No More Learning

One of the most inexcusable weaknesses of Americans is in signing their
names to what are called credentials. But for my interposition, a person
who shall be nameless would have taken from this town a recommendation
for an office of trust subscribed by the selectmen and all the voters of
both parties, ascribing to him as many good qualities as if it had been
his tombstone. The excuse was that it would be well for the town to be
rid of him, as it would erelong be obliged to maintain him. I would not
refuse my name to modest merit, but I would be as cautious as in signing
a bond. [I trust I shall be subjected to no imputation of unbecoming
vanity, if I mention the fact that Mr. W. indorsed my own qualifications
as teacher of the high-school at Pequash Junction. J. H. ] When I see a
certificate of character with everybody's name to it, I regard it as a
letter of introduction from the Devil. Never give a man your name unless
you are willing to trust him with your reputation.


There seem nowadays to be two sources of literary inspiration,--fulness
of mind and emptiness of pocket.


I am often struck, especially in reading Montaigne, with the obviousness
and familiarity of a great writer's thoughts, and the freshness they
gain because said by him. The truth is, we mix their greatness with all
they say and give it our best attention. Johannes Faber sic cogitavit
would be no enticing preface to a book, but an accredited name gives
credit like the signature to a note of hand.
It is the advantage of fame
that it is always privileged to take the world by the button, and a
thing is weightier for Shakespeare's uttering it by the whole amount of
his personality.


It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how
patient with overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no
injury while the other may he their ruin.


People are apt to confound mere alertness of mind with attention. The
one is but the flying abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and
windows at every passing rumor; the other is the concentration of every
one of them in a single focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at
the moment of expected projection. Attention is the stuff that memory is
made of, and memory is accumulated genius.


Do not look for the Millennium as imminent. One generation is apt to get
all the wear it can out of the cast clothes of the last, and is always
sure to use up every paling of the old fence that will hold a nail in
building the new.


You suspect a kind of vanity in my genealogical enthusiasm. Perhaps you
are right; but it is a universal foible. Where it does not show itself
in a personal and private way, it becomes public and gregarious. We
flatter ourselves in the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Virginian offshoot of
a transported convict swells with the fancy ef a cavalier ancestry.
Pride of birth, I have noticed, takes two forms. One complacently traces
himself up to a coronet; another, defiantly, to a lapstone. The
sentiment is precisely the same in both cases, only that one is the
positive and the other the negative pole of it.


Seeing a goat the other day kneeling in order to graze with less
trouble, it seemed to me a type of the common notion of prayer. Most
people are ready enough to go down on their knees for material
blessings, but how few for those spiritual gifts which alone are an
answer to our orisons, if we but knew it!