s, and dogs,
and ferules,[49] the love of little maids and berries, and many
another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend
and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and
world, must also soar and sing.[50]

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has
the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe
of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger
and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust
one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,[51] who, getting their
livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen,
for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and
discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees.
Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who,
moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow
the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish
their merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
action. Life is our dictionary.[52] Years are well spent in country
labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank
intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one
end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate
and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how
much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his
speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and
copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn
grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and
the work-yard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in
nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and
every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these "fits of
easy transmission and reflection," as Newton[53] called them, are the
law of nature because they are the law of spirit.

The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When
the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer
paints, when thoughts are no l