might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the
courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already
suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice
make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent,
indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of
this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is
no work for any one but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of
the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the
mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth
below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the
disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and
turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the
remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful
now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if
the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,--patience;
with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace
the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and
the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent,
the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the
world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to
yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to
be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the
party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted
geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and
friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for
sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a