Essays, First Series | Page 4

experience. There is a relation between the
hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn
from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded
by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body
depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the
hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the
hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more
incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his
private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have
done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution
was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought
occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a
private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will
solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to
something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must
become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and
executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret
experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or
Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and
depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political
movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say,
'Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions
into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the
waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can
see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon,
Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things.
Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we
hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their
ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of
this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul,
covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with
swords and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure
consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims;
the plea for education, for justice, for charity; the foundation of
friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to
acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read
as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not
in their stateliest pictures, --in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in
the triumphs of will or of genius,--anywhere lose our ear, anywhere
make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it
true that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that
Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the
corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments
of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great
prosperities of men;--because there law was enacted, the sea was
searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck, for us, as we
ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.
We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the
rich because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which
we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise
man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader
his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature
writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures,
conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is
forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and he
is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A true
aspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory
in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more
sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning
character, yea further in every fact and circumstance,--in the running
river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love

flows, from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the
firmament.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad
day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem
his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the
Muse