Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large
hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large
alimentiveness and destuctiveness and causality, with a perfect sense
of the oneness of nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied
to human affairs, are called up of the float of the brain of the world
to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth out of his mother's
womb, and from her birth out of her mother's. Caution seldom goes far
enough. It has been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen
who applied himself to solid gains, and did well for himself and for
his family, and completed a lawful life without debt or crime. The
greatest poet sees and admits these economies as he sees the economies
of food and sleep, but has higher notions of prudence than to think he
gives much when he gives a few slight attentions at the latch of the
gate. The premises of the prudence of life are not the hospitality of
it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond the independence of
a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few clap-boards
around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil own'd, and the
easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the
melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man
is, to the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their
scorching days and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and
underhand dodgings, or infinitesimals of parlors, or shameless
stuffing while others starve, and all the loss of the bloom and odor
of the earth, and of the flowers and atmosphere, and of the sea, and
of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have to do with in
youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at
the close of a life without elevation or naivety, (even if you have
achiev'd a secure 10,000 a year, or election to Congress or the
Governorship,) and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or
majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilization and forethought,
blotching the surface and system which civilization undeniably drafts,
and moistening with tears the immense features it spreads and spreads
with such velocity before the reach'd kisses of the soul.
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