whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat at my Selfhouse. I do not wish to please him: Reliance I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is 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 centre 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 everybody in society re minds us of somewhat else or of some other person. Character, realSelf- ity, reminds you of nothing else. It Reliance 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 Cæsar 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 Clarksons Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history Selfresolves itself very easily into the Reliance biography of a stout and earnest person. 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 charityboy, 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 have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem 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 Self- verdict: it is not to command me, Reliance but I am to settle its claims 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 Selftotal of both is the same. Why all Reliance 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 today, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with vast views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen. |