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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12700 ***
+
+American Men of Letters
+
+EDITED BY
+
+CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
+
+
+  "_Thou wert the morning star among the living,
+    Ere thy fair light had fled:
+  Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
+    New splendor to the dead._"
+
+
+American Men of Letters
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
+
+BY
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+1891
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+My thanks are due to the members of Mr. Emerson's family, and the other
+friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and
+furnishing valuable information.
+
+The Index, carefully made by Mr. J.H. Wiggin, was revised and somewhat
+abridged by myself.
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+BOSTON, November 25, 1884.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+1803-1823. To AET. 20.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section I. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.--Publication of the
+Second Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.
+--Character.--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist
+and Realist.--New England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second
+Visit to England
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review."--Visit to
+Europe.--England.--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published.
+I. Lives of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli"
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1853-1858. AET. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club"
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+1858-1863. AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival.--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of President Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus".
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication of
+"Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and Originality.
+--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--Greatness.
+--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies"
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+Emerson's Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.---A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+"I have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense. He
+furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography
+is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be
+known and believed."
+
+So writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is
+certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. He delineates
+himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader
+sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little
+more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him
+in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and
+pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were
+the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social
+influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature
+added to make him Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+He himself believes in the hereditary transmission of certain
+characteristics. Though Nature appears capricious, he says, "Some
+qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the
+finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to
+perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fixed and permanent
+in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until
+at last Nature adopts them and bakes them in her porcelain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what
+may be called the Academic Races. Their names have been on college
+catalogues for generation after generation. They have filled the learned
+professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to
+our own time. If aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be
+bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are
+developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a
+descendant of one of the Academic Races. Other things being equal, he
+will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. His features will
+be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more
+plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. The
+gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than
+a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a
+surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which
+it springs has been long under cultivation.
+
+These thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record
+of the family made historic by the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was
+remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and
+for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls.
+
+A genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the "survival of the
+fittest,"--in the estimate of the descendants. It is inclined to
+remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living
+heirs of the family name and traditions. As every man may count two
+grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers,
+and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection. If
+he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of
+personages to choose from. The great-grandfathers of Mr. Emerson at the
+sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by
+intermarriage of relatives. One of these, from whom the name descended,
+was Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the
+people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood.
+
+His son, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, minister of the town of Mendon,
+Massachusetts, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Edward
+Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, as
+Minister of Concord, Massachusetts.
+
+Peter Bulkeley was therefore one of Emerson's sixty-four grandfathers
+at the seventh remove. We know the tenacity of certain family
+characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible
+that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the
+full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted
+his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover
+more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities
+move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of
+chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that
+of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one
+square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows
+in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white
+bishop sweeps the board on his own color. Sometimes the distinguishing
+characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle
+strides over the black and white squares. Sometimes an uncle or aunt
+lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight's move were
+repeated on the squares of human individuality. It is not impossible,
+then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from
+the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early
+history of New England.
+
+The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies
+consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of
+fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or
+second hand, the _Magnolia Christi Americana_, of the Reverend Cotton
+Mather. The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one
+can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a
+few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies
+from the London-printed, folio of 1702.
+
+    "He was descended of an Honourable Family in _Bedfordshire_.--He was
+    born at _Woodhil_ (or _Odel_) in _Bedfordshire_, _January_ 31st,
+    1582.
+
+    "His _Education_ was answerable unto his _Original_; it was
+    _Learned_, it was _Genteel_, and, which was the top of all, it was
+    very _Pious_: At length it made him a _Batchellor_ of _Divinity_,
+    and a Fellow of Saint _John's_ Colledge in Cambridge.--
+
+    "When he came abroad into the World, a good benefice befel him,
+    added unto the estate of a Gentleman, left him by his Father; whom
+    he succeeded in his Ministry, at the place of his Nativity: Which
+    one would imagine _Temptations_ enough to keep him out of a
+    _Wilderness_."
+
+But he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the
+English Church, and so,--
+
+    "When Sir _Nathaniel Brent_ was Arch-Bishop _Laud's_ General, as
+    Arch-Bishop _Laud_ was _another's_, Complaints were made against Mr.
+    _Bulkly_, for his Non-Conformity, and he was therefore Silenced.
+
+    "To _New-England_ he therefore came, in the Year 1635; and there
+    having been for a while, at _Cambridge_, he carried a good Number of
+    Planters with him, up further into the _Woods_, where they gathered
+    the _Twelfth Church_, then formed in the Colony, and call'd the Town
+    by the Name of _Concord_.
+
+    "Here he _buried_ a great Estate, while he _raised_ one still,
+    for almost every Person whom he employed in the Affairs of his
+    Husbandry.--
+
+    "He was a most excellent _Scholar_, a very-_well read_ Person, and
+    one, who in his advice to young Students, gave Demonstrations, that
+    he knew what would go to make a _Scholar_. But it being essential
+    unto a _Scholar_ to love a _Scholar_, so did he; and in Token
+    thereof, endowed the Library of _Harvard_-Colledge with no small
+    part of his own.
+
+    "And he was therewithal a most exalted _Christian_--In his Ministry
+    he was another _Farel, Quo nemo tonuit fortius_--And the observance
+    which his own People had for him, was also paid him from all sorts
+    of People throughout the Land; but especially from the Ministers of
+    the Country, who would still address him as a _Father_, a _Prophet_,
+    a _Counsellor_, on all occasions."
+
+These extracts may not quite satisfy the exacting reader, who must be
+referred to the old folio from which they were taken, where he will
+receive the following counsel:--
+
+"If then any Person would know what Mr. _Peter Bulkly_ was, let him read
+his Judicious and Savory Treatise of the _Gospel Covenant_, which has
+passed through several Editions, with much Acceptance among the People
+of God." It must be added that "he had a competently good Stroke at
+Latin Poetry; and even in his Old Age, affected sometimes to improve it.
+Many of his Composure are yet in our Hands."
+
+It is pleasant to believe that some of the qualities of this
+distinguished scholar and Christian were reproduced in the descendant
+whose life we are studying. At his death in 1659 he was succeeded, as
+was mentioned, by his son Edward, whose daughter became the wife of the
+Reverend Joseph Emerson, the minister of Mendon who, when that village
+was destroyed by the Indians, removed to Concord, where he died in the
+year 1680. This is the first connection of the name of Emerson with
+Concord, with which it has since been so long associated.
+
+Edward Emerson, son of the first and father of the second Reverend
+Joseph Emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one,
+for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: "Mr. Edward Emerson, sometime
+Deacon of the first church in Newbury." He was noted for the virtue of
+patience, and it is a family tradition that he never complained but
+once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her dumplings were
+somewhat harder than needful,--"_but not often_." This same Edward was
+the only break in the line of ministers who descended from Thomas of
+Ipswich. He is remembered in the family as having been "a merchant in
+Charlestown."
+
+Their son, the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, Minister of Malden for
+nearly half a century, married Mary, the daughter of the Reverend Samuel
+Moody,--Father Moody,--of York, Maine. Three of his sons were ministers,
+and one of these, William, was pastor of the church at Concord at the
+period of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
+
+As the successive generations narrow down towards the individual whose
+life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes more and
+more important and interesting to the biographer. The Reverend William
+Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was an excellent and popular
+preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. He preached resistance to
+tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his townsmen and their allies to
+make a stand against the soldiers who had marched upon their peaceful
+village, and would have taken a part in the Fight at the Bridge, which
+he saw from his own house, had not the friends around him prevented
+his quitting his doorstep. He left Concord in 1776 to join the army at
+Ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was advised to return to Concord and
+set out on the journey, but died on his way. His wife was the daughter
+of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord.
+This was another very noticeable personage in the line of Emerson's
+ancestors. His merits and abilities are described at great length on his
+tombstone in the Concord burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that
+his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs
+which record the excellences of our New England clergymen of the past
+generations are so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help
+inquiring whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter,
+like that which the good Vicar of Wakefield arranged with the
+portrait-painter. He was to represent Sophia as a shepherdess, it will
+be remembered, with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for
+nothing.
+
+William Emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and
+three daughters, one of whom, Mary Moody Emerson, is well remembered as
+pictured for us by her nephew, Ralph Waldo. His widow became the wife
+of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, Doctor of Divinity, and his successor as
+Minister at Concord.
+
+The Reverend William Emerson, the second of that name and profession,
+and the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in the year 1769, and
+graduated at Harvard College in 1789. He was settled as Minister in the
+town of Harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became Minister of the
+First Church in Boston. In 1796 he married Ruth Haskins of Boston. He
+died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom Ralph Waldo was the second.
+
+The interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man
+like Emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics
+of the Reverend William Emerson so far as we can learn them from his own
+writings and from the record of his contemporaries.
+
+The Reverend Dr. Sprague's valuable and well-known work, "Annals of the
+American Pulpit," contains three letters from which we learn some of
+his leading characteristics. Dr. Pierce of Brookline, the faithful
+chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary,
+but thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people
+of the quiet little town of Harvard, while he was highly acceptable in
+the pulpits of the metropolis. In personal appearance he was attractive;
+his voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable.
+"He was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an
+enemy.--In his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal
+side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated.--He was,
+however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most
+widely."
+
+Dr. Charles Lowell, another brother minister, says of him, "Mr. Emerson
+was a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his cheeks
+slightly tinted, his motions easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike, his
+manners bland and pleasant. He was an honest man, and expressed himself
+decidedly and emphatically, but never bluntly or vulgarly.--Mr. Emerson
+was a man of good sense. His conversation was edifying and useful; never
+foolish or undignified.--In his theological opinions he was, to say the
+least, far from having any sympathy with Calvinism. I have not supposed
+that he was, like Dr. Freeman, a Humanitarian, though he may have been
+so."
+
+There was no honester chronicler than our clerical Pepys, good, hearty,
+sweet-souled, fact-loving Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, who knew the
+dates of birth and death of the graduates of Harvard, starred and
+unstarred, better, one is tempted to say (_Hibernice_), than they did
+themselves. There was not a nobler gentleman in charge of any Boston
+parish than Dr. Charles Lowell. But after the pulpit has said what it
+thinks of the pulpit, it is well to listen to what the pews have to say
+about it.
+
+This is what the late Mr. George Ticknor said in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner" for September, 1849.
+
+"Mr. Emerson, transplanted to the First Church in Boston six years
+before Mr. Buckminster's settlement, possessed, on the contrary, a
+graceful and dignified style of speaking, which was by no means without
+its attraction, but he lacked the fervor that could rouse the masses,
+and the original resources that could command the few."
+
+As to his religious beliefs, Emerson writes to Dr. Sprague as follows:
+"I did not find in any manuscript or printed sermons that I looked
+at, any very explicit statement of opinion on the question between
+Calvinists and Socinians. He inclines obviously to what is ethical
+and universal in Christianity; very little to the personal and
+historical.--I think I observe in his writings, as in the writings of
+Unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of
+the nature and offices of Jesus. They had not made up their own minds on
+it. It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so."
+
+Mr. William Emerson left, published, fifteen Sermons and Discourses, an
+Oration pronounced at Boston on the Fourth of July, 1802, a Collection
+of Psalms and Hymns, an Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston,
+besides his contributions to the "Monthly Anthology," of which he was
+the Editor.
+
+Ruth Haskins, the wife of William and the mother of Ralph Waldo
+Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner," as a woman "of great patience and fortitude, of
+the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous
+bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long
+as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew
+how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that
+authority was resigned. Both her mind and her character were of a
+superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar
+softness and natural grace and quiet dignity. Her sensible and kindly
+speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it
+was ever ready, was a reward."
+
+The Reverend Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, who grew up with her son,
+says, "Waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children
+resembled their mother."
+
+Such was the descent of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If the ideas of parents
+survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had
+a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this
+representative of a long line of ministers. The same trains of thought
+and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of
+near family relationship, though not of blood. After the death of the
+first William Emerson, the Concord minister, his widow, Mr. Emerson's
+grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, Dr. Ezra
+Ripley. The grandson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ripley, whose
+character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before
+The Social Circle of Concord, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly"
+for November, 1883. Mr. Emerson says of him: "He was identified with the
+ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same
+time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the
+great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days
+declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and
+liberated America.... The same faith made what was strong and what was
+weak in Dr. Ripley." It would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of
+character than Mr. Emerson's living picture of Dr. Ripley. I myself
+remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so
+communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling
+John Foster of Brighton and chatty Jonathan Homer of Newton. Mr. Emerson
+says, "He was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable,
+manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all
+men.--His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and
+he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His
+friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his
+tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was
+no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous.
+Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his
+compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the
+beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door." How
+like Goldsmith's good Dr. Primrose! I do not know any writing of
+Mr. Emerson which brings out more fully his sense of humor,--of the
+picturesque in character,--and as a piece of composition, continuous,
+fluid, transparent, with a playful ripple here and there, it is
+admirable and delightful.
+
+Another of his early companionships must have exercised a still more
+powerful influence on his character,--that of his aunt, Mary Moody
+Emerson. He gave an account of her in a paper read before the Woman's
+Club several years ago, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for
+December, 1883. Far more of Mr. Emerson is to be found in this aunt of
+his than in any other of his relations in the ascending series, with
+whose history we are acquainted. Her story is an interesting one, but
+for that I must refer the reader to the article mentioned. Her character
+and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. "Her early
+reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards,
+and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart,
+Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madam De Staƫl, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron.
+Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of
+old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious
+authority in their minds, and nowise the slight merely entertaining
+quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,--how venerable
+and organic as Nature they are in her mind!"
+
+There are many sentences cited by Mr. Emerson which remind us very
+strongly of his own writings. Such a passage as the following might have
+come from his Essay, "Nature," but it was written when her nephew was
+only four years old.
+
+    "Malden, 1807, September.--The rapture of feeling I would part from
+    for days devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with
+    such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its
+    Author,--feels it is related to Him more than by any ties of
+    creation,--it exults, too fondly, perhaps, for a state of trial. But
+    in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow, or
+    appear to glow, with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which
+    penetrates the spirits with wonder and curiosity,--then, however
+    awed, who can fear?"--"A few pulsations of created beings, a few
+    successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable
+    us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories,--to do more,--to
+    date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to
+    measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history
+    of God's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It
+    is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying,
+    acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting,
+    dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity.
+    Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished,
+    and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the
+    activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of
+    virtue, the approval of God."
+
+Miss Mary Emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural
+science which may be noted in her nephews Waldo and Charles. After
+speaking of "the poor old earth's chaotic state, brought so near in its
+long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist," she says:--
+
+    "Yet its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of Moses'
+    Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to
+    science."--"And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give
+    the idea of the Infinite, far, far better than when dignified with
+    arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless
+    ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. How
+    grand its preparation for souls, souls who were to feel the
+    Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions and applied its
+    steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither
+    psychology nor element."--"Usefulness, if it requires action, seems
+    less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God,
+    retaining consciousness.... Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do
+    what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from
+    sublimity of motive."
