travel, society, solitude."
"We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they
must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their
best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for
occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude,
the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the
cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it
farther than suns and stars."
We must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. Try the
rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth
knowing. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims
high, must dread an easy home and popular manners."
Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble
career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least.
But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he
respected. It was "the hand of Douglas" again,--the same feeling that
Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the
introduction to this volume.
Here are a few good sayings about "Behavior."
"There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an
egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke
of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage."
Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of "Manners" in his Essay under the
above title.
"The basis of good manners is self-reliance.--Manners require time,
as nothing is more vulgar than haste.--
"Men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first
time,--and every time they meet.--
"It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his
talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that
stands by himself, the universe stands by him also."
In his Essay on "Worship," Emerson ventures the following prediction:--
"The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming
ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind
must have a faith which is science.--There will be a new church
founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a
manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church
of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will
have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol
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