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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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