“’New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition:  if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor.  We are miserable with inaction.  We perish of rest and rust:  but we do not like your work.’

    ‘Then,’ says the world, ‘show me your own.’

    ‘We have none.’

    ‘What will you do, then?’ cries the world.

    ‘We will wait.’

    ‘How long?’

    ‘Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.’

    ‘But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.’

    ’Be it so:  I can sit in a corner and perish (as you call it), but
    I will not move until I have the highest command.’”

And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his reasons for doing nothing.

It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings.  It is easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the subscription paper go by us to the next door.  The common duties of life and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of themselves while we contemplate the infinite.  There is no safer fortress for indolence than “the Everlasting No.”  The chimney-corner is the true arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their all-sufficient panoply.  Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among his disciples.  His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a fitting condition to receive it.  He was a sower who went forth to sow.  Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism.  Some fell on the rocks of hardened conservatism.  Some fell by the wayside and was picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of themselves.  But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.

Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them.  But he makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.

“Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold them with what charity it can.  Possibly some benefit may yet accrue from them to the state.  Besides our coarse implements, there must be some few finer instruments,—­rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the by-stander.  Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the electricity to others.  Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or “line-packet” to learn its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter