APRIL FIRST OVE, and LOVE you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns everything to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors and from enemies. became friends, so do disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors. COMPENSATION APRIL SECOND Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. LITERARY ETHICS APRIL THIRD As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes; cant and lying and the attempt to secure a good which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain. APRIL FOURTH The prosperous and beautiful The yoke of conscience masterful, Yet spake yon purple mountain, Yet said yon ancient wood, That night or day, that love or crime, WORSHIP THE PARK APRIL FIFTH Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition Convention, or the Temperance meeting, or the Transcendental club into the fields and woods, she says to us, "So hot? my little sir." SPIRITUAL LAWS APRIL SIXTH You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.... Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. COMPENSATION APRIL SEVENTH The hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of a just and brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, himself,—and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relation of the incident. SPIRITUAL LAWS APRIL EIGHTH It seems as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood, -the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity and see what the great Soul showeth, INTELLECT APRIL NINTH What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.... Hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things. FATE APRIL TENTH Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and mean ness. MANNERS It is because we know how much is due from us, that we are impatient to show some petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a conscience of this right to grandeur of character, and are false to it. POLITICS APRIL TWELFTH Kings unborn shall walk with me, Quickened so, will I unlock Every crypt of every rock. APRIL THIRTEENTH BACCHUS The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for the best. APRIL FOURTEENTH THE OVER-SOUL All things exist in the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With what quality is in him, he infuses all nature that he can reach; nor does he tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, all his regards return into his own good at last. CHARACTER APRIL FIFTEENTH There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority-demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice-comes graceful and beloved as a bride. AN ADDRESS APRIL SIXTEENTH He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. SELF-RELIANCE APRIL SEVENTEENTH By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You become pronounced. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, -those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely. FRIENDSHIP APRIL EIGHTEENTH Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of amusement? |