cautiously, for to-day's belief is built upon the wreck of yesterday's heresy; and the outlaw of to-day was the hero of a breathing-space gone. Nothing abides. First opinions are oftentimes black with error, and go down in the light of fuller knowledge. We are ashamed of our grandfathers' belief in witches, ghosts, and goblins. It is said there is a trick in each man's talk; when caught, you have his whole thought. Poe felt sure you had a man's calibre by his autograph. We are not sure — and yet a careful reader shall tell you by ear which is Shakspeare, Tennyson, or Scott. That sentence you quote, why label Plato, or Bacon, or Milton? You can't deceive us. 'Tis a trick in the expression, if followed to the corner, shall show you the man hidden behind it. And I would that it should be ever so. Give me a little of the man's character stamped on the idea. I respect the man. His moral force heaped on the word shall be weight to bear me down and shame me into his path. Am I crooked and warped and dwarfed? Let me find his heart, backed by his life, in his thought and word, and behold! I straightway begin to grow erect and happy. It is an open question which are the masters, men or ants; but I see Rome begin to quicken when the she-wolf gives suck to a babe. I see her tremble when the young Hannibal swears upon his sword, and it takes Peter the Hermit to bring Saladin and Cœur de-Lion to the same battlefield. When Warwick goes down, all is lost. Verily, "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a God!" Yet I would have you know that the stolid, phlegmatic men are made of poor timber. Too slow, too nerveless. They burn slowly, stubbornly-crack, snap, they are broken and done. Give me a man who is keenly and passionately alive; full to bursting with bounding, nervous vitality; burning with that fierce energy which sends the wounded tiger leaping into mid-air and flings him on his foe, more fatal in death than in life. I do not rely much upon negative men. Pent fire is dangerous.

Men are so restless. We could almost believe in a Spirit of Unrest. They cannot work and wait. They are ever anxious to cut away a gap in the clay, that some historian may point and say, "This was his place. He is a link. He lived. He died. Go visit his grave." I am ashamed that men should gasp so, and be troubled after a line of mention in a printed book. A horse or a dog may win so much. Men smile so complacently when their names come forth heading large contributions to puny societies, and are trumpeted up and down as founders of this or that insignificant sect. They should know that one good life justifies the beauty of human existence, and leads more men to the tabernacle than a thousand such Christians. Girards, Peabodys, Corcorans, and Shaws, are the veriest of angelvisits. Men define immortality so strangely: one burns a temple, another leaps full harnessed into a chasm, and yet another teaches us how to talk under the Atlantic; and all these are immortal. I had rather beg like Homer than stab like Brutus; and yet when our day comes we tremble, and whisper to our elbow-companion whether we shall stab or burn or write, for we are full of perplexity.

I am myself and you are yourself. It is nerve that weds us to our own, and helps us to avow contentment. We have a sharp law for counterfeiters, and a bank-clerk has ingenuity in detecting the spurious coin or note. Why have we no law to brand counterfeit men? I would throw my pen away lest I write a parody or plagiarise. We pat the imitator on the back and tell him he mimics well. We should prefer cultivating our own weeds to stealing another's flowers; yet men try hard to catch the same twang for a conversation, and court the same fancies as well as dress. Sheep go in flocks. The lion crouches alone in the jungle. Jackdaws hover together in myriads, and chatter like mad. The eagle sits alone on his crag, and the albatross dips his wing in the midmost billow of the ocean, and each sweeps upward voiceless in his own dignified loneliness. Still, it is better to be a good jackdaw than a bad eagle, for even geese can sometimes save a city.

We are all just a mite cowardly. We elbow our way down street, not quite sure but we are trespassers. This last thought I put here goes down timidly. I make a half bow of apology to something within which seems almost to ask, Is that your own? I am ever saying to myself deprecatingly, Yes, yes, I admit it: it is not all mine : I borrowed this piece here and that yonder. We are ever turning half around, abashed, to see if some one is not deriding our best deeds. I once heard of a man who ran a pin into his foot at the age of twenty, and at eighty it worked out at his knee. That was his pin! After all those sixty years who was to claim it? I shall not tremble so when I set down my idea. Perhaps it has been in the heart so long, no owner will rise up in judgment to claim it. Let us take heart. It may be the chance thought we drop is the long-sought key which shall unlock all of life to some mere laborer. It is said that in a far country, when the traveller eats fruit, he buries a seed by the wayside. Each pass-way becomes a grand avenue of shade, under which a stranger can rest. Be firm, hopeful, and active. Record your thought: it may shelter a soul, and among the shadows where men struggle with evil, it may aid a sinking brother in saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan."

