e than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state
of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat
corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to
abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he
can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and
not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he
is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world;
he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read,
from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his conviction
that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to
him he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must
attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret
sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the
purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid
angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact
a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing
already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in
Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the
fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an
immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. "What
is history," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life of ours
is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization,
Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments
grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in
Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands,--the
genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our
private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes
subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,--must go over the
whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not
know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for
manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for
itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewh