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person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan
fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat
at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it
kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face
of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working
wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place,
but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures
you and all men and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society
reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character,
reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole
creation. The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances
indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age;
requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his
design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A
man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is
born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is
confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the
lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony;
the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley;
Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome";
and all history Resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few
stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a
bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the
man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the
force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when
he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an
alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like
that, 'Who are you, Sir?' Yet they all are his, suitors for his
notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out