yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from
my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me
anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent
untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I
have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that
this my Mentors said nothing about.

  One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely,
for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously
devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw
material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen,
which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow
along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries
of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in
others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

  The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone
over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and
all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise
Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the
Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your
neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without
trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has
even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with
the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the
very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety
and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have
never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any
precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign
to thee what thou hast left undone?"

  We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,
that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system
of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have
prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed
them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What
distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe
are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human
life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what
prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place
than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We
should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the
worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!- I know of no
reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this
would be.

  The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul
to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my
good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may
say the wisest thing you can, old man- you who have lived seventy
years, not without honor of a kind- I hear an irresistible voice which
invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises
of another like stranded vessels.

  I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow
elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our
strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh
incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of
what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we
had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by
faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we
unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties.
So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing
our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way,
we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from
one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a
miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, "To
know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not
know, that is true knowledge." When one man has reduced a fact of
the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that
all men at length establish their lives on that basis.

  Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety
which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that
we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to
live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward
civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of
life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to
look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was
that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that
is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have
had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence:
as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those
of our ancestors.

  By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man
obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long
use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether
from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without
it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of
life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of
palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of
the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation
requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man
in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the
several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we
have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of
life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not