my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

THOMAS HARDY

NEW YEAR'S EVE[13]

"I have finished another year," said God,
"In gray, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down."

"And what's the good of it?" I said.
"What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
Why nought should be at all?

"Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, 'who in
This tabernacle groan'?
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!"

Then he: "My labors--logicless--
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.

"Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!"

He sank to raptness as of yore,
And opening New Year's Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
In his unweeting way.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

CIVILIZATION[14]

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is
found,--a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape,--a cannibal, and
eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,--a certain degree of progress
from this extreme, is called Civilization. It is a vague, complex name, of
many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition. M. Guizot, writing a book
on the subject, does not. It implies the evolution of a highly-organized
man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power,
religion, liberty, sense of honor, and taste. In the hesitation to define
what it is, we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that has no
clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract
thought, we call barbarous. And after many arts are invented or imported,
as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant
to call them civilized.

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its own.
The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is different
from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term imports a
mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind to-day the
savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than civilized. The
Indians