What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail?—­people whose vane points always east, who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who raddle themselves, who toast their feet on the register, who intrigue to secure a padded chair and a corner out of the draught?  Suffer them once to begin the enumeration of their infirmities, and the sun will go down on the unfinished tale.  Let these triflers put us out of conceit with petty comforts.  To a man at work, the frost is but a color; the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he came in.  Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard.  The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated.  Neither will we be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness.  ’Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet.  All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.  How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, when you think how paltry are the machinery and the workers?  Wordsworth was praised to me, in Westmoreland, for having afforded to his country neighbors an example of a modest household, where comfort and culture were secured without display.  And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure the coveted place in college and the right in the library, is educated to some purpose.  There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet,—­that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials,—­that goes rusty, and educates the boy,—­that sells the horse, but builds the school,—­works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used,—­yet cautiously, and haughtily,—­and will yield their best values to him who best can do without them.  Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement.  Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.  He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men,—­from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.  “In the morning, solitude,” said Pythagoras,—­that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought.  ’Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth did not live in a crowd, but descended