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shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature, but from it, rather. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, comes much nearer to these,-understand them better than the dissector or the antiquary.

SELF-RELIANCE.

Ne te quæsiveris extra.

"Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and perfect man,
Command all light, all influence, all fate,
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune.

Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat: Wintered with the hawk and fox, Power and speed be hands and feet.

ESSAY II.
SELF-RELIANCE.

I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,-that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost,-and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton, is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they, thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own

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