Trust thyself:[156] every heart vibrates to that iron string.  Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.  Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.  And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos[157] and the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes!  That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these[158] have not.  Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted.  Infancy conforms to nobody:  all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five[159] out of the adults who prattle and play to it.  So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself.  Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.  Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic.  It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.  Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance[160] of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.  A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse;[161] independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.  He cumbers himself never about consequences about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict.  You must court him:  he does not court you.  But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.  As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat[162] he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.  There is no Lethe[163] for this.  Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!  Who[164] can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.  He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.