omprehend, with which I have no sympathy, for which I have no pity, and
of which I have no tolerance, is sensitiveness about poverty. I think it
is an essentially vulgar feeling. I cannot conceive how a man who has
any exaltation of life, any real elevation of character, any
self-respect, can for a moment experience so ignoble a shame. One may be
annoyed at the inconveniences and impatient of the restraints of
poverty; but to be ashamed to be called poor or to be thought poor, to
resort to shifts, not for the sake of being comfortable or elegant, but
of seeming to be above the necessity of shifts, is an indication of an
inferior mind, whether it dwell in prince or in peasant. The man who
does it shows that he has not in his own opinion character enough to
stand alone. He must be supported by adventitious circumstances, or he
must fall. Nobody, therefore, need ever expect to receive sympathy from
me in recounting the social pangs or slights of poverty. You never can
be slighted, if you do not slight yourself. People may attempt to do
it, but their shafts have no barb. You turn it all into natural history.
It is a psychological phenomenon, a study, something to be analyzed,
classified, reasoned from, and bent to your own convenience, but not to
be taken to heart. It amuses you; it interests you; it adds to your
stock of facts; it makes life curious and valuable: but if you suffer
from it, it is because you have not basis, stamina; and probably you
deserve to be slighted. This, however, is true only when people have
become somewhat concentrated. Children know nothing of it. They live
chiefly from without, not from within. Only gradually as they approach
maturity do they cut loose from the scaffolding and depend upon their
own centre of gravity. Appearances are very strong in school. Money and
prodigality have great weight there, notwithstanding the democracy of
attainments and abilities. If I live a thousand years, I do not believe
I shall ever do a more virtuous deed than I did long ago in staying at
home for the sake of a quarter of a dollar when the rest of the school
went to see Tom Thumb, the late bewritten bridegroom. I call it
virtuous, because I had the quarter and could have gone, and could not
explain the reason why I did not go. And though a senior class in
Harvard College may reasonably be supposed to be beyond the eminent
domain of Tom Thumb and quarter-dollars, the principle is precisely the
same,--only the tem