+
+So far as hereditary and family influences can account for the character
+and intellect of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we could hardly ask for a better
+inborn inheritance, or better counsels and examples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having traced some of the distinguishing traits which belong by descent
+to Mr. Emerson to those who were before him, it is interesting to note
+how far they showed themselves in those of his own generation, his
+brothers. Of these I will mention two, one of whom I knew personally.
+
+Edward Bliss Emerson, who graduated at Harvard College in 1824, three
+years after Ralph Waldo, held the first place in his class. He began
+the study of the law with Daniel Webster, but overworked himself and
+suffered a temporary disturbance of his reason. After this he made
+another attempt, but found his health unequal to the task and exiled
+himself to Porto Rico, where, in 1834, he died. Two poems preserve his
+memory, one that of Ralph Waldo, in which he addresses his memory,--
+
+  "Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star,"
+
+the other his own "Last Farewell," written in 1832, whilst sailing out
+of Boston Harbor. The lines are unaffected and very touching, full of
+that deep affection which united the brothers in the closest intimacy,
+and of the tenderest love for the mother whom he was leaving to see no
+more.
+
+I had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits
+which were in due time to develop themselves in Emerson's character and
+intelligence. As on the wall of some great artist's studio one may find
+unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions
+of pictures painted in after years, so we see that Nature often
+sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its
+rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors
+which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The
+sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life
+is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea.
+
+Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which I find in the
+long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy
+Emerson. Save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my
+life's early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes
+ever beheld. Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the
+veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in
+life might well say with Dryden,--
+
+  "If by traduction came thy mind
+  Our wonder is the less to find
+  A soul so charming from a stock so good."
+
+His image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years
+ago, I spoke of him in these lines, which I may venture to quote from
+myself, since others have quoted them before me.
+
+  Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,
+  The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,
+  O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down
+  In graceful folds the academic gown,
+  On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught
+  How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,
+  And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,
+  Too bright to live,--but O, too fair to die.
+
+Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much
+of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands.
+I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles
+Emerson's coming into my study,--this was probably in 1826 or
+1827,--taking up Hazlitt's "British Poets" and turning at once to a poem
+of Marvell's, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. The
+influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson's
+poems, and Charles' liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo.
+When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called "The
+Harvard Register" was published by students and recent graduates. Three
+articles were contributed by him to this periodical. Two of them have
+the titles "Conversation," "Friendship." His quotations are from Horace
+and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and
+Scott. There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of
+his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. Take
+this as an example:--
+
+    "Men and mind are my studies. I need no observatory high in air to
+    aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. I do not want a costly
+    apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility.
+    I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all
+    knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my
+    employment. I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at
+    home at my chambers, and I shall have enough to do and enjoy."
+
+The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson's poems.
+He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which
+he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons
+made famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness
+in the bitter cold winter's day; the mountain that rose in the horizon;
+the lofty pines; the lowly flowers. All talked with him as brothers and
+sisters, and he with them as of his own household.
+
+The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his
+maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.
+
+    "All men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says Charles Emerson,
+    "must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are
+    constrained to yield where it is due,--to rank, merit, talents. But
+    our affections we give not thus easily.
+
+      'The hand of Douglas is his own.'"
+
+    --"I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good
+    men hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent
+    conventions of polite life. But my friends I must know, and,
+    knowing, I must love. There must be a daily beauty in their life
+    that shall secure my constant attachment. I cannot stand upon the
+    footing of ordinary acquaintance. Friendship is aristocratical--the
+    affections which are prostituted to every suitor I will not accept."
+
+Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long
+outlived him became. Here is the dignity which commands reverence,--a
+dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson's sweetness of manner and
+expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence. There was
+something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was with into
+a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. A vulgar soul stood
+abashed in his presence. I could never think of him in the presence
+of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action
+without recalling Milton's line,
+
+  "Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed,"
+
+and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial
+messenger.
+
+No doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences,
+and of that exaggeration which belongs to the _laudator temporis acti_.
+But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and
+out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and neck
+they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the
+class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part
+assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some
+extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the
+result of a Presidential election,--or the Winner of the Derby. But
+Hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. "Who has a part with ****
+at this next exhibition?" I asked him one day, as I met him in the
+college yard. "***** the Post," answered Hillard. "Why call him _the
+Post_?" said I. "He is a wooden creature," said Hillard. "Hear him and
+Charles Emerson translating from the Latin _Domus tota inflammata erat_.
+The Post will render the words, 'The whole house was on fire.' Charles
+Emerson will translate the sentence 'The entire edifice was wrapped in
+flames.'" It was natural enough that a young admirer should prefer the
+Bernini drapery of Charles Emerson's version to the simple nudity of
+"the Post's" rendering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred
+in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a
+scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental
+life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly.
+
+When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion
+by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange
+themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had
+found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of
+political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was
+as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and
+there, waiting to form centres of condensation.
+
+Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a
+number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became
+visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries:
+John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards President of Harvard University;
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster; John Sylvester John Gardiner; William Tudor;
+Samuel Cooper Thacher; William Emerson. These were the chief stars of
+the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of
+it, as reflected from the pages of "The Monthly Anthology," which very
+soon came under the editorship of the Reverend William Emerson.
+
+The father of Ralph Waldo Emerson may be judged of in good measure by
+the associates with whom he was thus connected. A brief sketch of these
+friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these
+men made the local sphere of thought into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was
+born.
+
+John Thornton Kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is
+remembered by old graduates of Harvard, sitting in the ancient
+Presidential Chair, on Commencement Day, and calling in his penetrating
+but musical accents: "_Expectatur Oratio in Lingua Latina_" or
+"_Vernacula_," if the "First Scholar" was about to deliver the English
+oration. It was a presence not to be forgotten. His "shining morning
+face" was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did,
+with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. Mr. Ticknor speaks
+of his sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom,
+with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor." It was of him
+that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of
+printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to
+pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished
+out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the
+leaves together as he best might. The Reverend Dr. Lowell says: "He
+always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of
+his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the
+labor." Mr. Cabot, who knew all Emerson's literary habits, says he used
+to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the
+same way. Emerson's father, however, was very methodical, according
+to Dr. Lowell, and had "a place for everything, and everything in its
+place." Dr. Kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of
+the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very
+thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries.
+
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in Boston.
+The beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of
+his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of
+those living idols which seem to be as necessary to Protestantism as
+images and pictures are to Romanism.
+
+John Sylvester John Gardiner, once a pupil of the famous Dr. Parr, was
+then the leading Episcopal clergyman of Boston. Him I reconstruct from
+scattered hints I have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a
+sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome English
+parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice. Mild
+Orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of
+Christianity, and none was readier than Dr. Gardiner, if the voice of
+tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal
+persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to
+the interests of learning.
+
+William Tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the
+"Monthly Anthology," and that of the "North American Review," for he was
+a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the
+founder of the second. Edward Everett characterizes him, in speaking of
+his "Letters on the Eastern States," as a scholar and a gentleman, an
+impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a
+correct writer. Daniel Webster bore similar testimony to his talents and
+character.
+
+Samuel Cooper Thacher was hardly twenty years old when the "Anthology"
+was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty. He
+contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various
+controversial sermons, and writing the "Memoir of Buckminster."
+
+There was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities.
+There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much
+scholarship. The "Anthology" was the literary precursor of the "North
+American Review," and the theological herald of the "Christian
+Examiner." Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity.
+It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine,
+with all manner of literary chips and shavings. It had Magazine
+ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced
+paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations
+that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to
+Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and
+languid trickle of Laura Matilda's sentimentalities. It talked about
+"the London Reviewers" with a kind of provincial deference. It printed
+articles with quite too much of the license of Swift and Prior for the
+Magazines of to-day. But it had opinions of its own, and would compare
+well enough with the "Gentleman's Magazine," to say nothing of "My
+Grandmother's Review, the British." A writer in the third volume (1806)
+says: "A taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our
+country. I believe that, fifty years ago, England had never seen a
+Miscellany or a Review so well conducted as our 'Anthology,' however
+superior such publications may now be in that kingdom."
+
+It is well worth one's while to look over the volumes of the "Anthology"
+to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how
+they expressed themselves. The stiffness of Puritanism was pretty well
+relaxed when a Magazine conducted by clergymen could say that "The
+child,"--meaning the new periodical,--"shall not be destitute of the
+manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. He shall
+attend Theatres, Museums, Balls, and whatever polite diversions the town
+shall furnish." The reader of the "Anthology" will find for his reward
+an improving discourse on "Ambition," and a commendable schoolboy's
+"theme" on "Inebriation." He will learn something which may be for his
+advantage about the "Anjou Cabbage," and may profit by a "Remedy for
+Asthma." A controversy respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore
+may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for
+relief to the epistle "Studiosus" addresses to "Alcander." If the lines
+of "The Minstrel" who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from "The
+District of Main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "R.T. Paine,
+Jr., Esq.," of tameness when he exclaims:--
+
+  "Rise Columbia, brave and free,
+  Poise the globe and bound the sea!"
+
+But the writers did not confine themselves to native or even to English
+literature, for there is a distinct mention of "Mr. Goethe's new novel,"
+and an explicit reference to "Dante Aligheri, an Italian bard." But
+let the smiling reader go a little farther and he will find Mr.
+Buckminster's most interesting account of the destruction of Goldau.
+And in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by Dr. Jacob
+Bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries,
+and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is
+sweetening our atmospheric existence.
+
+The late President Josiah Quincy, in his "History of the Boston
+Athenaeum," pays a high tribute of respect to the memory and the
+labors of the gentlemen who founded that institution and conducted the
+"Anthology." A literary journal had already been published in Boston,
+but very soon failed for want of patronage. An enterprising firm of
+publishers, "being desirous that the work should be continued, applied
+to the Reverend William Emerson, a clergyman of the place, distinguished
+for energy and literary taste; and by his exertions several gentlemen
+of Boston and its vicinity, conspicuous for talent and zealous for
+literature, were induced to engage in conducting the work, and for this
+purpose they formed themselves into a Society. This Society was not
+completely organized until the year 1805, when Dr. Gardiner was elected
+President, and William Emerson Vice-President. The Society thus formed
+maintained its existence with reputation for about six years, and issued
+ten octavo volumes from the press, constituting one of the most lasting
+and honorable monuments of the literature of the period, and may be
+considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country after
+that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the
+Revolutionary War, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history
+of the United States. Its records yet remain, an evidence that it was a
+pleasant, active, high-principled association of literary men, laboring
+harmoniously to elevate the literary standard of the time, and with a
+success which may well be regarded as remarkable, considering the little
+sympathy they received from the community, and the many difficulties
+with which they had to struggle."
+
+The publication of the "Anthology" began in 1804, when Mr. William
+Emerson was thirty-four years of age, and it ceased to be published in
+the year of his death, 1811. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight years old at
+that time. His intellectual life began, we may say, while the somewhat
+obscure afterglow of the "Anthology" was in the western horizon of the
+New England sky.
+
+The nebula which was to form a cluster about the "North American Review"
+did not take definite shape until 1815. There is no such memorial of
+the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first half
+century of that periodical. It is easy to find fault with it for uniform
+respectability and occasional dulness. But take the names of its
+contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of
+that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved
+from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like Irving
+and Cooper. Strike out the names of Webster, Everett, Story, Sumner, and
+Cushing; of Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor,
+Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of
+Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and,
+lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic
+literature would be left for a new edition of "Miller's Retrospect"?
+
+These were the writers who helped to make the "North American Review"
+what it was during the period of Emerson's youth and early manhood.
+These, and men like them, gave Boston its intellectual character. We
+may count as symbols the three hills of "this darling town of ours,"
+as Emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon. Civil liberty
+lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and
+shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily
+on the third from the days when John Cotton preached his first sermon to
+those in which we are living.
+
+The social religious influences of the first part of the century
+must not be forgotten. The two high-caste religions of that day were
+white-handed Unitarianism and ruffled-shirt Episcopalianism. What called
+itself "society" was chiefly distributed between them. Within less than
+fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat
+changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies. This
+movement is the general withdrawal of the native New Englanders of both
+sexes from domestic service. A large part of the "hired help,"--for
+the word servant was commonly repudiated,--worshipped, not with their
+employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages
+stood at the doors. The congregations that went chiefly from the
+drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the
+culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of
+social cleavage. A certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not
+reminding us exactly of primitive Christianity, was the inevitable
+result. This must always be remembered in judging the men and women
+of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving
+prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of King George in
+the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue. The line of social
+separation was more marked, probably, in Boston, the headquarters of
+Unitarianism, than in the other large cities; and even at the present
+day our Jerusalem and Samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing
+with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and
+dollars. The exodus of those children of Israel from the house of
+bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of
+independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even
+in the sanctuary. True religious equality is harder to establish than
+civil liberty. No man has done more for spiritual republicanism than
+Emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time
+in the whole country.
+
+Such were Emerson's intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and
+environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to
+manhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+1803-1823. To _AET_. 20.
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of
+May, 1803.
+
+He was the second of five sons; William, R.W., Edward Bliss, Robert
+Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy.
+
+His birthplace and that of our other illustrious Bostonian, Benjamin
+Franklin, were within a kite-string's distance of each other. When
+the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from Milk Street
+through the narrow passage long known as Bishop's Alley, now Hawley
+Street, he came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite the spot
+where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the
+First Church, the home of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and
+the birthplace of his son, Ralph Waldo. The oblong quadrangle between
+Newbury, now Washington Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street,
+and the open space called Church Green, where the New South Church was
+afterwards erected, is represented on Bonner's maps of 1722 and 1769 as
+an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway.
+
+Even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a
+most attractive little _rus in urbe_. The sunny gardens of the late
+Judge Charles Jackson and the late Mr. S.P. Gardner opened their flowers
+and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses
+and other massive edifices. The most aristocratic pears, the "Saint
+Michael," the "Brown Bury," found their natural homes in these sheltered
+enclosures. The fine old mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out
+upon these gardens. Some of us can well remember the window of his
+son's, the historian's, study, the light from which used every evening
+to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while "The Conquest of
+Mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable
+than those encountered by Cortes. It was a charmed region in which
+Emerson first drew his breath, and I am fortunate in having a
+communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other
+living person.
+
+Mr. John Lowell Gardner, a college classmate and life-long friend of Mr.
+Emerson, has favored me with a letter which contains matters of
+interest concerning him never before given to the public. With his kind
+permission I have made some extracts and borrowed such facts as seemed
+especially worthy of note from his letter.
+
+    "I may be said to have known Emerson from the very beginning. A very
+    low fence divided my father's estate in Summer Street from the field
+    in which I remember the old wooden parsonage to have existed,--but
+    this field, when we were very young, was to be covered by Chauncy
+    Place Church and by the brick houses on Summer Street. Where the
+    family removed to I do not remember, but I always knew the boys,
+    William, Ralph, and perhaps Edward, and I again associated with
+    Ralph at the Latin School, where we were instructed by Master Gould
+    from 1815 to 1817, entering College in the latter year.
