better with the new generation? We easily p dict a fair future to each new candidate w enters the lists, but we are frivolous and vo tile, and by low aims and ill example do w we can to defeat this hope. Then these you bring us a rough but effectual aid. By th unconcealed dissatisfaction they expose our p erty and the insignificance of man to man. man is a poor limitary benefactor. He oug to be a shower of benefits-a great influen which should never let his brother go, should refresh old merits continually with n ones; so that though absent he should ne be out of my mind, his name never far fr my lips; but if the earth should open at side, or my last hour were come, his na should be the prayer I should utter to the U verse. But in our experience, man is cheap a friendship wants its deep sense. We affect dwell with our friends in their absence, but do not; when deed, word, or letter comes n they let us go. These exacting children adv tise us of our wants. There is no complime no smooth speech with them; they pay y only this one compliment, of insatiable exp tation; they aspire, they severely exact, and they only stand fast in this watch-tower, a

persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.'

With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it cannot be wondered at that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivolity in people. They say to themselves, It is better to be alone than in bad company. And it is really a wish to be met, the wish to find society for their hope and religion,—which prompts them to shun what is called society. They feel that they are never so fit for friendship as when they have quitted mankind and taken themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the hills or the woods which they can people with the fair and worthy creation of the fancy, can give them often forms so vivid that these for the time shall seem real, and society the illusion.

But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly

share in the public charities, in the public re gious rites, in the enterprises of education, missions foreign and domestic, in the aboliti of the slave-trade, or in the temperance so ety. They do not even like to vote. The p lanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalis does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear th their friend is dead, as that he is a Transce dentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and c never do anything for humanity. What righ cries the good world, has the man of genius retreat from work, and indulge himself? T popular literary creed seems to be, ‘I am a su lime genius; I ought not therefore to labo But genius is the power to labor better ar more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt The good, the illuminated, sit apart from th rest, censuring their dulness and vices, as if the thought that by sitting very grand in their chair the very brokers, attorneys, and congressme would see the error of their ways, and flock them. But the good and wise must learn to ac and carry salvation to the combatants and de magogues in the dusty arena below.

On the part of these children it is replied tha life and their faculty seem to them gifts too ric to be squandered on such trifles as you propos

to them. What you call your fundamental institutions, your great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and, when nearly seen, paltry matters. Each cause' as it is called, say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism, - becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers. You make very free use of these words 'great' and 'holy,' but few things appear to them such. Few persons have any magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and the philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to the general course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle; and as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble in the arts by which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the experiment and found that from the liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming which intimates a frightful

skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim.

Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not wish to perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once.' I do not love routine. Once possessed of the principle, it is equally easy to make four or forty thousand applications of it. A great man will be content to have indicated in any the slightest manner his perception of the reigning Idea of his time, and will leave to those who like it the multiplication of examples. When he has hit the white, the rest may shatter the target. Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is. Every moment of a hero so raises and cheers us that a twelvemonth is an age. All that the brave Xanthus brings home from his wars is the recollection that at the storming of Samos, “in the heat of the battle, Pericles smiled on me, and passed on to another detachment." It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, of events, or of actors, that imports.

New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust but we do not like your work.