
ing, throws himself unhesitatingly on his
thought, instantly rights himself, stands 35
in the erect position, commands his limbs,
works miracles; just as a man who stands
on his feet is stronger than a man who
stands on his head.

Most 40

FORBEARANCE

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?
At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse?
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of
trust?

And loved so well a high behavior,

In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,

Nobility more nobly to repay?

O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!
The Dial, January, 1842.

BRAHMA

If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt.

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
Atlantic Monthly, Nov., 1857.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

15

We meet under the gloom of a calamity which darkens down over the minds of good men in all civil society, as the fearful tidings travel over sea, over land, from country to country, like the shadow of an uncalculated eclipse over the planet. Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain to mankind as this has caused, or will cause, on its announcement; and this, not so much because nations are by modern arts brought so closely together, as because of the mysterious

So use all that is called Fortune. men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and ac- 45 quire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shall sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, 50 or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the 55 hopes and fears which, in the present day, triumph of principles.

Essays, First Series, 1841.

are connected with the name and institutions of America.

In this country, on Saturday, every one

5

was struck dumb, and saw at first only
deep below deep, as he meditated on the
ghastly blow. And perhaps, at this hour,
when the coffin which contains the dust
of the President sets forward on its long
march through mourning States, on its
way to his home in Illinois, we might well
be silent, and suffer the awful voices of
the time to thunder to us. Yes, but
that first despair was brief: the man 10
was not so to be mourned. He was the
most active and hopeful of men; and his
work had not perished: but acclamations
of praise for the task he had accomplished
burst out into a song of triumph, which 15
even tears for his death cannot keep down.

The President stood before us as a
man of the people. He was thoroughly
American, had never crossed the sea, had
never been spoiled by English insularity 20
or French dissipation; a quite native, ab-
original man, as an acorn from the oak;
no aping of foreigners, no frivolous ac-
complishments, Kentuckian born, working
on a farm, a flatboatman, a captain in 25
the Black Hawk war, a country lawyer, a
representative in the rural Legislature of
Illinois; on such modest foundations the
broad structure of his fame was laid.
How slowly, and yet by happily prepared 30
steps, he came to his place. All of us
remember, it is only a history of five.
or six years, the surprise and the dis-
appointment of the country at his first
nomination by the Convention at Chicago. 35
Mr. Seward, then in the culmination of
his good fame, was the favorite of the
Eastern States. And when the new and
comparatively unknown name of Lincoln
was announced (notwithstanding the re- 40
port of the acclamations of that Conven-
tion), we heard the result coldly and sadly.
It seemed too rash, on a purely local repu-
tation, to build so grave a trust in such
anxious times; and men naturally talked 45
of the chances in politics as incalculable.
But it turned out not to be chance.
profound good opinion which the peo-
ple of Illinois and the West had conceived
of him, and which they had imparted to 50
their colleagues that they also might jus-
tify themselves to their constituents at
home, was not rash, though they did not
begin to know the riches of his worth.

The

A plain man of the people, an extraordi- 55 nary fortune attended him. He offered no shining qualities at the first encounter: he did not offend by superiority. He had

a face and manner which disarmed suspicion, which inspired confidence, which confirmed good-will. He was a man without vices. He had a strong sense of duty, which it was very easy for him to obey. Then, he had what farmers call a long head; was excellent in working out the sum for himself; in arguing his case and convincing you fairly and firmly. Then, it turned out that he was a great worker; had prodigious faculty of performance; worked easily. A good worker is so rare; everybody has some disabling quality. In a host of young men that start together and promise so many brilliant leaders for the next age, each fails on trial; one by bad health, one by conceit, or by love of pleasure, or lethargy, or an ugly temper,

each has some disqualifying fault that throws him out of the career. But this man was sound to the core, cheerful, persistent, all right for labor, and liked nothing so well.

Then, he had a vast good-nature, which made him tolerant and accessible to all; fair-minded, leaning to the claim of the petitioner; affable, and not sensible to the affliction which the innumerable visits paid to him when President would have brought to any one else. And how this goodnature became a noble humanity, in many a tragic case which the events of the war brought to him, every one will remember; and with what increasing tenderness he dealt when a whole race was thrown on his compassion. The poor negro said of him, on an impressive occasion, Massa Linkum am eberywhere.'

