[ESSAY

ESSAYS.

forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold

spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by!

the hours

man is one more incarnation. All its properties con

Of the universal mind each individual

sist in him.

Each new fact in his private experience on what great bodies of men have

flashes a light

done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's

mind, and

man, it is

when the same thought occurs to another the key to that era. Every reform was

once & private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

me to

arrated must correspond to something in

must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, be credible or intelligible. We as we read martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to reality in our secret experience, or we shall

some

learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Cæsar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has. meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, "Under this. mask did my Proteus nature hide itself." This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot, lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures-in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius— anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we

intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of a king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of We sympathise in the great moments of

himself.

history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men ;-because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.

So all that is

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honour the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace, which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern his unattained but attainable self. essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes

All literature

writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuhe finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent ments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which stimulated wherever he moves as by personal allusions and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and he is! sions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears! A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for alluthat character he seeks, in every word that is said the commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of circumstance,-in the running river and the rustling concerning character, yea, further, in every fact and

com.

from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows

of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; .to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have anything to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no

fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, | Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to

all nations.

have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign: London and Paris and New York must go the same way.

Who cares what the fact was, when we

Napoleon,

"What is history," said ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life of War, Colonisation, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands,-the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind. of history in our private experience, and verifying| We are always coming up with the emphatic facts

them here.

All history becomes subjective; in other

Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,words, there is properly no history; only biography. must go over the whole ground. What it does not 800, what it does not live, it will not know. What for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of the former age has epitomised into a formula or rule verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him. History must be this or it is nothing. Every law