contrary to this. He assumed freedom to exist only where law is not, that is, in the savage state, and to be surrendered, piece for piece, with every acknowledgment of social obligation. Seldom was ever so plausible a doctrine equally false. Law is properly the public definition of freedom and the affirmation of its sacredness and inviolability as so defined; and only in the presence of it, either express or implicit, does man become free. Duty and privilege are one and the same, however men may set up a false antagonism between them; and accordingly social obligation can subtract nothing from the privilege and prerogative of liberty. Consequently, the freedom which is defined as the negation of social duty and obligation is not true regal freedom, but is that worst and basest of all tyrannies, the tyranny of pure egotism, masked in the semblance of its divine contrary. That, be it observed, is the freest society, in which the noblest and most delicate human powers find room and secure respect,—wherein the loftiest and costliest spiritualities are most invited abroad by sympathetic attraction. Now among savages little obtains appreciation, save physical force and its immediate allies: the divine fledglings of the human soul, instead of being sweetly drawn and tempted forth, are savagely menaced, rudely repelled; whatsoever is finest in the man, together with the entire nature of woman, lies, in that low temperature, enchained and repressed, like seeds in a frozen soil. The harsh, perpetual contest with want and lawless rivalry, to which all uncivilized nations are doomed, permits only a few low powers, and those much the same in all,—lichens, mosses, rude grasses, and other coarse cryptogamous growths,—to develop themselves; since these alone can endure the severities of season and treatment to which all that would clothe the fields of the soul must remain exposed. Meanwhile the utmost of that wicked and calamitous suppression of faculty, which constitutes the essence and makes the tragedy of human slavery, is equally effected by the inevitable isolation and wakeful trampling and consequent barrenness of savage life. Liberty without law is not liberty; and the converse may be asserted with like confidence.
Where, then, the fixed term, State, or Law, and the progressive term, Person, or Freewill, are in relations of reciprocal support and mutual reproduction, there alone is freedom, there alone public order. We were able to command this truth from the height of our general proposition, and closer inspection shows those anticipations to have been correct.
But man is greater than men; and for the finest aspect of high laws, we must look to individual souls, not to masses.
What is the secret of noble manners? Orbital action, always returning into and compensating itself. The gentleman, in offering his respect to others, offers an equal, or rather the same, respect to himself; and his courtesies may flow without stint or jealous reckoning, because they feed their source, being not an expenditure, but a circulation. Submitting to the inward law of honor and the free sense of what befits a man,—to a law perpetually made and spontaneously executed in his own bosom, the instant flowering of his own soul,—he commands his own obedience, and he obeys his own commanding. Though throned above all nations, a king of kings, yet the faithful humble vassal of his own heart; though he serve, yet regal, doing imperial service; he escapes outward constraint by inward anticipation; and all that could he rightly named as his duty to others, he has, ere demand, already discovered, and engaged in, as part of his duty to himself. Now it is the expression of royal freedom in loyal service, of sovereignty in obedience, courage in concession, and strength in forbearance, which makes manners noble. Low may he bow, not with loss, but with access of dignity, who bows with an elevated and ascending heart: there is nothing loftier, nothing less allied to abject behavior, than this grand lowliness. The worm, because it is low, cannot be lowly; but man, uplifted in token of supremacy, may kneel in adoration, bend in courtesy, and stoop in condescension. Only a great pride, that is, a great and reverential repose in one's own being, renders possible a noble humility, which is a great and reverential acknowledgment of the being of others; this humility in turn sustains a higher self-reverence; this again resolves itself into a more majestic humility; and so run, in ever enhancing wave, the great circles of inward honor and outward grace. And without this self-sustaining return of the action into itself, each quality feeding itself from its correlative opposite, there can be no high behavior. This is the reason why qualities loftiest in kind and largest in measure are vulgarly mistaken, not for their friendly opposites, but for their mere contraries,—why a very profound sensibility, a sensibility, too, peculiarly of the spirit, not of nerve only, is sure to be named coldness, as Mr. Ruskin recently remarks,—why vast wealth of good pride, in its often meek acceptance of wrong, in its quiet ignoring of insult, in its silent superiority to provocation, passes with the superficial and petulant for poverty of pride and mere mean-spiritedness,—why a courage which is not partial, but total, coexisting, as it always does, with a noble peacefulness, with a noble inaptness for frivolous hazards, and a noble slowness to take offence, is, in its delays and forbearances, thought by the half-courageous to be no better than cowardice;—it is, as we have said, because great qualities revolve and repose in orbits of reciprocation with their opposites, which opposites are by coarse and ungentle eyes misdeemed to be contraries. Feeling transcendently deep and powerful is unimpassioned and far lower-voiced than indifference and unfeelingness, being wont to express itself, not by eloquent ebullition, but by extreme understatement, or even by total silence. Sir Walter Raleigh, when at length he found himself betrayed to death—and how basely betrayed!—by Sir Lewis Stukely, only said, "Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn to your credit." The New Testament tells us of a betrayal yet more quietly received. These are instances of noble manners.
What actions are absolutely moral is determined by application of the same law,—those only which repose wholly in themselves, being to themselves at once motive and reward. "Miserable is he," says the "Bhagavad Gita," "whose motive to action lies, not in the action itself, but in its reward." Duty purchased with covenant of special delights is not duty, but is the most pointed possible denial of it. The just man looks not beyond justice; the merciful reposes in acts of mercy; and he who would be bribed to equity and goodness is not only bad, but shameless. But of this no further words.
Rest is sacred, celestial, and the appreciation of it and longing for it are mingled with the religious sentiment of all nations. I cannot remember the time when there was not to me a certain ineffable suggestion in the apostolic words, "There remaineth, therefore, a rest for the people of God." But the repose of the godlike must, as that of God himself, be infinitely removed from mere sluggish inactivity; since the conception of action is the conception of existence itself,—that is, of Being in the act of self-manifestation. Celestial rest is found in action so universal, so purely identical with the great circulations of Nature, that, like the circulation of the blood and the act of breathing, it is not a subtraction from vital resource, but is, on the contrary, part of the very fact of life and all its felicities. This does not exclude rhythmic or recreative rest; but the need of such rest detracts nothing from pleasure or perfection. In heaven also, if such figure of speech be allowable, may be that toil which shall render grateful the cessation from toil, and give sweetness to sleep; but right weariness has its own peculiar delight, no less than right exercise; and as the glories of sunset equal those of dawn, so with equal, though diverse pleasure, should noble and temperate labor take off its sandals for evening repose, and put them on to go forth "beneath the opening eyelids of the morn." Yet, allowing a place for this rhythm in the detail and close inspection even of heavenly life, it still holds true on the broad scale, that pure beauty and beatitude are found there only where life and character sweep in orbits of that complete expression which is at once divine labor and divine repose.
Observe, now, that this rest-motion, as being without waste or loss, is a manifested immortality, since that which wastes not ends not; and therefore it puts into every motion the very character and suggestion of immortal life. Yea, one deed rightly done, and the doer is in heaven, —is of the company of immortals. One deed so done that in it is no mortality; and in that deed the meaning of man's history,—the meaning, indeed, and the glory, of existence itself,—are declared. Easy, therefore, it is to see how any action may be invested with universal significance and the utmost conceivable charm. The smaller the realm and the humbler the act into which this amplitude and universality of spirit are carried, the more are they emphasized and set off; so that, without opportunity of unusual occasion, or singular opulence of natural power, a man's life may possess all that
