condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but
which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as
any. In our estimates let us take a lesson from kings. The
parts of hospitality, the connection of families, the
impressiveness of death, and a thousand other things,
royalty makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind will.
To make habitually a new estimate,--that is elevation.

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with
hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard
no good as solid but that which is in his nature and
which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The
goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves;
let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary
signs of his infinite productiveness.

He may have his own. A man's genius, the quality that
differences him from every other, the susceptibility
to one class of influences, the selection of what is
fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines
for him the character of the universe. A man is a method,
a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle,
gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only
his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles
round him. He is like one of those booms which are set
out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like
the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts,
words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his
being able to say why, remain because they have a relation
to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. They