ances.

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearHe plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed1 and Herschel,2 in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,— watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, - how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems

scholar and patron of learning. He is characterized by historians as the wisest, best, and greatest king that ever reigned in England.

1 John Flamsteed (1646-1719), first English astronomer royal under Charles II. He was the first to explain the true principles of the equation of time. His Historia Cœlistis Britannicæ, in which he determined the position of nearly 3000 stars, was the first trustworthy catalogue of the stars.

2 Sir William Herschel (1738–1822) was of German birth, but all his astronomical work was done in England. He accomplished more than any other man in the field of astronomy. He discovered the planet Uranus, and made many remarkable observations upon the physical constitution of the sun, and upon comets; but his most valuable service to the cause of astronomy consisted in his accurate observations upon variable and binary stars. He demonstrated the action upon the most distant members of the firmament of the same mechanical laws that bind together our solar system.

to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one,

who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of today, this he shall hear and promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish1 of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time,- happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads 2 on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any 1 An idol or object of blind devotion.

2 Follows.

law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,—until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; that they drink his words because he fulfills for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.

In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be,— free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes,1 peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin,- see the whelping of this lion,- which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance,—

1 The ostrich, when hunted, thrusts its head into a bush and imagines itself invisible because it cannot see the hunter.

by your sufferance.

See it to be a lie, and you have already

dealt it its mortal blow. Yes, we are the cowed, we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint.1 They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.2 Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and

1 "It is flint," i.e., hard or unimpressionable as flint.

2 In Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's squire, relates a story of a gentleman who, having invited a poor farmer to dine with him, pressed him to take the head of the table. The countryman, piquing himself on his good breeding, refused to take the place of honor, until his host, losing all patience, exclaimed, "Sit thee down, clodpole, for let me sit wherever I will, that will still be the upper end and the place of worship to thee.” The same thought, modified in expression, is placed by different authors in the mouths of various men, and it is uncertain to which of several famous Scotchmen Emerson ascribes it.

3 Carolus Linnæus, or Carl von Linne (1707-78), Swedish botanist. He established natural science upon its modern basis, and was, in botany and zoology, the foremost man of his time. His artificial system of plant classification, though now discarded, was simple and easily followed, and has greatly facilitated the study of botany.

4 Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), English chemist. His greatest achievement was his account of the decomposition by galvanism of the fixed alkalies, by which he proved that these alkalies are metallic oxides.

Cuvier,1 fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.2

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light, that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called "the mass " and the herd." In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say,— one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, — ripened ; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony,-full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those

1 George Cuvier (1769-1832), French naturalist. He first applied to zoölogy the natural method, and founded a system of classification of animals based on their anatomical structure. He is regarded as the founder of the science of comparative anatomy.

2 The attraction of the moon heaps up the waters of the sea into a broad, low wave, the passage of which forms the ebb and flow of the tide.