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introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason-today, pasteboard and filagree; and ending, to-morrow, in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing; for, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is-first, soul; and second, soul; and evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify. Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us: first, the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world, whose light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into prison cells; and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, a thought of the dignity of spiritual being. Let it stand for evermore a temple, which new love, new faith, new sight, shall restore to more than its first splendour to mankind. And secondly, the institution of preaching-the speech of man to men, essentially the most flexible of all organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation?

I look for the hour when the supreme Beauty which ravished the souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly o those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions; but they have no epical integrity-are fragmentary-are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

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LITERARY ETHICS: AN ORATION,

DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE,

GENTLEMEN,

JULY 24, 1838.

men.

THE invitation to address you this day, with which you have honoured me, was a call so welcome, that I made haste to obey it. A summons to celebrate with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me, as to overcome the doubts I might well entertain of my ability to bring you any thought worthy of your attention. I have reached the middle age of man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at the meeting of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates of my own College assembled at their anniversary. Neither years nor books have yet availed to eradicate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the favourite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of His duties lead him directly into the holy ground, where other men's aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages. And because the scholar, by every thought he thinks, extends his dominion into the general mind of men, he is not one, but many. The few scholars in each country, whose genius I know, seem to me not individuals, but societies; and, when events occur of great import, I count over these representatives of opinion, whom they will affect, as if I were counting nations. And, even if his results were incommunicable; if they abode in his own spirit; the intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its possessions, that the fact of his existence and pursuits would not be without joy.

Meantime, I know that a very different estimate of the scholar's profession prevails in this country, and the importunity, with which society presses its claim upon young men, tends always to pervert the views of the youth in respect to the culture of the intellect. Somewhat mediocre and sordid has polluted the image of this great duty. It is not sought with enthusiasm. Its higher courts-of philosophy, of poetry-are thinly peopled, and the intellect still wants the voice that shall say to it, "Sleep no more."

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Hence the historical failure on which Europe and America have so freely commented. This country has not fulfilled what seemed the reasonable expectation of mankind. Men looked, when all feudal straps and bandages were snapped asunder, that Nature, too long the mother of dwarfs, should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans, who should laugh and leap in the continent, and run up the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and of love. But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative: a vase of fair outline, but empty, which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty and emit lightnings on all beholders: a muse, which does not lay the grasp of despotic genius on us, and chain an age to its thought and emotion.

I will not lose myself in the desultory questions, what are the limitations, and what the causes of the fact. It suffices me to say, in general, that all particular reasons merge themselves in this, that the diffidence of mankind in the soul has crept over the American mind; that men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to innovation, and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought. Yet, in every sane hour, the service of thought appears reasonable, the despotism of the senses insane. The scholar may, and does, lose himself, in schools; in

words; becomes a pedant; yet, when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses with things. For the scholar is the student of the world, and of what worth the world is, and with what emphasis it accosts the soul of man, such is the worth, such the call of the scholar.

The want of the times, and the propriety of this anniversary, concur to draw attention to the doctrine of LITERARY ETHICS. On that doctrine I wish to offer you a few thoughts. What I have to say, distributes itself under the topics of the resources, the subject, and the discipline of the scholar.

I. The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the Intellect. The resources of the scholar are coextensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his, unless claimed by him with an equal greatness of mind. He cannot know them until he has beheld with awe the infinitude and impersonality of the intellectual power, and worshipped that great light. When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man's, but that it is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will then see, that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and answerable to it. When he stands in the world, he feels himself its native king. A divine pilgrim in nature, all things attend his steps. Over him stream the flying constellations; over him streams Time, as they, scarcely divided into months and years. He inhales the year as a vapour: its fragrant midsummer breath, its sparkling January heaven. And so pass into his mind, in bright transfiguration, the grand events of history, to take a new order and scale from him. He is the world; and the epochs and heroes of chronology are pictorial images, in which his thoughts are told. There is no event but sprung somewhere from the soul of man; and therefore there is none but the soul of man can interpret. Every presentiment of the mind is executed somewhere in some gigantic fact. What else is Greece, Rome,

England, France, St. Helena? What else are churches, and literatures, and empires?

But the soul, so feeling its right, must exercise the same, or it surrenders itself to the usurpation of facts. Essential to our riches is the unsleeping assertion of spiritual independence, as all the history of literature may teach. The new man must feel that he is new, and has not come into the world mortgaged to the opinions and usages of Europe, and Asia, and Egypt. The sense of spiritual independence is like the lovely varnish of the dew, whereby the old, hard, peaked earth, and its old self-same productions, are made new every morning, and shining with the last touch of the artist's hand. A false humility, a complaisance to reigning schools, or to the wisdom of antiquity, must not defraud me of supreme possession of this hour. If any person have less love of liberty, and less jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he therefore dictate to you and me? Say to such doctors, We are thankful to you, as we are to history, to the pyramids, and the authors; but now our day is come; we have been born out of the eternal silence; and now will we live,-live for ourselves,—and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral, but as the upholders and creators of our age; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor the three Unities of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review, is to command any longer. Now we are come, and will put our own interpretation on things, and, moreover, our own things for interpretation. Please himself with complaisance who will,-for me, things must take my scale, not I theirs. I will I will say, with the warlike king, "God gave me this crown, and the whole world shall not take it away."

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the moral of the Plutarchs, the Tennemanns, the Cudworths, who give us the story of men or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies my faith in the treasures of the soul, by showing me, that what

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