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a few slight attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life are not the hospitality of it or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned, and the easy dollars that supply the year’s plain clothing and meals, the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking with all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitessimals of parlors, or shameless stuffing while others starve .. and all the loss of the bloom and odor of the earth and of the flowers and atmosphere and of the sea and of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete, and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilization and forethought, blotching the surface and system which civilization undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the reached kisses of the soul ... Still the right explanation remains to be made about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year or seventy or eighty years to wisdom spaced out by ages and coming back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself .... all else has reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in a day or a month or any part of the direct lifetime or the hour of death but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The indirect is always as great and real as the direct. The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one name of word or deed .. not of venereal sores or discolorations .. not the privacy of the onanist .. not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rumdrinkers ... not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder .. no serpentine poison of those that seduce women .. not the foolish yielding of women .. not prostitution .. not of any depravity of young men .. not of the attainment of gain by discreditable means .. not any nastiness of appetite .. not any harshness of officers to men or judges to prisoners or fathers to sons or sons to fathers or of husbands to wives or bosses to their boys .. not of greedy looks or malignant wishes ... nor any of the wiles practised by people upon themselves ... ever is or ever can be stamped on the programme but it is duly realized and returned, and that returned in further performances ... and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be any thing else than the profoundest reason, whether it bring arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary .. to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it forever. If the savage or felon is wise it is well .... if the greatest poet or savan is wise it is simply the same .. if the President or chief justice is wise it is the same ... if the young mechanic or farmer is wise it is no more or less .. if the prostitute is wise it is no more nor less. The interest will come round .. all will come round. All the best actions of war and peace ... all help given to relatives and strangers and the poor and old and sorrowful and young children and widows and the sick, and to all shunned persons .. all furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves .. all the self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks and say others take the seats of the boats ... all offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a friend’s sake or opinion’s sake ... all pains of enthusiasts scoffed at by their neighbors .. all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of mothers ... all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded .... all the grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we inherit .. and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and mote ancient nations unknown to us by name or date of location .... all that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no .... all that has at any time been well suggested out of the divine heart of man or by the divinity of his mouth or by the shaping of his great hands .. and all that is well thought or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe .. or on any of the wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here .. or that is henceforth to be well thought or done by you whoever you are, or by any one – these singly and wholly inured at their time and inure now and will inure always to the identities from which they sprung or shall spring. .. Did you guess any of them lived only its mo-
