But as for making it real,
every man's life should have the integrity of meaning of that of a tree.
A. statesman, B. seer, C. scavenger: pines, raspberries, oaks.
Impossible, as we know. And then, a thistle at the beginning knows it is
a thistle, and cannot be anything else, so there is the end of it; but
when Pratt, by nature _ne_ knife-grinder, asserts himself poet, what
then? How many men know their vocation? Who is going about to tie on the
labels? Who would you be willing should tie on yours? Then, again, there
is your neighbor Brownson, with a yeasty brain, fermenting too fast
through every phase of creed or party to accept a healthful "settling";
so it is left to work itself out, and it will settle itself by-and-by,
in a life or two it may be. You know other brains which, if you will but
consider, prove this life to be only one stage of a many-yeared era:
they are lying fallow from birth until death; they have powers latent in
them, that next time, perhaps, will bear golden grain or fruit. Now they
are resting, they lie fallow. Communism allows no time for fermentation,
or lying fallow; God does: for brains, I mean, not souls.
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