For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named, -yet they cannot originally use them. Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out.” Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. A man is a golden impossibility. Every man is an impossibility, until he is born ; every thing impossible, until we see a success. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let pass in silence, but must either worship or hate, – and to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion, and the obscure and eccentric, -he helps; he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the scepticism which says, “man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do,” by illuminating the untried and unknown. A man is a poor creature, if he is to be measured so. For, all these, of course, are exceptions; and the rule and hodiernal life of a good man is benefaction. A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart. As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so, that appears in all the forms of society. The wise man is the State. The magnetism which arranges tribes and races in one polarity is alone to be respected; the men are steel-filings. For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul. Very fitly, therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that, each man’s genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add, that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. Very fitly, therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that, each man’s genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add, that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history. S. 219 Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. Nothing shall warp me from the belief, that every man is a lover of truth. Men are all secret believers in it, else, the word “justice” would have no meaning: they believe that the best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaos would come. The life of man is the true romance, which, when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. "Man is all symmetry, Full of proportions, one limb to another, And to all the world besides. 'A man is a god in ruins. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vesperlina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matulina cognitio. Man is the wonderworker. The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses with things. 159 justice; because an able man is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organization, whereinto the universal spirit freely flows; so that his fund of justice is not only vast, but infinite. All men are poets at heart. An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. For man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love. A man is a poor limitary benefactor. Men are photometers. Union and Constitution, but Man is above measures. All men are ministers to him, servants to bring him materials, but none, nor all, can possibly do what he must do, he alone is privy,nor even is he yet privy to his own secret.. Elizabeth Hoar says, Add the topic of the rights of woman; and Margaret Fuller testifies that women are slaves. But man is a voluntary benefactor. But behold again here in another book, “Man is good, but men are bad.” Why, I have said no more. Men are the result or value of the Past. I desire that it should appear in all its arrangements that human culture is the end to which that house is built and garnished. In every moment and change it represents nature, but these transformed men are an impotent canting. 270 JOURNAL [AGE 36 A man is a Diamond Edition of the world. When I was thirteen years old, my Uncle Samuel Ripley one day asked me, “How is it, Ralph, that all the boys dislike you and quarrel with you, whilst the grown people are fond of you?” Now am I thirty-six and the fact is re1839] CANT. They seem parts of the eternal chain of destiny whereof this sundered will of man is the victim. The wise man is the State. And yet every man is master of the whole Fact, and shall one day find himself so. Instantly you behold that a man is a Mover, — to the extent of his being, a Power, and in contrast with the efficiency thus suggested, our actual life and society appears a dormitory. The vulgar man is the victim of the circumstance. The life of man is the true romance which, when it is valiantly conducted and all the stops of the instrument opened, will go nigh to craze the reader with anxiety, wonder and love. Moreover, to join this body would be to traverse all my long trumpeted theory, and the instinct which spoke from it, that one man is a counterpoise to a city, that a man is stronger than a city, that his solitude is more prevalent and beneficent than the concert of crowds. A man is a compendium of nature, an indomitable savage; ... as long as he has a temperament of his own, and a hair growing on his skin, a pulse beating in his veins, he has a physique which disdains all intrusion, all despotism ; it lives, wakes, alters, by omnipotent modes, and is directly related there, amid essences and billets doux, to Himmaleh mountain chains, wild cedar swamps, and the interior fires, the molten core of the globe. ... Man is the tender, irritable, susceptible matrix or receiver. .. Great men are the universal men, men of the common sense, not provincial ; Raffaelle not a mannerist. Man is a rude bear when men are separated in ships, in mines, in colleges, in monasteries. I affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command which we call moral sentiment:'... Remember that a scholar wishes that every book, chart, and plate belonging to him should draw interest every moment by circulation: for “ No man is the lord of anything Till he communicate his part to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught 1872) JOYS AS A CHILD 381 Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they ’re extended; where, like an arch, reverberates The voice again, or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sún, receives and renders back The figure and its heat.” (Troilus and Cressida.) 'Tis impossible that the Divine Order be broken without resistance, and the remorses, wraths, indecisions, violence, and runnings away into solitude of men are the checks and recoils. What a grand man was Milton! i The young man confesses this inability to satisfactorily account for all misery when he considers it under the two dis1822] 191 BENEVOLENCE One of the best satires upon women is the popular opinion of the third century, that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the influence of evil demons. . . . Men's minds visit heaven as they visit earth, and hence the Turkish heaven is a Harem; the Scandinavian, a hunting field; the Arabian, a place of wheaten cakes and murmuring fountains. Man is a foolish slave who is busy in forging his own fetters. It may be that theirs are the traditionary ingenuity of that supposed ancient parent people i In Greece, such a person was a hero in the second gencration, a giant in the third, and a god in the fourth. He who makes one addition to the stock of thought in circulaCO 358 (AGE 20 JOURNAL tion among men is a benefactor to an unknown amount, and has not lost his day. Man is an animal that looks before and after ; and I should be loth to reflect at a remote period that I took so solemn a step in my existence without some careful examination of my past and present life. Men are appendages. God manifest in the flesh of every man is a perfect rule of social life. Task work is good for idlers, and man is an idler. No man is the Idealist's enemy. “The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen in saying that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, 1836] GREEK CHORUS. Man is an analogist, and therefore no man loses any time or any means who studies that one thing that is before him, though a log or a snail. However, his muse is catholic as ever any was. . . . A human soul is an awesome thing, and when this point-world, this something-nothing, is reabsorbed into the Infinite, let it be recorded of us that we have not defaced the page of Time with any voluntary blemish of folly and malignity. Man is an analogist. Where is not man is neither color nor sound. The man is the creator of his world. Yet is the benefit of others and their love of receiving truth from me the reason of my in1 Followed by the passage « Man is a god in ruins," etc. Man is the point wherein matter and spirit meet and marry. Alcott maintained that every man is a genius, that he looks peculiar, individual, only from the point of view of others. The fit attitude of a man is humble wonder and gratitude, a meek watching of the marvels of the creation, to the end that he may know and do what is fit. THE ANTIQUE A man is the prisoner of ideas and must be unconscious. .. Do you not see that a man is a bundle of relations, that his entire strength consists not in his properties, but in his innumerable relations? There is one mind, and every man is a porch leading into it. A person is finite personality, is finiteness." That man is a commission merchant, and in the midst of a vast business, does not trade on his own account to the amount of a dollar. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.' The shining boughs of the trees in the sun, the swift sailing clouds and the warm air made me think a man is a fool to be mean and unhappy, when every day is made illustrious by these splendid shows. We know all they will do, and man is like man as one steamboat is like another. • Unitarianism.” He went on defining, or rather refining: The Trinitarian doctrine was realism ; the idea of God was not essential, but super• essential ;' talked of trinism and tetrakisin, and much more, of which I only caught this, that the will was that by which a person is a person; • because, if one should push me in the street, .and so I should force the man next me into the • kennel, I should at once exclaim, “I did not do it, sir," meaning it was not my will.' “Yes,” he said, o the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that God was a God of order. For it is certain that these men are samples of their contemporaries. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world. The men were common masons, with paddies to help, nor did they think they were doing anything remarkable. Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. A man is a centre for nature, running out threads of relation through every thing, fluid and solid, material and elemental. Between rank and rank of our great men are · wide intervals. The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. He domesticates the soul in nature: man is the microcosm. “ Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to 116 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and understanding. They replied, that they have not yet done work enough to merit heaven.” He delivers golden sayings, which express with singular beauty the ethical laws; as when he uttered that famed sentence, that, “in heaven the angels are advancing continually to the spring-time of their youth, so that the oldest angel appears the youngest: ” “The more angels, the more room :” “The perfection of man is the love of use:” “Man, in his perfect form, is swedENBoRG; oR, THE MYSTIC. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary men are conjurors and charlatans. Read the haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions : other men are rats and mice. "Men are a sort of moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the air. The soul of man must be the type of our scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house is built. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported. There's naught in this life sweet, If men were wise to see't, But only melancholy. Men are facts as well as persons, and the involuntary part of their life so much as to fill the mind and leave them no countenance to say aught of what is so trivial as their selfish thinking and doing. It instructs in the power of man over men; that a man is a mover; to the extent of his being, a power; and, in contrast with the efficiency he suggests, our Vactual life and society appears a. dormitory. All men are competitors in this art. I am benefited by every observation of a victory of man over nature, — by seeing that wisdom is better than strength; by seeing that every healthy and resolute man is an organizer, a method coming into a confusion and drawing order out of it. In virtue of man's access to Reason or the Whole, the human form is a pledge of wholeness, suggests to our imagination the perfection of truth or goodness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or imperfection. Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value. Here stretches out of sight, out of conception even, this vast Nature, daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable, all self-similar, — an unbroken unity, — and the mind of man is a key to the whole. For the scholars represent the intellect, by which man is man; the intellect and the moral sentiment, — which in the last analysis can never be separated. If men were equals, the waters would not move; but the difference of level which makes Niagara a cataract, makes eloquence, indignation, 'poetry, in him who finds there is much to communicate. Every palace was a door to a pyramid ; a king or rich man was a pyramidaire. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. A man is the whole encyclopædia of facts. Man is the broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age ; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design ; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves ; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton 2 Every great man is a unique. The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. Common men are apologies for men ; they bow the head, excuse themselves with prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances, because the substance is not. The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole ; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. A man is the façade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. The life 276 ESSAY X. of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. But if the constructive powers are rare, and it is given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a receiver of this descending holy ghost, and may well study the laws of its influx. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. AUNT MARY 53 of some sacred part therein, as if each man were a jet of flame affixed to some capital, or node, or angle, or triglyph, or rosette, or spandril, bringing out its beauty and symmetry to the eye by his shining. Ah, dear old Swedenborg, and is thy saw good,“ The perfection of man is the love of use"? Men are miscellanies, rag-bags, unannealed glass, utter discontin1851] BOY AND MAN. On the contrary, the people are all cousins, traders, partners. The misfortune of scholars is that people are non-conductors. A man is a battery whose circuit should be complete, like the ball of the earth, which is also a battery ; but, for the most part, the circuit is interrupted, and you see only the gear or rigging of a battery. A man is a torpedo to a man. In Massachusetts, every twelfth man is a shoemaker; tea-plant for China; oranges for Spain; coal for England; wheat for Canada. English University men are thoroughbred scholars, full readers, by no means idlers : hypercritical, no error can pass under their notice. A humble man can see, but a proud man and a vain man are patients for the oculist. Every man is a possible lord. an race nea The human race are a near-sighted people. “Who, Agni, among men is thy kinsman? 'T is wonderful where the moral influences come from, since no man is a moralist. Whole Floras, all Linnæus', and Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry, but the meanest natural fact, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the interpretation or even associated to [with] a fact in human nature is beauty, is poetry, is truth at once.' I suppose that an Orthodox preacher's cry, “The natural man is an enemy of God,” only translates the philosopher's that “ the instinct of the Understanding is to contradict the Reason”; so Luther's Law and Gospel (also St. Paul's); Swedenborg's love of self and love of the Lord; William Penn's World and Spirit; the Court of Honor's Gentleman and Knave. But then a person is a cause. Every man is an angel in disguise, a god playing the fool. The tree is a congeries of living vegetables ; so it often seems as if man was a congeries of living spirits, according to Goethe's monadism. Every man is a wonder until you learn his studies, his associates, his early acts and the floating opinions of his times, and then he developes himself as naturally fro point as a river is made from rills. Every man is a system, an institution. “ In no man's path malignant stood.” Excellent hymn of Cowper concerning “truths which o'er the world rise but never set.” The preacher, thought I in church, must assume that man is the revelation, and that, if he will reflect, he shall find his heart overflowing with a divine light, and the bible shall be a mirror giving back to him the refulgence of his own mind. Man is the wonderworker. The men are ripe of Saxon kind To build an equal state, — To take the statute from the mind, And make of duty fate. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. So when a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit ; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws. Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. A man is the prisoner of his power. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at self-possession. But the whole state of man is a state of culture; and its flowering and completion may be described as Religion, or Worship. It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading men is a vice general throughout American society. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. 