Traveling is a fool’s paradise.  Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.  At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness.  I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.[245] I seek the Vatican,[246] and the palaces.  I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.  My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3.  But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness of affecting the whole intellectual action.  The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness.  Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.  We imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind?  Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant.  The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished.  It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model.  It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed.  And why need we copy the Doric[247] or the Gothic[248] model?  Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.[249] Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.  That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.  No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.  Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?[250] Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin,[251] or Washington, or Bacon,[252] or Newton?[253] Every great man is a unique.  The Scipionism of Scipio[254] is precisely that part he could not borrow.  Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.  Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.  There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,[255] or trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258] but different from all these.  Not possible will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature.  Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld[259] again.