Page:Americans (1922).djvu/114

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

way it supplements by the restoration of classical virtues our Christian gospel of long-suffering. There is a welcome in it for life, even before the quality is disclosed: "Virtue is uneducated power." There is a place in it for manly resistance: "Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory." There is the strong man's relish for difficulty and hostility: "We must have antagonisms in the tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties or they will not be born." There is precept for use of the spur: "He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard." There is warrant for choosing one's path: It is a man's "essential virtue to carry out into action his own dearest ends, to dare to do what he believes and loves. If he thinks a sonnet the flower and result of the world, let him sacrifice all to the sonnet.' Even in his definition of friendship, Emerson drives at action: "He is my friend who makes me do what I can." It is obvious that he restores ambition, an aspect of magnanimity, to its proper place in the formation of the manly character, ambition to bring one's life to its fullest fruit.

This accounts for his extraordinary emphasis upon the virtue of courage: "It may be safely trusted—God will not have His work made manifest by cowards." Read from that cue, and presently you fancy that all forms of virtue appeared to him as aspects and phases of courage. He has