wards. There lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you know it not. So lies the whole series of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted in your memory, though you know it not, and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as the word of its momentary thought."
He becomes bold in comparison—"Perhaps if we should meet Shakespeare, we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no; but of great equality—only that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying his facts, which we lacked."
The mind can have "its choice," says Emerson, "between truth and repose." "Take which you please—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets—most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being. The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is something more blessed and great
