English Prose | Page 7

a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever
moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is
the center of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and
all men and all events. You are constrained to accept his standard.
Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of
some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it
takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he
must make all circumstances indifferent--put all means into the shade.
This: all great men are and do. Every true man is a cause, a country,
and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to
accomplish his thought;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a
procession. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman
Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his
genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, the Reformation,
of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of
Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history
resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest
persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a
bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the man
in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force
which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he
looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book has an alien
and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seems to say like that,
"Who are you, sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice,
petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession.
The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to
settle its claim to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked
up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and
dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all
obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been
insane--owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the
state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes
up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination
makes fools of us, plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and
estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a
small house and common day's work: but the things of life are the same
to both: the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to
Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did
they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act
to-day as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men
shall act with original views, the luster will be transferred from the
actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has indeed been instructed by its kings, who have so
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful
loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble,
or the great proprietor to walk among them, by a law of his own, make
his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not
with money but with honor, and represent the Law in his person, was
the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness
of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we

inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax,
without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into
trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the
essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or
Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later
teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which
analysis cannot go, all