ry
of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when
that turn shall be oftenest to be practised. We do what we must, and
call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of
having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of man
who is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is not
worth the taking, to do tricks in.

Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The
party-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is
earned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoever
loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our
failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very
educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with
commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every
man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird
which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the
Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks
from this one, and for another moment from that one.

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought?
Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons
enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and
written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written,
neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual
tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should
consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat,
he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat
on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and
melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not
rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A
political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads,
which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side to
tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended in
a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends in
headache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those who a few
months ago were dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times.
"There is now no longer any right course of action nor any self-devotion
left among the Iranis." Objections and criticis