higher wants become
imperative.

'Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through
sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert exasperates
people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach
alone. Here is the use of society: it is so easy with the great to be
great! so easy to come up to an existing standard!--as easy as it is
to the lover to swim to his maiden, through waves so grim before. The
benefits of affection are immense; and the one event which never loses
its romance is the alighting of superior persons at our gate.

It by no means follows that we are not fit for society, because
_soirees_ are tedious, and because the _soiree_ finds us
tedious. A backwoodsman, who had been sent to the university, told
me, that when he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school talk
together, he reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he caught them
apart, and had one to himself alone, then they were the boors, and he
the better man. And if we recall the rare hours when we encountered
the best persons, we then found ourselves, and then first society
seemed to exist. That was society, though in the transom of a brig,
or on the Florida Keys.

A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose,
and must decline its turn in the conversation. But they who speak have
no more,--have less. 'Tis not new facts that avail, but the heat to
dissolve everybody's facts. Heat puts you in right relation with
magazines of facts. The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the
want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God
should raise the dead. The recluse witnesses what others perform by
their aid with a kind of fear. It is as much out of his possibility,
as the prowess of Coeur-de-Lion, or an Irishman's day's work on the
railroad. 'Tis said, the present and the future are always
rivals. Animal spirits constitute the power of the present, and their
feats are like the structure of a pyramid. Their result is a lord, a
general, or a boon-companion. Before these, what a base mendicant is
Memory with his leathern badge! But this genial heat is latent in all
constitutions, and is disengaged only by the friction of society. As
Bacon said of manners, "To obtain them, it only needs not to despise
them," so we say of animal spirits, that they are the spontaneous
product of health and of a social habit. "For behavior, men learn it,
as they take diseases, one of another."