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Ralph Waldo Emerson by Oliver Wendell Holmes
page 94 of 449 (20%)
dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many
another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already;
friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation
and world must also soar and sing."

Having spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, by
action, he speaks of the scholar's duties. "They may all," he says, "be
comprised in self-trust." We have to remember that the _self_ he means
is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to
the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which
all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he
sings in "The Sphinx ":--

"The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found,--for new heavens
He spurneth the old."

"First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater
by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The
man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be
enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of
this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which,
flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the Capes of Sicily,
and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and
vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand
stars. It is one soul which animates all men."

And so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid
down to the American scholar of to-day. He does not spare his censure;
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