“Nature is no sentimentalist,—­does not cosset or pamper us.  We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.—­The way of Providence is a little rude.  The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,—­these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.  You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,—­expensive races,—­race living at the expense of race.—­Let us not deny it up and down.  Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.”

Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he believed in so fully:—­

    “They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a
    lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.”

But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words, which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:—­

“People are born with the moral or with the material bias;—­uterine brothers with this diverging destination:  and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that a free-soiler.”

Let us see what Emerson has to say of “Power:”—­

“All successful men have agreed in one thing—­they were causationists.  They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and the last of things.

“The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe;—­the key to all ages is,—­Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.  This gives force to the strong,—­that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.—­

“We say that success is constitutional; depends on a plus condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive, yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge.”