The American Scholar Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SELF-RELIANCE. "Ne te qucesiveris extra."l " Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influen... more »ce, all late; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or2 good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." Ep. to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune. 1 " Do not seek for anything outside of thyself." 2 Whether. CAST the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat; Wintered with the hawk and fox, Power and speed be hands and feet. SELF-RELIANCE. I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,— that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense ;1 for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,2 and Milton3 is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament4 of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide ...« less