tle
of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects,
or saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these
bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust.
We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more
vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis
more firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mournful; but it
is not the slave of tears, contritions and perturbations. It does not
attempt another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lesson
of wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned that I cannot
dispose of other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my own as
persuades me, against all their denials, that they also have a key to
theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among
drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a
finger they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of
their vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this
poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Come
out of that, as the first condition of advice.

In this our talking America we are ruined by our good nature and
listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being
greatly useful. A man should not be able to look other than directly
and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the
importunate frivolity of other people; an attention, and to an aim which
makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no
appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of
Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on
the threshold. The face of the god expresses a shade of regret and
compassion, but is calm with the conviction of the irreconcilableness
of the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into the eternal and
beautiful. The man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the
earth, into which his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there
lying express pictorially this disparity. The god is surcharged with his
divine destiny.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality,
Subjectiveness,--these are threads on the loom of time, these are the
lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as
I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for
my picture