to be known by the absence in them of tricks
and by the justification of perfect personal candor. Then folks echo
a new cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains: How
beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has
perfect candor. Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that
openness wins the inner and outer world and that there is no single
exception, and that never since our earth gathered itself in a mass
have deceit or subterfuge or prevarication attracted its smallest
particle or the faintest tinge of a shade--and that through the
enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the whole republic of states
a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and despised ... and that
the soul has never once been fooled and never can be fooled ... and
thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a foetid puff ...
and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe nor upon
any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any
part of ethereal space, nor in the midst of density, nor under the
fluid wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth
of babes, nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that
condition that follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of
abeyance or action afterward of vitality, nor in any process of
formation or reformation anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the
truth.

Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large
hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large
alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense
of the oneness of nature and the propriety of the same spirit applied
to human affairs ... these are called up of the float of the brain of
the world to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth out of his
mother's womb and from her birth out of her mother's. Caution seldom
goes far enough. It has been thought that the prudent citizen was the
citizen who applied himself to solid gains and did well for himself
and for his family and completed a lawful life without debt or crime.
The greatest poet sees and admits these economies as he sees the
economies of food and sleep, but has higher notions of prudence than
to think he gives much when he gives a few slight attentions at the
latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life are not
the hospitality of it or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond the
independence of a little sum laid aside for