This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the basis of it.  Every valuable nature is there in its own right; and the student we speak to must have a mother-wit invincible by his culture, which uses all books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of intercourse, but is never subdued and lost in them.  He only is a well-made man who has a good determination.  And the end of culture is, not to destroy this,—­God forbid!—­but to train away all impediment and mixture, and leave nothing but pure power.  Our student must have a style and determination, and be a master in his own specialty.  But, having this, he must put it behind him.  He must have a catholicity, a power to see with a free and disengaged look every object.  Yet is this private interest and self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects for their own sake, and without affection or self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their self-love.  Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest which his private history has for mankind, he still converses with his family, or a few companions,—­perhaps with half a dozen personalities that are famous in his neighborhood.  In Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men.  Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough?  Have you heard Everett, Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker?  Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees?  Then you may as well die.  In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty.  Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers,—­two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers?  New York is a sucked orange.  All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.  Nor do we expect anybody to be other than a faint copy of these heroes.

Life is very narrow.  Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confusion of insanities would come up!  The “causes” to which we have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy, Whiggism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism, would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath:  and our talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird of prey, which had whisked him away from fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the poets, some zeal, some bias, and only when he was now gray and nerveless was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to sober perceptions.