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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- 11592
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- pictures, and the bragging historic armorials and the banners of the
Glendinning renown; confident, that if need should come, he would not be
forced to turn resurrectionist, and dig up his grandfather's
Indian-chief grave for the ancestral sword and shield, ignominiously to
pawn them for a living! He could live on himself. Oh, twice-blessed now,
in the feeling of practical capacity, was Pierre.
The mechanic, the day-laborer, has but one way to live; his body must
provide for his body. But not only could Pierre in some sort, do that;
he could do the other; and letting his body stay lazily at home, send
off his soul to labor, and his soul would come faithfully back and pay
his body her wages. So, some unprofessional gentlemen of the
aristocratic South, who happen to own slaves, give those slaves liberty
to go and seek work, and every night return with their wages, which
constitute those idle gentlemen's income. Both ambidexter and
quadruple-armed is that man, who in a day-laborer's body, possesses a
day-laboring soul. Yet let not such an one be over-confident. Our God is
a jealous God; He wills not that any man should permanently possess the
least shadow of His own self-sufficient attributes. Yoke the body to the
soul, and put both to the plough, and the one or the other must in the
end assuredly drop in the furrow. Keep, then, thy body effeminate for
labor, and thy soul laboriously robust; or else thy soul effeminate for
labor, and thy body laboriously robust. Elect! the two will not
lastingly abide in one yoke. Thus over the most vigorous and soaring
conceits, doth the cloud of Truth come stealing; thus doth the shot,
even of a sixty-two-pounder pointed upward, light at last on the earth;
for strive we how we may, we can not overshoot the earth's orbit, to
receive the attractions of other planets; Earth's law of gravitation
extends far beyond her own atmosphere.
In the operative opinion of this world, he who is already fully provided
with what is necessary for him, that man shall have more; while he who
is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him
even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain,
downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed
only by the simplest principles, and scorns all ambiguities, all
transcendentals, and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively
heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their willful
inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and all-displacing
transcendentals, which say three is four, and two and two make ten. But
if the eminent Jugglarius himself ever advocated in mere words a
doctrine one thousandth part so ridiculous and subversive of all
practical sense, as that doctrine which the world actually and eternally
practices, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough, still
more of the superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath
nothing at all, even that which he hath,--then is the truest book in the
world a lie.
Wherefore we see that the so-called Transcendentalists are not the only
people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that
the Utilitarians,--the every-day world's people themselves, far
transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own
incomprehensible worldly maxims. And--what is vastly more--with the one
party, their Transcendentals are but theoretic and inactive, and
therefore harmless; whereas with the other, they are actually clothed in
living deeds.
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