the world. He cannot do so, if he be thoughtful and earnest, but by the force of his perception. He sees that the soul is a creator, and instantly makes light of all your present works, since he knows it can very easily make more when these are gone; a secret which others do not know, and so contradict him with petulance.

It is very pleasant to me to hear of any fine person that he or she is a reader of Swedenborg. It is an uncomputed force,-his influence on this age, his genius still unmeasured. He is the fabulist, the Cebes, the better Æsop of the last ages. How bland, how warm, how renovating it works on the cold crudities of Calvinism or Unitarianism!

Gather yourself into a ball to be thrown at a mark.

Lectures.-In Boston, December 4, I read the first lecture of my course on the Present Age; with the old experience that when it was done, and the time had come to read it, I was then first ready to begin to write.'

1 The lectures of this course, lasting into February of the following year, were as follows: I, Introductory; II and III,

1839] HOPE. THE AGE ALIVE 351

There is no hope so bright but it is the beginning of its own fulfilment. The dearer it is to us, the more it engages the hands to work for it, and approaching by nature to its object in proportion to its justice, it enlists heaven and earth to work in its behalf.

O Age! he who embraces thee heartily finds all ages in thee. The magazine of the gods, which every age dispenses in its own way, is now thine, and thou hast thine own expendi

ture.

And lo! how fast the great Critic, who now instructs, discerns, separates the dead from the living, the flesh from the spirit! See the living veins and strata run, detaching as bark and burr what we thought was stock and pith. See laws to be no laws, and religions to become impieties, and great sciences mistakes, and great men perverters.

It is in the order of nature one of the curbs and ligaments, that great good is first contended against before it is heartily appropriated, as the

Literature; IV, Politics; V, Private Life; VI, Reforms; VII, Religion; VIII, Ethics; IX, Education; X, Tendencies.

heroes first made war against the Amazons whom

they afterwards married.

Sunday, December 8.

My Friends. I read with joy Sterling's noble critique on Carlyle in the Westminster Review. All intellectual ability seems to have somewhat impersonal and destructive of personality; and yet I read with warm pride because a man who has offered me friendship gives this unequivocal certificate of his equality to that office. O friend! you have given me that sign which high friendship demands, namely, ability to do without it. Pass on, we shall meet again. I woke this morn with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. I think no man in the planet has a circle more noble. They have come to me unsought: the great God gave them to me. Will they separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not, for my relation to them is so pure that we hold by simple affinity; and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whosoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.'

I Although the last three sentences are printed ("Friendship," Essays, First Series, p. 194), they are given here