All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The
mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of
events, and strong with their strength. One man is made of the same
stuff of which events are made; is in sympathy with the course of
things; can predict it. Whatever befalls, befalls him first; so that he
is equal to whatever shall happen. A man who knows men, can talk well
on politics, trade, law, war, religion. For, everywhere, men are led in
the same manners.
The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be supplied by any labor, art,
or concert. It is like the climate, which easily rears a crop, which no
glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or manures, can elsewhere rival. It
is like the opportunity of a city like New York, or Constantinople,
which needs no diplomacy to force capital or genius or labor to it.
They come of themselves, as the waters flow to it. So a broad, healthy,
massive understanding seems to lie on the shore of unseen rivers, of
unseen oceans, which are covered with barks, that, night and day, are
drifted to this point. That is poured into its lap, which other men lie
plotting for. It is in everybody’s secret; anticipates everybody’s
discovery; and if it do not command every fact of the genius and the
scholar, it is because it is large and sluggish, and does not think them
worth the exertion which you do.
This affirmative force is in one, and is not in another, as one horse
has the spring in him, and another in the whip. "On the neck of the
young man," said Hafiz, "sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise."
Import into any stationary district, as into an old Dutch population in
New York or Pennsylvania, or among the planters of Virginia, a colony of
hardy Yankees, with seething brains, heads full of steam-hammer, pulley,
crank, and toothed wheel,—and everything begins to shine with values.
What enhancement to all the water and land in England, is the arrival of
James Watt or Brunel! In every company, there is not only the active
and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important
_sex of mind_, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and
women, and the uninventive or accepting class. Each _plus_ man
represents his set, and, if he have the accidental advantage of personal
ascendency,—which implies neither more nor less of talent, but merely
the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier or a schoolmaster, (which
one has, and one has not, as one has a black moustache and one a blond,)
then quite easily and without envy or resistance, all his coadjutors and
feeders will admit his right to absorb them. The merchant works by
book-keeper and cashier; the lawyer’s authorities are hunted up by
clerks; the geologist reports the surveys of his subalterns; Commander
Wilkes appropriates the results of all the naturalists attached to the
Expedition; Thorwaldsen’s statue is finished by stone-cutters; Dumas has
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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