on a good footing with the heads of parties at Washington reads the rumors of the newspapers and the guesses of provincial politicians with a key to the right and wrong in each statement, and sees well enough where all this will end.  Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine at a glance, and judge of its fitness.  And much more, a wise man who knows not only what Plato, but what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair he deals with to a certain majesty.  Plato says, Pericles owed this elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras.  Burke descended from a higher sphere when he would influence human affairs.  Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which the brawls of modern senates are but pot-house politics.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients.  These are lessons only for the brave.  We must know our friends under ugly masks.  The calamities are our friends.  Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse:—­

  “Get him the time’s long grudge, the court’s ill-will,
  And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,
  Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse,
  Almost all ways to any better course;
  With me thou leav’st a better Muse than thee,
  And which thou brought’st me, blessed Poverty.”

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism.  But the wiser God says, Take the shame, the poverty, and the penal solitude that belong to truth-speaking.  Try the rough water, as well as the smooth.  Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing.  When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more than ever decisive.  Fear not a revolution which will constrain you to live five years in one.  Don’t be so tender at making an enemy now and then.  Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you their coldest contempts.  The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.  He must hold his hatreds also at arm’s length, and not remember spite.  He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

He who aims high must dread an easy home and popular manners.  Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.  If there is any great and good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms.  Popularity is for dolls.  “Steep and craggy,” said Porphyry, “is the path of the gods.”  Open your Marcus Antoninus.  In the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man who scorned to shine, and who contested the frowns of Fortune.  They preferred the noble vessel too late for the tide, contending with winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into harbor with colors flying and guns firing.  There is none of the social goods that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not take rank with high aims and self-subsistency.