+
+    "... I have no recollection of his relative rank as a scholar, but it
+    was undoubtedly high, though not the highest. He never was idle or a
+    lounger, nor did he ever engage in frivolous pursuits. I should say
+    that his conduct was absolutely faultless. It was impossible that
+    there should be any feeling about him but of regard and affection.
+    He had then the same manner and courtly hesitation in addressing you
+    that you have known in him since. Still, he was not prominent in the
+    class, and, but for what all the world has since known of him,
+    his would not have been a conspicuous figure to his classmates in
+    recalling College days.
+
+    "The fact that we were almost the only Latin School fellows in the
+    class, and the circumstance that he was slow during the Freshman
+    year to form new acquaintances, brought us much together, and an
+    intimacy arose which continued through our College life. We were in
+    the habit of taking long strolls together, often stopping for repose
+    at distant points, as at Mount Auburn, etc.... Emerson was not
+    talkative; he never spoke for effect; his utterances were well
+    weighed and very deliberately made, but there was a certain flash
+    when he uttered anything that was more than usually worthy to be
+    remembered. He was so universally amiable and complying that my
+    evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his
+    gentleness and forbearance, but nothing could disturb his
+    equanimity. All that was wanting to render him an almost perfect
+    character was a few harsher traits and perhaps more masculine vigor.
+
+    "On leaving College our paths in life were so remote from each other
+    that we met very infrequently. He soon became, as it were, public
+    property, and I was engrossed for many years in my commercial
+    undertakings. All his course of life is known to many survivors. I
+    am inclined to believe he had a most liberal spirit. I remember that
+    some years since, when it was known that our classmate ---- was
+    reduced almost to absolute want by the war, in which he lost his two
+    sons, Emerson exerted himself to raise a fund among his classmates
+    for his relief, and, there being very few possible subscribers, made
+    what I considered a noble contribution, and this you may be sure was
+    not from any Southern sentiment on the part of Emerson. I send you
+    herewith the two youthful productions of Emerson of which I spoke to
+    you some time since."
+
+The first of these is a prose Essay of four pages, written for a
+discussion in which the Professions of Divinity, Medicine, and Law were
+to be weighed against each other. Emerson had the Lawyer's side to
+advocate. It is a fair and sensible paper, not of special originality or
+brilliancy. His opening paragraph is worth citing, as showing the same
+instinct for truth which displayed itself in all his after writings and
+the conduct of his life.
+
+    "It is usual in advocating a favorite subject to appropriate all
+    possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful
+    auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our
+    attention. Such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far
+    as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments
+    being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for
+    the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the merits of the
+    subject."
+
+From many boys this might sound like well-meaning commonplace, but in
+the history of Mr. Emerson's life that "bold appeal to the heart," that
+"tribute of honest conviction," were made eloquent and real. The
+boy meant it when he said it. To carry out his law of sincerity and
+self-trust the man had to sacrifice much that was dear to him, but he
+did not flinch from his early principles.
+
+It must not be supposed that the blameless youth was an ascetic in his
+College days. The other old manuscript Mr. Gardner sends me is marked
+"'Song for Knights of Square Table,' R.W.E."
+
+There are twelve verses of this song, with a chorus of two lines. The
+Muses and all the deities, not forgetting Bacchus, were duly invited to
+the festival.
+
+  "Let the doors of Olympus be open for all
+  To descend and make merry in Chivalry's hall."
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Sanborn has kindly related to me several circumstances told him by
+Emerson about his early years.
+
+The parsonage was situated at the corner of Summer and what is now
+Chauncy streets. It had a yard, and an orchard which Emerson said was as
+large as Dr. Ripley's, which might have been some two or three acres.
+Afterwards there was a brick house looking on Summer Street, in which
+Emerson the father lived. It was separated, Emerson said, by a brick
+wall from a garden in which _pears grew_ (a fact a boy is likely to
+remember). Master Ralph Waldo used to _sit on this wall_,--but we cannot
+believe he ever got off it on the wrong side, unless politely asked to
+do so. On the occasion of some alarm the little boy was carried in his
+nightgown to a neighboring house.
+
+After Reverend William Emerson's death Mrs. Emerson removed to a house
+in Beacon Street, where the Athenaeum Building now stands. She kept some
+boarders,--among them Lemuel Shaw, afterwards Chief Justice of the State
+of Massachusetts. It was but a short distance to the Common, and Waldo
+and Charles used to drive their mother's cow there to pasture.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Reverend Doctor Rufus Ellis, the much respected living successor of
+William Emerson as Minister of the First Church, says that R.W. Emerson
+must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died
+when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in "the new
+parsonage," which was, doubtless, the "brick house" above referred to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources. Mr. Cooke tells us
+that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and
+soon afterwards the Latin School. At the age of eleven he was turning
+Virgil into very readable English heroics. He loved the study of Greek;
+was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses.
+But he thinks "the idle books under the bench at the Latin School" were
+as profitable to him as his regular studies.
+
+Another glimpse of him is that given us by Mr. Ireland from the "Boyhood
+Memories" of Rufus Dawes. His old schoolmate speaks of him as "a
+spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years
+old,--whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my
+mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him
+so angelic and remarkable." That "blue nankeen" sounds strangely, it may
+be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter
+of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from China were a
+common summer clothing of children. The places where the factories and
+streets of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence were to rise were then open
+fields and farms. My recollection is that we did not think very highly
+of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen,--a dull-colored fabric, too
+nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering.
+
+Emerson was not particularly distinguished in College. Having a near
+connection in the same class as he, and being, as a Cambridge boy,
+generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in College
+from the year when George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, and Francis William
+Winthrop graduated until after I myself left College, I might have
+expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of
+the great writers of his time. I do not recollect hearing of him except
+as keeping school for a short time in Cambridge, before he settled as a
+minister. His classmate, Mr. Josiah Quincy, writes thus of his college
+days:--
+
+    "Two only of my classmates can be fairly said to have got into
+    history, although one of them, Charles W. Upham [the connection of
+    mine referred to above] has written history very acceptably. Ralph
+    Waldo Emerson and Robert W. Barnwell, for widely different reasons,
+    have caused their names to be known to well-informed Americans. Of
+    Emerson, I regret to say, there are few notices in my journals. Here
+    is the sort of way in which I speak of the man who was to make so
+    profound an impression upon the thought of his time. 'I went to the
+    chapel to hear Emerson's dissertation: a very good one, but rather
+    too long to give much pleasure to the hearers.' The fault, I
+    suspect, was in the hearers; and another fact which I have mentioned
+    goes to confirm this belief. It seems that Emerson accepted the duty
+    of delivering the Poem on Class Day, after seven others had been
+    asked who positively, refused. So it appears that, in the opinion of
+    this critical class, the author of the 'Woodnotes' and the 'Humble
+    Bee' ranked about eighth in poetical ability. It can only be because
+    the works of the other five [seven] have been 'heroically unwritten'
+    that a different impression has come to prevail in the outside
+    world. But if, according to the measurement of undergraduates,
+    Emerson's ability as a poet was not conspicuous, it must also be
+    admitted that, in the judgment of persons old enough to know better,
+    he was not credited with that mastery of weighty prose which the
+    world has since accorded him. In our senior year the higher classes
+    competed for the Boylston prizes for English composition. Emerson
+    and I sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to
+    take the two prizes; but--Alas for the infallibility of academic
+    decisions! Emerson received the second prize. I was of course much
+    pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should
+    have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who
+    was to be the most original and influential writer born in America
+    was my unsuccessful competitor. But Emerson, incubating over deeper
+    matters than were dreamt of in the established philosophy of
+    elegant letters, seems to have given no sign of the power that was
+    fashioning itself for leadership in a new time. He was quiet,
+    unobtrusive, and only a fair scholar according to the standard of
+    the College authorities. And this is really all I have to say about
+    my most distinguished classmate."
+
+Barnwell, the first scholar in the class, delivered the Valedictory
+Oration, and Emerson the Poem. Neither of these performances was highly
+spoken of by Mr. Quincy.
+
+I was surprised to find by one of the old Catalogues that Emerson
+roomed during a part of his College course with a young man whom I well
+remember, J.G.K. Gourdin. The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard
+Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to
+Charleston, South Carolina. The "Southerners" were the reigning College
+_elegans_ of that time, the _merveilleux_, the _mirliflores_, of their
+day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the
+prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects
+of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help
+wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin
+together as room-mates.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+We get a few brief glimpses of Emerson during the years following his
+graduation. He writes in 1823 to a classmate who had gone from Harvard
+to Andover:--
+
+    "I am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of German
+    and Hebrew, Parkhurst and Jahn, and such other names as the memory
+    aches to think of, on foot at Andover. Meantime, Unitarianism will
+    not hide her honors; as many hard names are taken, and as much
+    theological mischief is planned, at Cambridge as at Andover. By the
+    time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will
+    not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly
+    he able to speak to one another, and there will be a Guelf and
+    Ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie."
+
+    "You can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city
+    needs the excitement and impulse of literary example. The sight of
+    broad vellum-bound quartos, the very mention of Greek and German
+    names, the glimpse of a dusty, tugging scholar, will wake you up to
+    emulation for a month."
+
+After leaving College, and while studying Divinity, Emerson employed a
+part of his time in giving instruction in several places successively.
+
+Emerson's older brother William was teaching in Boston, and Ralph Waldo,
+after graduating, joined him in that occupation. In the year 1825 or
+1826, he taught school also in Chelmsford, a town of Middlesex County,
+Massachusetts, a part of which helped to constitute the city of Lowell.
+One of his pupils in that school, the Honorable Josiah Gardiner Abbott,
+has favored me with the following account of his recollections:--
+
+The school of which Mr. Emerson had the charge was an old-fashioned
+country "Academy." Mr. Emerson was probably studying for the ministry
+while teaching there. Judge Abbott remembers the impression he made
+on the boys. He was very grave, quiet, and very impressive in his
+appearance. There was something engaging, almost fascinating, about him;
+he was never harsh or severe, always perfectly self-controlled, never
+punished except with words, but exercised complete command over the
+boys. His old pupil recalls the stately, measured way in which, for some
+offence the little boy had committed, he turned on him, saying only
+these two words: "Oh, sad!" That was enough, for he had the faculty of
+making the boys love him. One of his modes of instruction was to give
+the boys a piece of reading to carry home with them,--from some book
+like Plutarch's Lives,--and the next day to examine them and find out
+how much they retained from their reading. Judge Abbott remembers a
+peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to
+be in the field of vision. The whole impression left on this pupil's
+mind was such as no other teacher had ever produced upon him.
+
+Mr. Emerson also kept a school for a short time at Cambridge, and among
+his pupils was Mr. John Holmes. His impressions seem to be very much
+like those of Judge Abbott.
+
+My brother speaks of Mr. Emerson thus:--
+
+    "Calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre. Rather
+    stern in his very infrequent rebukes. Not inclined to win boys by a
+    surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice. Every inch
+    a king in his dominion. Looking back, he seems to me rather like a
+    captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny,
+    but not amused with its incongruities. He once recommended the use
+    of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items."
+
+In 1823, two years after graduating, Emerson began studying for the
+ministry. He studied under the direction of Dr. Charming, attending some
+of the lectures in the Divinity School at Cambridge, though not enrolled
+as one of its regular students.
+
+The teachings of that day were such as would now be called
+"old-fashioned Unitarianism." But no creed can be held to be a finality.
+From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to
+Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of
+a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain
+permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism. If the gates are
+not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill
+the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on
+the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to
+Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer,
+and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian
+Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the
+evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church.
+
+There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches. If De
+Tocqueville's account of Unitarian preaching in Boston at the time of
+his visit is true, the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau would have preached
+acceptably in some of our pulpits. In fact, the good Vicar might have
+been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians.
+
+At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism was the
+dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of
+the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University
+at Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry
+Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature,
+followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James
+Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in
+Boston. I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that
+the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly
+connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches. A Cambridge
+graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable
+in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose
+by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant
+talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which
+their light could shine before men.
+
+Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a
+reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his
+fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of
+a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from
+the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. It is
+hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned
+professions. His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling
+about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. His
+brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found
+his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the
+profession of Law. It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less
+exercised with the same questionings. He has said, speaking of his
+instructors: "If they had examined me, they probably would not have let
+me preach at all." His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not
+taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which
+accounted for his being excused from examination. In 1826, after three
+years' study, he was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association
+of Ministers. His health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he
+went in the following winter to South Carolina and Florida. During this
+absence he preached several times in Charleston and other places. On his
+return from the South he preached in New Bedford, in Northampton, in
+Concord, and in Boston. His attractiveness as a preacher, of which we
+shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his
+being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city
+clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a
+settled Minister in Boston.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+On the 11th of March, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague with
+the Reverend Henry Ware, Minister of the Second Church in Boston. In
+September of the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker.
+The resignation of his colleague soon after his settlement threw all the
+pastoral duties upon the young minister, who seems to have performed
+them diligently and acceptably. Mr. Conway gives the following brief
+account of his labors, and tells in the same connection a story of
+Father Taylor too good not to be repeated:--
+
+    "Emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of Boston.
+    He was on its School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State
+    Senate. He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and
+    helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. Father
+    Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave
+    an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when
+    establishing the Seaman's Mission in Boston. This was told me by
+    Father Taylor himself in his old age. I happened to be in his
+    company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the
+    Methodist Church; but when I spoke of the part Emerson had in it, he
+    softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend. I have
+    no doubt that if the good Father of Boston Seamen was proud of any
+    personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have
+    given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson.
+    Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to"--[the place
+    which a divine of Charles the Second's day said it was not good
+    manners to mention in church].--"'It does look so,' said Father
+    Taylor, 'but I am sure of one thing: if Emerson goes to'"--[that
+    place]--"'he will change the climate there, and emigration will set
+    that way.'"
+
+In 1830, Emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the
+Reverend H.B. Goodwin as Dr. Ripley's colleague. His address on giving
+the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his
+collected works.
+
+The fair prospects with which Emerson began his life as a settled
+minister were too soon darkened. In February, 1832, the wife of
+his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of
+consumption.
+
+He had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties,
+and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people. On
+the 9th of September, 1832, he preached a sermon on the Lord's Supper,
+in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against
+administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples
+were founded. This discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one
+which heralded a movement in New England theology which has never
+stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice. The sermon
+is in no sense "Emersonian" except in its directness, its sweet temper,
+and outspoken honesty. He argues from his comparison of texts in a
+perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor Peter Bulkeley might
+have done. It happened to that worthy forefather of Emerson that upon
+his "pressing a piece of _Charity_ disagreeable to the will of the
+_Ruling Elder_, there was occasioned an unhappy _Discord_ in the Church
+of _Concord_; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help
+of a _Council_ and the _Ruling Elder's_ Abdication." So says Cotton
+Mather. Whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in
+Emerson's days we need not try to determine. The sermon was only a more
+formal declaration of views respecting the Lord's Supper, which he had
+previously made known in a conference with some of the most active
+members of his church. As a committee of the parish reported resolutions
+radically differing from his opinion on the subject, he preached this
+sermon and at the same time resigned his office. There was no "discord,"
+there was no need of a "council." Nothing could be more friendly, more
+truly Christian, than the manner in which Mr. Emerson expressed himself
+in this parting discourse. All the kindness of his nature warms it
+throughout. He details the differences of opinion which have existed
+in the church with regard to the ordinance. He then argues from the
+language of the Evangelists that it was not intended to be a permanent
+institution. He takes up the statement of Paul in the Epistle to the
+Corinthians, which he thinks, all things considered, ought not to alter
+our opinion derived from the Evangelists. He does not think that we are
+to rely upon the opinions and practices of the primitive church. If that
+church believed the institution to be permanent, their belief does not
+settle the question for us. On every other subject, succeeding times
+have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of
+Christianity than was the practice of the early ages.
