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Serene, adorable, eternal it lives, though Goethe, Mackintosh, Cuvier, Bentham, Hegel die in their places, which no living men can fill.

REPAIRS

The errors that the moon and earth make in the heavens in a long period of time, an equal period repairs; the seventh Pleiad was lost and is found; the sweet fern dies, but revives; as much rain as the mountain sheds in forming torrents is replenished by visiting clouds. But these are faroff signs of compensation. Before tea I counted not myself worth a brass farthing, and now I am filled with thoughts and pleasures and am as strong and infinite as an angel. So when, one of these days, I see this body going to ruin like an old cottage, I will remember that after the ruin the resurrection is sure.

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The principle of repairs is in us, the remedial principle. Everybody perceives greatest contrasts in his own spirit and powers. To-day he is not worth a brown cent, to-morrow he is better than a million. He kicks at riches and could be honoured and happy with nothing but arrowroot and balm tea. This we call being in good or bad spirits. It is only in the bad fit, that we doubt and deny and do ill, and we know well at that time that

1832] A MODERN PLUTARCH

503

and sorrow

sorrow will come for the bad action; is repairs, and belief in the powers and perpetuity of man will return, and we shall be magnified by trust in God. (When, therefore, I doubt and sin, I will look up at the moon, and, remembering that its errors are all periodical; I will anticipate the return of my own spirits and faith. )

Patrick Henry's speech full of religion.

[REAL ANTIQUITY]

Our upstart antiquities hide themselves like little children between the knees of such a fatherly place as London. The bishop of London sits in his cathedral by a regular succession of twelve hundred years. Read Palgrave's account of Saxon religion, vol. 1, p. 55.

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God good. Man wickedness. They believed in future state.

[A BRITISH PLUTARCH]

August 12.

The British Plutarch and the modern Plutarch is yet to be written. They that have writ the lives of great men have not written them from love and from seeing the beauty that was to be de

[AGE 29 sired in them. But what would operate such gracious motions upon the spirit as the death of Lord Cobham and of Sir Thomas More, and a censure of Bacon, and a picture of George Fox and Hampden, and the chivalrous integrity of Walter Scott, and a true portrait of Sir Harry Vane, and Falkland, and Andrew Marvell? I would draw characters, not write lives. I would evoke the spirit of each, and their relics might rot. Luther, Milton, Newton, Shakspeare, Alfred, a light of the world, Adams. I would walk

the

among dry bones, and wherever on the face of the earth I found a living man, I would say, here is life, and life is communicable. Jesus Christ truly said, My flesh is meat indeed. I am the bread, for of his life or character have the nations of the earth been nourished. Socrates I should like well, if I dared to take him. I should repeat Montaigne though. I would n't.

"Eyes that the beam celestial view

Which evermore makes all things new."

These I claim as sole qualification, ewe-lamb. I would make Milton shine. I would mourn for Bacon. I would fly in the face of every cockered prejudice, feudal or vulgar, and speak as Christ of their good and evil.

1832] SPEAK YOUR OWN WORD 505

[IDEAL MEN]

When we look at the world of past men, we say, what a host of heroes; but when we come to particularize, it is like counting the stars which we thought innumerable, but which prove few and rare. Bacon, Shakspeare, Cæsar, Scipio, Cicero, Burke, Chatham, Franklin, - none of them will bear examination, or furnish the type of a Man.

What we say, however trifling, must have its roots in ourselves, or it will not move others. No speech should be separate from our being like a plume or a nosegay, but like a leaf or a flower or a bud, though the topmost and remotest, yet joined by a continuous line of life to the trunk and the seed.

CHOLERA TIMES

August 17.

It would be good to publish Girard's heroism in yellow fever at Philadelphia, and Dr. Rush's account of his own practice, to stimulate the cowed benevolence of this dismal time.

We are to act doubtless in our care of our own health as if there were no other world. We are to be punctilious in our care. No caution

is unseemly. This is the design of Providence. But we are to recognize, in every instant of this creeping solicitude, that happy is the lot of those to whom the unspeakable secrets of the other state are disclosed. When our own hour comes, when every medicine and means has been exhausted, we are then to say to the angel, Hail! All Hail! and pass to whatever God has yet to reveal to the conscious spirit. Why should we dread to die, when all the good and the beautiful and the wise have died, and earth holds nothing so good as that which it has lost. But oh! let not life be valued, when that which makes the value of life is lost. It is only a clean conscience, the knowledge that we are beloved by our friends, and deserve to be beloved, that can persuade an honourable mind to pray that its being may be prolonged an hour; but to outlive your own respect, to live when your acquaintance shall shrug their shoulders, and count it a disgrace to you the breath that is yet in your nostrils, -I shall be glad to be told what is the pleasure, what is the profit that is worth buying at such a price.

August 18.

To be genuine. Goethe, they say, was wholly so. The difficulty increases with the gifts of the

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