us, nor
Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made.
We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great
men. There is none without his foible. I verily believe if an angel
should come to chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much
gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious
atrocity. It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful,
but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. He
is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a
cripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or by
courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner, each concealing as
he best can his incapacity for useful association, but they want either
love or self-reliance.

Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a
little reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant
qualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particular
excellences; as we grow older we value total powers and effects, as the
impression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius is
all. The man,--it is his system: we do not try a solitary word or act,
but his habit. The acts which you praise, I praise not, since they are
departures from his faith, and are mere compliances. The magnetism which
arranges tribes and races in one polarity is alone to be respected; the
men are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say,
'O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel to thee! what
prodigious virtues are these of thine! how constitutional to thee, and
incommunicable.' Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls
our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the
wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for
the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions.
A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, it is
great; if they say it is small, it is small; you see it, and you see it
not, by turns; it borrows all its size from the momentary estimation of
the speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes
if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell if
Washington be a great man or no? Who can tell if Franklin be? Yes, or
any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods of fame? And they too
loom and fade before the eter