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Self- sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his Reliance being as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh

are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does
it matter how you gauge and try him. A character
is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;—read it
forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same
thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God
allows me, let me record day by day my honest
thought without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot
doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean
it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines
and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow
over my window should interweave that thread or
straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We
pass for what we are. Character teaches above our
wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue
or vice only by overt actions and do not see that
virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever
variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural
in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be
harmonious, however unlike they seem. These
varieties are lost sight of when seen at a little distance,

at a little height of thought. One tendency unites Selfthem all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag Reliance line of a hundred tacks. This is only microscopic criticism. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly, will justify you now.

Greatness always appeals to the future. If I can be great enough to do right now and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before, as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. There they all stand and shed an united light on the advancing actor He is attended as by a visible escort of angels to every man's eye. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity

Self into Washington's port, and America into Adam's Reliance eye Honor is venerable to us because it is no

ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day, because it is not of to-day. We love and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more.

A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him: 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 Selfis, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, Reliance and all events. You are constrained to accept his standard.

Ordinarily everybody 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 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 Clarkson ☘ Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a stout and

Self- earnest persons. ¶Let a man then know his worth, Reliance 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 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 verdict: it is not to command me, but I a
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

am

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