+
+"But, it is said, 'Admit that the rite was not designed to be
+perpetual.' What harm doth it?"
+
+He proceeds to give reasons which show it to be inexpedient to continue
+the observance of the rite. It was treating that as authoritative which,
+as he believed that he had shown from Scripture, was not so. It confused
+the idea of God by transferring the worship of Him to Christ. Christ is
+the Mediator only as the instructor of man. In the least petition to God
+"the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your
+mind than your brother or child." Again:--
+
+    "The use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the
+    modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and
+    unsuited to affect us. The day of formal religion is past, and we
+    are to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The Jewish
+    was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the
+    Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach
+    men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was
+    religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and
+    forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to that purpose;
+    and with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must
+    contend that it is a matter of vital importance,--really a duty to
+    commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be acceptable
+    to their understanding or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of
+    God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial?"
+
+To these objections he adds the practical consideration that it brings
+those who do not partake of the communion service into an unfavorable
+relation with those who do.
+
+The beautiful spirit of the man shows itself in all its noble sincerity
+in these words at the close of his argument:--
+
+    "Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this
+    institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither
+    should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I
+    not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of
+    my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it
+    stand to the end of the world if it please men and please Heaven,
+    and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces."
+
+He then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling
+in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor's duties to
+administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been
+confided to him.
+
+This is the only sermon of Mr. Emerson's ever published. It was
+impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his
+truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning.
+It was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations
+over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up
+entirely. And thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on
+both sides, Mr. Emerson left the pulpit of the Second Church and found
+himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section 1. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
+
+
+Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first
+time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief
+which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford
+him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled
+"English Traits." He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily,
+Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower
+Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning
+visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom
+he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the
+rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that
+one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together,
+or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was
+explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief
+persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he
+reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions
+incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his
+microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." Emerson
+hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look
+through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson
+says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the
+wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with
+these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further
+abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon,
+were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of
+Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom
+he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which,
+follows:--
+
+    "The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people
+    who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that
+    they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply
+    themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost
+    destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that
+    frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best
+    terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or
+    in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you
+    crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I
+    have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to
+    my first belief that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these
+    impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of
+    having been met, and a larger horizon."
+
+Emerson carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in Edinburgh,
+who, being unable to pay him all the desired attention, handed him over
+to Mr. Alexander Ireland, who has given a most interesting account of
+him as he appeared during that first visit to Europe. Mr. Ireland's
+presentation of Emerson as he heard him in the Scotch pulpit shows
+that he was not less impressive and attractive before an audience of
+strangers than among his own countrymen and countrywomen:--
+
+"On Sunday, the 18th of August, 1833, I heard him deliver a discourse in
+the Unitarian Chapel, Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly
+the effect which it produced on his hearers. It is almost needless to
+say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of
+them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts,
+the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the
+calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
+the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the
+least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not
+long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers,
+whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence
+carried, for the moment, all before them,--his audience becoming like
+clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant
+thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a
+greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of Chalmers. His
+voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever
+heard; nothing like it have I listened to since.
+
+  'That music in our hearts we bore
+  Long after it was heard no more.'"
+
+Mr. George Gilfillan speaks of "the solemnity of his manner, and the
+earnest thought pervading his discourse."
+
+As to the effect of his preaching on his American audiences, I find the
+following evidence in Mr. Cooke's diligently gathered collections. Mr.
+Sanborn says:--
+
+    "His pulpit eloquence was singularly attractive, though by no means
+    equally so to all persons. In 1829, before the two friends had met,
+    Bronson Alcott heard him preach in Dr. Channing's church on 'The
+    Universality of the Moral Sentiment,' and was struck, as he said,
+    with the youth of the preacher, the beauty of his elocution and the
+    direct and sincere manner in which he addressed his hearers."
+
+Mr. Charles Congdon, of New Bedford, well known as a popular
+writer, gives the following account of Emerson's preaching in his
+"Reminiscences." I borrow the quotation from Mr. Conway:--
+
+    "One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals,
+    with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the
+    first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was
+    a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after
+    Emerson's voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an
+    indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional
+    illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and
+    dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard. I could understand
+    them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse."
+
+Everywhere Emerson seems to have pleased his audiences. The Reverend Dr.
+Morison, formerly the much respected Unitarian minister of New Bedford,
+writes to me as follows:--
+
+    "After Dr. Dewey left New Bedford, Mr. Emerson preached there
+    several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who
+    heard him. The Society would have been glad to settle him as their
+    minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for
+    some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion
+    service. Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at
+    that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration
+    for Mr. Emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a
+    Christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his
+    friend, without any action by the Society."
+
+All this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable.
+But every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must
+have been as a preacher. In fact, we have all listened, probably, to
+many a passage from old sermons of his,--for he tells us he borrowed
+from those old sermons for his lectures,--without ever thinking of the
+pulpit from which they were first heard.
+
+Among the stray glimpses we get of Emerson between the time when he
+quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public
+as a lecturer is this, which I owe to the kindness of Hon. Alexander H.
+Rice. In 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with
+another boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being
+at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in
+the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice
+to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along,
+Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of
+thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and
+spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which
+had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after
+generation.
+
+When they parted at the house of young Rice's father, Emerson invited
+the boys to come and see him at the Allen farm, in the afternoon. They
+came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off.
+"Boys," said Emerson, "here we recognize the presence of the Universal
+Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d' ye do? How d'
+ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with
+our own How d' ye do? How d' ye do? And all the waving branches of
+the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the
+singing brook, and the insect and the bird,--every living thing and
+things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while
+they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the
+salutation of the Universal Spirit."
+
+We perceive the same feeling which pervades many of Emerson's earlier
+Essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences
+of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus
+unexpectedly favored. Governor Rice continues:--
+
+    "You know what a captivating charm there always was in Emerson's
+    presence, but I can never tell you how this line of thought then
+    impressed a country boy. I do not remember anything about the
+    remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day,--I
+    only remember that I went home wondering about that mystical dream
+    of the Universal Spirit, and about what manner of man he was under
+    whose influence I had for the first time come....
+
+    "The interview left impressions that led me into new channels of
+    thought which have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, I doubt
+    not, taught me somewhat how to distinguish between mere theological
+    dogma and genuine religion in the soul."
+
+In the summer of 1834 Emerson became a resident of Concord,
+Massachusetts, the town of his forefathers, and the place destined to
+be his home for life. He first lived with his venerable connection, Dr.
+Ripley, in the dwelling made famous by Hawthorne as the "Old Manse." It
+is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene
+of the Fight on the banks of the river. It was built for the Reverend
+William Emerson, his grandfather. In one of the rooms of this house
+Emerson wrote "Nature," and in the same room, some years later,
+Hawthorne wrote "Mosses from an Old Manse."
