petual tendency to a
set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain
trick, which may be soon learned by an acute person and then that
particular style continued indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in
tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is
their natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or
the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of
power. Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as it reveals
faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of the
persons, with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion by
hatred, could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit
that there should be two stupidities! It is like that brute advantage so
essential to astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for
a base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy,
but in the State and in the schools it is indispensable to resist the
consolidation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why are
you and I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need of him;
let him fight for his own. A new poet has appeared; a new character
approached us; why should we refuse to eat bread until we have found his
regiment and section in our old army-files? Why not a new man? Here is
a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton: why so
impatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by
any known and effete name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only
two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and
no man is wanted much. We came this time for condiments, not for
corn. We want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in our
constellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish
to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I
think I have done well if I have acquired a new word from a good author;
and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt
him down into an epithet or an image for daily use:--

"Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"

To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at any
general statement,--when we have insisted on the imperfection of
individuals, our affections and our experience urge that every
individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure
to be repaid. A recluse sees only two or