lorified seers. And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent genius
struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at last
sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by
pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and
mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him,
as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his
own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position, have
their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem Nature
a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure of our
deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let him
control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may be
expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may
be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on every
piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the
better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard, or the
State-Street prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the foot; or the
thrift of the agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it
will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which consists in husbanding
little strokes of the tool, little portions of time, particles of stock
and small gains. The eye of prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at
the ironmonger's, will rust; beer, if not brewed in the right state of
the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships will rot at sea, or if laid
up high and dry, will strain, warp and dry-rot; money, if kept by
us, yields no rent and is liable to loss; if invested, is liable to
depreciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith,
the iron is white; keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe
as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed
to be very much on the extreme of this prudence. It takes bank-notes,
good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the speed with which it
passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor
calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks depreciate, in the few
swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in
his possession. In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that every
thing in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck, and
that what h