Right ethics are central, and go from the soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving us. I must absolve me to myself.

USES OF GREAT MEN

MAY TWENTIETH

We foolishly think in our days of sin that we must court friends by compliance to the customs of society, to its dress, its breeding, and its estimates. But later if we are so happy we learn that only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.

SPIRITUAL LAWS

MAY TWENTY-FIRST

A man who is sure of his point, carries a broad and contented expression, which everybody reads. And you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, except by making him the kind of man of whom that manner is the natural expression. Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect, is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love, is felt to be done for love.

BEHAVIOR

MAY TWENTY-SECOND

A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels: his proof is that his eloquence makes

me one.

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC

MAY TWENTY-THIRD

Past utterance and past belief,

And past the blasphemy of grief,

The mysteries of nature's heart,—

And though no muse can these impart,

Throb thine with nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.

THRENODY

MAY TWENTY-FOURTH

Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system.

BEAUTY

MAY TWENTY-FIFTH

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated and not to be overawed,

decides upon every man's title to fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last.

MAY TWENTY-SIXTH

SPIRITUAL LAWS

Pride ruined the angels,

Their shame them restores,
And the joy that is sweetest
Lurks in stings of remorse.
Have I a lover

Who is noble and free,-
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.

MAY TWENTY-SEVENTH

THE SPHYNX

The only reward of virtue is virtue: the only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they repel us; why should we intrude?

MAY TWENTY-EIGHTH

FRIENDSHIP

The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars;

why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

THE POET

MAY TWENTY-NINTH

All private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.

MAY THIRTIETH

EXPERIENCE

Genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man.

MAY THIRTY-FIRST

THE OVER-SOUL

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. [ 49 ]

THE POET