from an ethical
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative
conscience,--if we would trulier express our central and wide-related
nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which
we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines
in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not
the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled
farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read,
than the dissector or the antiquary.

*****

SELF-RELIANCE.

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune.

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet.

II. SELF-RELIANCE.

I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil
is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is
true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and
it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the
outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets
of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the
highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set
at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they
thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of
the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our
own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us
than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices i