before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best
see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

  I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live
the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected
in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an
invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin
to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be
expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he
will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In
proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will
appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty
poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the
air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put
the foundations under them.

  It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you
shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor
toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not
enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support
but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as
quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa,
which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were
safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not
be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow
limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of
which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how you
are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another
latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail,
leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I
desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking
moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I
cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true
expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he
should speak extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future
or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front our
outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an
insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our
words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual
statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument
alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not
definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to
superior natures.

  Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that
as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which
they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those
who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we
appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault
with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough. "They
pretend," as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four different
senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of
the Vedas"; but in this part of the world it is considered a ground
for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one
interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will
not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more
widely and fatally?

  I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should
be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score
than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its
blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were
muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes
of weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the
earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

  Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns
generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even
the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog
is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he
belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he
can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he
was made.

  Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such
desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his
companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let
him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It
is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or
an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of
things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality
which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.
Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves,
though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true
ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?

  There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive
after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff.
Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but
into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It
shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in
my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved
that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he
searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually
deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew
not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and
his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial
youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way,
and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.