20 JOURNAL [AGE 41 Men are weathercocks and like nothing long. that all the men are cotton gins? “ Man is a torch borne in the wind.” Is there only one courage and one warfare?' the tenth man is a God to him. To the youth the hair of woman is a meteor. Man is a manufacturer. When he broke water his men were a quarter of a mile off, looking out for him; they soon discovered him and picked him up. Unchastity with women is an acute disease, not a habit; . All intellectual men are believers in an aristocracy, that is, a hierarchy. In the neighborhood of the new railroad the other day, in Westminster, I found two poor English or Irish men playing chequers on a little board where the spots were marked with ink, and the men were beans and coffee berries. In a letter to his wife he says of Scott, “The man is a noble stoic, sitting apart here among his rainbow allegories, very much respected by all superior persons.” After the death of Mr. Emerson and the painter, W 1848) SCOTLAND. Stand at the door of the House of Commons, and see the members go in and out, and you will say these men are all men of humanity, of good sense. What a convenience to the senses of men is the Palais Royal; the swarming Boulevards, what an animating promenade; the furnished lodgings have a seductive independence; the living is cheap and good; then what a luxury is it to have a cheap wine for the national beverage as uniformly supplied as beer in England. A successful man is a good hit, a lucky adjustment to the men about him, and their aims, as Goodrich, as Weld, as Brown, Belknap, and all that company are. ur V A robin, says Agassiz (embryonic), is a gull; a gull is a duck; a duck is a fish; add now what I suppose is omitted, pro causa conciliandi gratiam, that a man is a robin, and the chain is perfect, a man is a fish. ur V A robin, says Agassiz (embryonic), is a gull; a gull is a duck; a duck is a fish; add now what I suppose is omitted, pro causa conciliandi gratiam, that a man is a robin, and the chain is perfect, a man is a fish. All that we care for in a man is the tidings he gives us of our own faculty through the new conditions under which he exhibits the common soul. With our faith that every man is a possessed person having that admirable Prompter at his ear, is it not a little superfluous to go about to reason with a person so advised? The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration, but every moment, whilst we think of this offending person that he is ridden by a devil and go to pity him, comes in our sensibility to persuade us that the person is the devil, then the poison works, the devil jumps on our neck, and back again wilder on the other: jumps from neck to neck, and the kingdom of hell comes in. The wonderful men are wonderful hereby. The wonderful men are wonderful hereby. A man is an exaggerator. 1841) SACRED ANTIQUITY 127 expressions which the first user of did not know what he said, but they were spoken through him and from above, not from his level; things which seemed a happy casualty, but which were no more random than the human race are a random formation. Doctor Bradford said it was a misfortune to be born when children were nothing and live until men were nothing. The young men are the readers and victims 228 JOURNAL [AGE 39 of Vivian Grey.' Most men are dupes of the hour, dupes of the nearest object: they cannot put things in perspective; but the nearest is still the largest. mo Men are delicate ware to bring across the sea, more delicate than Sèvres porcelain and glass, or than tropical fruit, for the least non-reception of them in the thought and heart of those to whom they come makes cruelty, futility, and i Here Mr. Emerson takes account of material available for the New York course on New England in February, 284 JOURNAL (AGE 39 confusion.' A man is a partiality. DISCUSSIONS 299 great number of people is fidelity. Earth Spirit, living, a black river like that swarthy stream which rushes through the human body is thy nature, demoniacal, warm, fruitful, sad, nocturnal. If we could establish the rule that each man was a guest in his own house, and when we had shown our visitors the passages of the house, the way to fire, to bread, and water, and thus made them as much at home as the inhabitant, did then leave them to the accidents of intercourse, and went about our ordinary business, a guest would no longer be formidable. REFORM 405 It is folly to imagine that there can be anything very bad in the position of woman compared with that of man, at any time; for since every woman is a man's daughter, and every man is a woman's son, every woman is too near to man, was too recently a man, than that possibly any wide disparity can be. REFORM 405 It is folly to imagine that there can be anything very bad in the position of woman compared with that of man, at any time; for since every woman is a man's daughter, and every man is a woman's son, every woman is too near to man, was too recently a man, than that possibly any wide disparity can be. In Nature the doubt occurs whether the man is the cause or the effect. The magnetism is alone to be respected; the men are steel filings.' The manliness of man is a frail and exquisite fruit which does not keep its perfection twenty-four hours. We fancy that men are individuals; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.'... The question is whether the trilobites, or whether the gods, are our grandfathers; and whether the actual existing men are an amelioration or a degradation arises from the contingence whether we look from the material or from the poetic side. The straight line is better than the square: a man is the one; a horse the other. It is never strange, an unfit marriage, since man is the child of this most impossible marriage, this of the two worlds. I walked in my dream with a pundit who said, ... he could not speak with me many words, for the life of incarnate natures was short, but that the vice of men was old age, which they ought never to know; for, though they should see ten centuries, yet would they be younger than the waters, which — hearken unto their sound! A man is a gate betwixt Hell and Heaven.