Then his broad good-humor, running easily into jocular talk, in which he delighted and in which he excelled, was a rich gift to this wise man. It enabled him to keep his secret; to meet every kind of man and every rank in society; to take off the edge of the severest decisions; to mask his own purpose and sound his companion; and to catch with true instinct the temper of every company he addressed. And, more than all, it is to a man of severe labor, in anxious and exhausting crises, the natural restorative, good as sleep, and is the protection of the overdriven brain against rancor and insanity.

He is the author of a multitude of good sayings, so disguised as pleasantries that it is certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in

the mouths of millions, turn out to be
the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this
man had ruled in a period of less facility
of printing, he would have become mytho-
logical in a very few years, like Esop or
Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Mas-
ters, by his fables and proverbs. But the
weight and penetration of many passages
in his letters, messages and speeches,
hidden now by the very closeness of their 10
application to the moment, are destined
hereafter to wide fame. What pregnant
definitions; what unerring common sense;
what foresight; and, on great occasion,
what lofty, and more than national, what 15
humane tone! His brief speech at Get-
tysburg will not easily be surpassed by
words on any recorded occasion. This,
and one other American speech, that of
John Brown to the court that tried him, 20
and a part of Kossuth's speech at Birming
ham, can only be compared with each
other, and with no fourth.

His occupying the chair of State was a
triumph of the good-sense of mankind, 25
and of the public conscience. This mid-
dle-class country had got a middle-class
President, at last. Yes, in manners and
sympathies, but not in powers, for his
powers were superior. This man grew 30
according to the need. His mind mas-
tered the problem of the day; and, as
the problem grew, so did his comprehen-
sion of it. Rarely was man so fitted to
the event. In the midst of fears and jeal- 35
ousies, in the Babel of counsels and par-
ties, this man wrought incessantly with
all his might and all his honesty, labor-
ing to find what the people wanted, and
how to obtain that. It cannot be said 40
there is an exaggeration of his worth. If
ever a man was fairly tested, he was.
There was no lack of resistance, nor of
slander, nor of ridicule. The times have
allowed no state secrets; the nation has 45
been in such ferment, such multitudes had
to be trusted, that no secret could be
kept. Every door was ajar, and we know
all that befell.

Then, what an occasion was the whirl- 50 wind of the war. Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four years, four years of battle-days, his endurance, his fertility 55 of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even tem

5

per, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the center of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue.

Adam Smith remarks that the ax, which in Houbraken's portraits of British kings and worthies is engraved under those who have suffered at the block, adds a certain lofty charm to the picture. And who does not see, even in this tragedy so recent, how fast the terror and ruin of the massacre are already burning into glory around the victim? Far happier this fate than to have lived to be wished away; to have watched the decay of his own faculties; to have seen,- perhaps even he, the proverbial ingratitude of statesmen; to have seen mean men preferred. Had he not lived long enough to keep the greatest promise that ever man made to his fellow-men.- the practical abolition of slavery? He had seen Tennessee, Missouri and Maryland emancipate their slaves. He had seen Savannah, Charleston and Richmond surrendered; had seen the main army of the rebellion lay down its arms. He had conquered the public opinion of Canada, England and France. Only Washington can compare with him in fortune.

And what if it should turn out, in the unfolding of the web, that he had reached the term; that this heroic deliverer could no longer serve us; that the rebellion had touched its natural conclusion, and what remained to be done required new and uncommitted hands,- a new spirit born out of the ashes of the war; and that Heaven, wishing to show the world a completed benefactor, shall make him serve his country even more by his death than by his life? Nations, like kings, are not good by facility and complaisance. The kindness of kings consists in justice and strength.' Easy good-nature has been the dangerous foible of the Republic, and it was necessary that its enemies should outrage it, and drive us to unwonted firmness, to secure the salvation of this country in the next ages.

The ancients believed in a serene and