There are more men than ideas, and I thank God that in this life we shall look neither to the right nor to the left, before nor behind. We shall strike our little tent here in the meridian of this day, and stand up and do our work. I shall not take an observation to find in what quarter is the moon. The seed I shall sow to-day shall bring forth fruit in its kind when the harvest shall come. Enough for me to know this It is for me to dig my place, choose my seed, winnow and plant. He shall water; He shall watch; He shall keep. Tomorrow is not mine. I must be a man to-day, and need not fear the morrow. I am well told that I shall have nothing to do with consistency; and in my heart I thank my instructor. I shall work to-day, and affirm or deny to-morrow as my best of life shall demand. There be whom I shall please, and there be whom you shall please. Do you put on brown or blue or red, as your case shall need, while I shall put on black or purple or white, and we shall both be applauded. We map out our lives, and then we check and pull and dwarf and tug our

steps into the path we plan. We should open our hearts and read what is written therein; then look up and live. Why should we fret over our epitaphs before disease has laid its hand upon us? If I am a valuable fraction in the sum, I shall help to balance the final count, and be sure a shaft will go over me and my name be set down. I would not have you curl your lips and sneer when we quote that the world owes us, and we will claim our own with usury. 'Tis not seemly we should come in boisterously like Orlando, sword in hand. If we serve faithfully and hopefully, our reward shall be forthcoming. There is no court in which the good world pleads bankruptcy. Did you ever hear of her neglecting her yeomen? You shall not tell me the laurel is oftener twined on the gravestone than the head. It comes enough! Work, wait, hope; then lie down and be glorified. Be sure your memory shall be drowned in nectar, though we drench you here with wormwood. Richter is scoffed out of a two-penny publisher's office, and straightway we find a great nation pluming itself on his citizenship. Hold your judgment; be silent; observe. The butterfly shakes off the grub, and bevies of children chase it. Do something worthy that shall burnish your name, and what boots it us whether you live in a garret or palace? we will come down from our equipage, inch up to you hat in hand, and say, Do not forget us: we played side by side with you in the long-gone time; and you shall not say I know you not, because we gave you no cup of water when you were athirst; how should we know your place the while, there are so many men?

I think more of Dickens than Scott, because his story is the necessary outcropping from the character he draws. In him the petty little plot does not puff itself and force each man and woman into existence, to dance around or under it and help to bear its ponderous weight along. It should be said of us, They lived; see the consequences. The husbandman digs about the roots of his tree, cuts away the dead buds and branches, and lo! the leaves are green and the fruit luscious. Let him not trouble himself about the kind of fruit; it is his to tend his tree, and he shall not come away empty-handed. I shall admire Hercules for searing the severed heads of the Hydra; but for me I shall not despond or grow weary because of this or that bad thought, wicked impulse, failure or disappointment. I shall rise to manhood "on the stepping-stones of my dead self." If I do love my work, it shall go well with me, and I shall not tire. Constant labor gives splendid physique. It was a suggestive custom which dubbed a knight with a stroke of the sword. Let us feel our danger, and if we be men, our eyes shall burn.

I would that our lives were not measured by clocks, but by the good strokes we make. Should this eye offend me, let me pluck it out, and settling back into my bettered life, say, Here, begin the count just here; this is an epoch. And then I should play the lordly conqueror, and throw my former puny self into the scale to make good the balance, and laugh at the taunting magnanimity of a Bren

nus.

When I rise I had rather go hither and thither, up and down, like a badly balanced kite, than hitch myself to somebody's balloon and be

hoisted up. 'Tis not well to pluck the half-blown rose to-day and rudely press its tender petals open. Patience. To-morrow you shall see it in its full beauty.

In my heart of hearts I respect and look up to that man who is mailed in a well-grounded faith in himself, who delights in opposition for opposition's sake, and would not, in this body, live in a world where there was no sin to fight; who, fixed and firm in himself, does not need to grasp the horn of the altar to steady him when he stands, but proud in his consciousness of rectitude and faithful obedience to all higher law, shall not need to sprinkle his door-post with blood ere he lay his hand on the strong right-arm of the Destroying Angel and demand his absolution. Carlyle may crack my head with his cranky words, but I shall go down on my knees beside him and do homage to his heroes. It would amuse as well as astound us sometimes, when we are in a corner thanking God we are not as other men are, if we could step around the square where other men are thanking God they are not as we are. It is mine to love what I have; what I have not, to use all due diligence to get, and what I cannot get, not to weep for. Let me think all good things are not bestowed upon one. I never saw one man with five acute senses - a dim eye, a bad ear, and so on, and yet he may have a crown. Milton was blind when he paid his entrance-fee to Westminster Abbey. Samson at the temple pillar is infinitely more powerful in his pathos of chained majesty than Samson with the jaw-bone of an ass among Philistines.

