among old things. In Thebes,1 in Palmyra,2 his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3

3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic 5 model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American

1 The ruined prehistoric city, capital of Upper Egypt.

2 A ruined city, founded by Solomon, in an oasis of the Syrian desert, a hundred and twenty miles northeast of Damascus.

3 The residence of the Pope in Rome, the largest palace in the world, consisting of over four thousand rooms. It contains the finest existing collection of marbles, bronzes, frescoes, paintings, gems, and statues.

4 A style of architecture distinguished for simplicity and strength, which originated in Doris in ancient Greece.

5 A style of architecture derived from the Goths, with high and sharply pointed arches and clustered columns.

artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Your own gift you can

Insist on yourself; never imitate. present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin,2 or Washington, or Bacon,3 or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven7 tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and

1 See Note 3, p. 29.

2 Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), American philosopher, statesman, and writer. He discovered the nature of lightning, invented the lightning rod, performed important diplomatic services during the Revolution, and compiled the famous Poor Richard's Almanac.

3 See Note I, p. 27.

4 Phidias (400-432 B.C.), the greatest sculptor of Greece if not of all lands. 5 The tool with which they reared the pyramids.

• Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), the greatest Italian poet, author of the Inferno.

7 Divided into many parts; that is, capable of speaking in many ways.

noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld1 again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad ax, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

It recedes as fast on one side as it

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva' watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac 3 he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and

1 A previous state of the world.

2 Geneva, Switzerland, at one time produced the best watches in the world.

3 An almanac for the use of navigators and astronomers, calculated at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England.

it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity intrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's1 heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion,2 Socrates, Anaxagoras,3 Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson5 and Bering accomplished so much in their fishing boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources

7

6

1 A Grecian philosopher living in the first century A.D. He was also a prolific writer. His most noted work is Parallel Lives, a series of forty-six biographies divided into pairs, one taken from Greek and one from Roman history, and each accompanied by a psychological and moral comparison between the characters described. 2 An Athenian general (402-317 B.C.).

3 Eminent Greek philosopher (500-426 B.C.). He maintained the eter

nity of matter.

4 A famous Greek cynic philosopher (400-323 B.C.). He affected a contempt for the comforts of life and the customs of the world. According to tradition he lodged in a tub.

5 Henry Hudson, distinguished English discoverer, discovered Hudson River and Hudson Bay.

6 A Danish navigator (1680-1741). He discovered Bering Strait in 1728, and ascertained that Asia was not joined to America, as was formerly supposed. 7 Sir William Edward Parry, English navigator (1790-1855). In 1819-23 he penetrated the Arctic regions farther than any previous explorer.

8 Sir John Franklin (1786-1845), English Arctic explorer.

of science and art.

man.

Galileo, with an opera glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus1 found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon 2 conquered Europe by the bivouac,3 which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his bread himself."

4

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by

1 Christopher Columbus (about 1436-1506), the discoverer of America. 2 See note 2, page 101.

3 An encampment of soldiers in the open air, without tents, each soldier remaining dressed, with his weapons at hand.

4 Emmanuel Augustin Dieudonné, Comte de las Cases (1766-1842); author of "Mémorial de St. Hélène," and a friend of Napoleon Bonaparte's. Note that Emerson's spelling of the name is wrong. He confused it with that of the great Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish missionary.