pection shows those anticipations to have been correct.
But man is greater than men; and for the finest aspect of high laws, we
must look to individual souls, not to masses.
What is the secret of noble manners? Orbital action, always returning
into and compensating itself. The gentleman, in offering his respect to
others, offers an equal, or rather the same, respect to himself; and his
courtesies may flow without stint or jealous reckoning, because they
feed their source, being not an expenditure, but a circulation.
Submitting to the inward law of honor and the free sense of what befits
a man,--to a law perpetually made and spontaneously executed in his
own bosom, the instant flowering of his own soul,--he commands his own
obedience, and he obeys his own commanding. Though throned above all
nations, a king of kings, yet the faithful humble vassal of his own
heart; though he serve, yet regal, doing imperial service; he escapes
outward constraint by inward anticipation; and all that could he rightly
named as his duty to others, he has, ere demand, already discovered, and
engaged in, as part of his duty to himself. Now it is the expression of
royal freedom in loyal service, of sovereignty in obedience, courage in
concession, and strength in forbearance, which makes manners noble. Low
may he bow, not with loss, but with access of dignity, who bows with an
elevated and ascending heart: there is nothing loftier, nothing less
allied to abject behavior, than this grand lowliness. The worm, because
it is low, cannot be lowly; but man, uplifted in token of supremacy, may
kneel in adoration, bend in courtesy, and stoop in condescension. Only a
great pride, that is, a great and reverential repose in one's own being,
renders possible a noble humility, which is a great and reverential
acknowledgment of the being of others; this humility in turn sustains a
higher self-reverence; this again resolves itself into a more majestic
humility; and so run, in ever enhancing wave, the great circles of
inward honor and outward grace. And without this self-sustaining
return of the action into itself, each quality feeding itself from its
correlative opposite, there can be no high behavior. This is the reason
why qualities loftiest in kind and largest in measure are vulgarly
mistaken, not for their friendly opposites, but for their mere
contraries,--why a very profound sensibility, a sensibility, too,
peculiarly of the spirit, not of nerve only,
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