JOURNAL XVII

(From "XV," «XVI,” “XVIII," 2d, and Cabot's Q and R)

[SOMEWHAT improved in health, Emerson came to Roxbury at the beginning of the year to take, for a time, a school which Edward's health had obliged him to give up. He taught there during the winter, and in April rejoined his mother in Cambridge, in the "Mellen House" on North Avenue, which afforded a schoolroom. There he gathered his last school, which he taught until the end of the summer. Among his scholars were Richard Henry Dana and John Holmes. (See Morse's life of Richard Henry Dana, page 5, and Holmes's life of Emerson, page 50.)]

(From "XV")

January 8, 1826.

I come with mended eyes to my ancient friend and consoler. Has the interval of silence made the writer wiser? Does his mind teem with well weighed judgments? The moral and intellectual universe has not halted because the eye of the observer was closed. Compensation has been

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woven to want, loss to gain, good to evil, and good to good, with the same industry, and the same concealment of an intelligent cause. And in my joy to write and read again I will not pester my imagination with what is done unseen, with the burden that is put in the contrary scale, with the sowing of the death-seed in the place of the nettle that was rooted up. I am a more cheerful philosopher, and am rather anxious to thank Oromasdes than to fear Ahriman.

Since I wrote before, I know something more of the grounds of hope and fear of what is to come. But if my knowledge is greater, so is my courage. I know that I know next to nothing, but I know too that the amount of probabilities is vast, both in mind and in morals. It is not certain that God exists, but that he does not is a most bewildering and improbable chimæra.

I rejoice that I live when the world is so old. There is the same difference between living with Adam and living with me as in going into a new house unfinished, damp and empty, and going into a long occupied house where the time and taste of its inhabitants has accumulated a thousand useful contrivances, has furnished the chambers, stocked the cellars, and filled the library. In the new house every comer must do all for

himself. In the old mansion there are butlers, cooks, grooms and valets. In the new house all must work, and work with the hands. In the old one there are poets who sing, actors who play and ladies who dress and smile. O ye lovers of the past, judge between my houses. I would not be elsewhere than I am.

COMPENSATION

All things are double one against another, said Solomon. The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.

The history of retributions is a strange and awful story; it will confirm the faith that wavers, and, more than any other moral feature, is perhaps susceptible of examination and analysis, and, more than any other, fit to establish the doctrine of Divine Providence.

I have seen all men in the common circumstances of society may see-the thrift, coldblooded and hard-hearted thrift, that has wrought out for itself its own reward, men and women that set out to be rich, that sold their body, its strength, its grace, its health, its sleep; yea,

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and sold their soul, its peace, its affections, its time, its education, its religion, its eternity, for gold. They have paid the price and by the laws of Providence they shall receive their purchase. But by the laws of Providence they shall receive nothing more. They have not bought any immunity from bodily pain, any grace from the elements, any courtesy from the diseases; they made no mention with their dealers of gentle affections, and asked no more of the Intellectual Principle than how to cast their drivelling balances of loss and gain. Health, knowledge, friendship, God, these were no parties to their contract, no guarantees against disaster. These were defrauded of the just debt which each human being owes them, to scrape together the means by which wealth was to be bought. But these are creditors that will not let them pass unchallenged. They have asked no protection. against the evils of life, and God has left them naked to them. . . .

Ignorance shall curse them with a leaden cloud on their understandings, their hours shall drag by in stupid darkness, unvisited by Thought, the daughter of God, denounced, forgot, unrecognized by the great brotherhood of intelligent minds who are penetrating into the obscure on

every side and adding new provinces to the kingdom of Knowledge.

But all who sell themselves do not sell for wealth. There are many dupes of many passions. Nor are the compensations that God ordains confined to a single class of moral agents. To come nearer to my design, I will venture to assert that whilst all moral reasonings of necessity refer to a whole existence, to a vaster system of things than is here disclosed, there are, nevertheless, strong presumptions here exhibited that perfect compensations do hold, that very much is done in this world to adjust the uneven balance of condition and character.

There are certain great and obvious illustrations of this doctrine which lie on the outside of life and have therefore been always noted: that prodigality makes haste to want; that riot introduces disease; that fearful crimes are hunted by fearful remorse; that the love of money is punished by the care of money; that honest indigence is cheerful; that in fertile climates the air breathes pestilence, and in healthy zones there is an iron soil; that whilst the mind is in ignorant infancy, the body is supple and strong; when the mind is informed and powerful the body decays, these and all this most important