“You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence.  You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name.  ’What is this truth you seek?  What is this beauty?’ men will ask, with derision.  If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true.  When you shall say, ’As others do, so will I:  I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions:  I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;’—­then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men.—­Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.  Why should you renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn?  Truth also has its roof and house and board.  Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s possessions, in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.”

The next Address Emerson delivered was “The Method of Nature,” before the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841.

In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says:  “As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges nine days hence....  My whole philosophy—­which is very real—­teaches acquiescence and optimism.  Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet—­for any spiritualist—­in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue.”  It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.

The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter.  Its title is “The Method of Nature.”  He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments and promises of this literary Anniversary.

“The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the castle.”—­“We hear too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts.  We are a puny and a fickle folk.  Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.  The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”—­“While the multitude of men degrade each other, and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself.”

I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than in any of those which preceded it.