How proud I am to meet a man who can pick me out from my every day self and place me on his own high character, and talk to me as if it were my perch! Verily I am better than I thought myself. How suggestive he is, and how my brain stirs and my tongue moves! I am a new man. 'Tis a test, this association of ours. I meet a man. He is steel, I am flint. A flash, and lo! I am brilliantly alive for a moment. Let us understand each other. Let us be frank and free and truthful. Let us enter into solemn compact to deal honestly with each other forevermore. What a new and high life we should then lead! I shall feel you, and you me, however removed we be. Lonely no more. Companioned through time. My life, my aim, my thought, would be buoyed up by your existence. I could wish we knew what we are to each other. Do you put on armor? then I box myself in mail. Pistol for pistol, knife for knife, sword for sword. What a strife we have! I must meet my antagonist in the same trim he meets me, else I shall fail and fall. Do you suspect me? Then to me you violate every commandment, and henceforth are an uncaught outlaw. Don't look askance at me. 'Tis not every man would betray for thirty pieces of silver. Come out from your corner. Love the sunshine. Why should you groan and wither and frown? There is more of joy than sorrow in this life. You can do your work more acceptably on a sofa than in a tub. I shall always think it was sheer affectation that shaved Demosthenes and sent him to a cellar. A man may smile, and smile, and be full of wisdom still. We are so fearful of being passed. We would be noticed. What a way we have of squeezing our street number into the corner of our cards, fearing lest our place shall be forgotten. Be steadfast. The best men are

least seen. I had rather be a newsman and cry my papers, than a bouqueted dandy on a street corner. Let us sing while we pull up the weeds. There is no oblivion, no death. Let men weigh well each side of every subject before falling in with any creed or party; shake from brain and heart each prejudice that has webbed itself around them, and never denying the softening and refining influence of the heart's deep emotion, yet look alone for their guidance to a sound and well-balanced reason. Then what deep works of influence on age and race shall they leave behind them! Not the nation's train or the glowworm's trail, which quiver and flash and die, but the line carved in adamant - the life which shall revivify the memory of Sesostris, and stud the wayside with monuments of worthy deeds. Prejudice is stronger than reason, and to go astray is easy. When shall men burst upward through the crust of error which holds them down, and live proud and liberal lives? Men should not look into the life of this or that good man, and then into their own, shouting with exultation, "They are alike, they are alike, and we are also good!" Does the palm-tree grow in Siberia, or the fir-tree in the waste sands of Africa? And yet the growth of each is the beautiful perfection of vegetal life. You shall open ears, eyes, and heart to every elevating and ennobling word and deed. Grapple fast to you that stray longing for a higher life, but run yourselves into no mould. Maintain both form and proportion, and wait the unfolding of your own growth. You shall know the lime-rock by the lichen which cloaks its savage face, but the marble is bare in its stony stubbornness. God made each, and said, "It is good." We know not what we are. We see a landscape, a tree, a flower, an attitude, a man, anything, and straightway there runs through us a sensation of troubled wonder where we saw them before. A flash. Quick. It comes and goes, but in that moment we are dragged headlong with amazement through aeons of years, annoyed with a shadowy distrust that this we call the soul is playing us false and has been where it likes not to tell us. Are they dreams, are they visions, are they presciences? We know not. bold was Schelling when he said that man has been what he is through all eternity, and did not become so in time. Life is full of mysteries. But let the mind assert itself. Now life becomes sacred. Vanish, ye superstitions and annoyances! Shake yourselves from us, and fall around like dead leaves from the wind-shaken tree in autumn! No blanched cheek, no restless, weary eye, no pallid lip, no cowering frame! Bold, braced, calm. The man rises, smiles, conquers. Now life becomes dignified. The very rush and din of battle ring upward like sacred music. For out of the strife comes the full measure of moral and intellectual manhood. Out of the flush of fever and the bounding pulse of disease comes perfect and peaceful health. Those centuries, standing so full of hidden meaning behind us, and taunting us with their half-whisperings, why should they awe us? They are our picture-books, upon which are photographed the features of the past. How shall we read, when we know not yet the signs she uses? We shall not hold them above our heads, leaning upward and backward to them. We shall nail them under our feet, and upon them reach up to the fulfillment of the future. We shall not blindfold our