quish display and
immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray
often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the
disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in
his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must
accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of
treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the
religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of
course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty
and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way
of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual
hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to
educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to
find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.
He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes
and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of
history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in
all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in
himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows
the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some
great decorum, some fetich[62] of a government, some ephemeral trade,
or war, or man, is cried up[63] by half mankind and cried down by the
other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds
are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable[64]
of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in
steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add
observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach,
and bide his own time,--happy enough if he can satisfy himse