+
+The place in which Emerson passed the greater part of his life well
+deserves a special notice. Concord might sit for its portrait as an
+ideal New England town. If wanting in the variety of surface which
+many other towns can boast of, it has at least a vision of the distant
+summits of Monadnock and Wachusett. It has fine old woods, and noble
+elms to give dignity to its open spaces. Beautiful ponds, as they
+modestly call themselves,--one of which, Walden, is as well known in our
+literature as Windermere in that of Old England,--lie quietly in their
+clean basins. And through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges,
+a gentle, unsalted stream, like an English river, licking its grassy
+margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. This is the
+Musketaquid, or Meadow River, which, after being joined by the more
+restless Assabet, still keeps its temper and flows peacefully along by
+and through other towns, to lose itself in the broad Merrimac. The names
+of these rivers tell us that Concord has an Indian history, and there is
+evidence that it was a favorite residence of the race which preceded our
+own. The native tribes knew as well as the white settlers where were
+pleasant streams and sweet springs, where corn grew tall in the meadows
+and fish bred fast in the unpolluted waters.
+
+The place thus favored by nature can show a record worthy of its
+physical attractions. Its settlement under the lead of Emerson's
+ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, was effected in the midst of many
+difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble
+leader were successful in overcoming. On the banks of the Musketaquid
+was fired the first fatal shot of the "rebel" farmers. Emerson appeals
+to the Records of the town for two hundred years as illustrating the
+working of our American institutions and the character of the men of
+Concord:--
+
+    "If the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to
+    be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+    fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+    much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+What names that plain New England town reckons in the roll of its
+inhabitants! Stout Major Buttrick and his fellow-soldiers in the war of
+Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers
+and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter
+Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as
+the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as
+the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our
+stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and
+half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a
+school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in
+undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I
+need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning
+the women whose names have added to its distinction. It has long been an
+intellectual centre such as no other country town of our own land, if of
+any other, could boast. Its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted
+by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows are made holy by the
+dust that is covered by their turf.
+
+Such was the place which the advent of Emerson made the Delphi of New
+England and the resort of many pilgrims from far-off regions.
+
+On his return from Europe in the winter of 1833-4, Mr. Emerson began to
+appear before the public as a lecturer. His first subjects, "Water," and
+the "Relation of Man to the Globe," were hardly such as we should have
+expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical
+and physiological science. They were probably chosen as of a popular
+character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and
+entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him
+pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. These lectures are
+not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so
+far as I know. He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating
+the experiences of his recent tour in Europe. Having made himself at
+home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his
+taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics. In 1834
+he lectured on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund
+Burke. The first two of these lectures, though not included in his
+collected works, may be found in the "North American Review" for 1837
+and 1838. The germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in
+prose and verse may be found in these Essays.
+
+The _Cosmos_ of the Ancient Greeks, the _piu nel' uno_, "The Many in
+One," appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his
+"Nature." The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little
+poem entitled "Each and All." The "Rhodora," another brief poem, finds
+itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, "What is Beauty?" and its answer,
+"This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt.
+It may be produced. But it cannot be defined." And throughout this Essay
+the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is
+the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment.
+_Noscitur a sociis_ applies as well to a man's dead as to his living
+companions. A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on
+Plato. When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution,
+long remembered, "When you strike at a _King_, you must kill him."
+He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own
+intelligence. What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character
+chiefly interested him. He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble.
+Like his "Humble Bee," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," whom he speaks
+of as
+
+  "Wiser far than human seer,"
+
+and says of him,
+
+  "Aught unsavory or unclean
+  Hath my insect never seen,"
+
+he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is
+repulsive to dwell upon,
+
+  "Seeing only what is fair,
+  Sipping only what is sweet."
+
+Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his
+earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as
+printed in the Essay.
+
+    "He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race;
+    he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty
+    that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and
+    self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness."
+
+Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters
+they draw. One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will
+not take the color of his subject. He may force himself to picture that
+which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he
+delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he
+feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself. Let us
+try Emerson by this test in his "Essay on Milton:"--
+
+    "It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour
+    foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?)
+    of all men, in the power to _inspire_. Virtue goes out of him into
+    others." ... "He is identified in the mind with all select and holy
+    images, with the supreme interests of the human race."--"Better than
+    any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely,
+    to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of
+    posterity,--to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a
+    composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not
+    described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to
+    him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France, and
+    Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and
+    we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who
+    communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of
+    piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes."
+
+Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, "To raise the idea of man;"
+he had "the power _to inspire_" in a preƫminent degree. If ever a man
+communicated those _vibrations_ he speaks of as characteristic of
+Milton, it was Emerson. In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is
+worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a
+school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for
+its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The
+similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into
+their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a
+revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost
+very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them
+in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many
+parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any
+man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer
+of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of
+audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as "an expert swordsman"
+like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive
+controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But
+though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have
+been conscious, like Milton, of "a certain niceness of nature, an honest
+haughtiness," which was as a shield about his inner nature. Charles
+Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the
+feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in
+the line he quotes:--
+
+  "The hand of Douglas is his own."
+
+It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was
+listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that
+of the divine singer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My friend, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a life-long friend of Emerson,
+who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the
+movement of which Emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has
+kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters:--
+
+    TO REV. JAMES F. CLARKE, LOUISVILLE, KY.
+
+    PLYMOUTH, MASS., March 12, 1834.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--As the day approaches when Mr. Lewis should leave
+    Boston, I seize a few moments in a friendly house in the first of
+    towns, to thank you heartily for your kindness in lending me the
+    valued manuscripts which I return. The translations excited me much,
+    and who can estimate the value of a good thought? I trust I am to
+    learn much more from you hereafter of your German studies, and much
+    I hope of your own. You asked in your note concerning Carlyle. My
+    recollections of him are most pleasant, and I feel great confidence
+    in his character. He understands and recognizes his mission. He is
+    perfectly simple and affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he
+    can well afford to be, in his communications. He expressed some
+    impatience of his total solitude, and talked of Paris as a
+    residence. I told him I hoped not; for I should always remember
+    him with respect, meditating in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was
+    cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read
+    with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and
+    when I specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from
+    the New Jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way;
+    whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears of
+    two or three years afterward.--He has many, many tokens of Goethe's
+    regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. If you should go to
+    Scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your
+    visit to Craigenputtock, in the parish of Dunscore, near Dumfries.
+    He told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in
+    the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for "Fraser's
+    Magazine." I therefore subscribed for that book, which he calls the
+    "Mud Magazine," but have seen nothing of his workmanship in the two
+    last numbers. The mail is going, so I shall finish my letter another
+    time.
+
+    Your obliged friend and servant,
+
+    R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+    CONCORD, MASS., November 25, 1834.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--Miss Peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece
+    on Goethe and Carlyle. I have read it with great pleasure and a
+    feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it
+    was not published. I have forgotten what reason you assigned for not
+    printing it; I cannot think of any sufficient one. Is it too late
+    now? Why not change its form a little and annex to it some account
+    of Carlyle's later pieces, to wit: "Diderot," and "Sartor Resartus."
+    The last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched
+    pamphlet. Whilst I see its vices (relatively to the reading public)
+    of style, I cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem,
+    reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour. And it
+    seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as
+    must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that
+    of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. If you still
+    retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid,
+    having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be
+    glad to know that he values his American readers very highly;
+    that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it
+    questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about
+    publishing a historical piece called "The Diamond Necklace," as a
+    part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French
+    Revolution. He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry,
+    could we tell it right. He adds, moreover, in a letter I have
+    recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he
+    might end in the western woods. Shall we not bid him come, and be
+    Poet and Teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd? Or,
+    as I sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to
+    become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to
+    spiritual influences of the higher kind? Have you read Sampson
+    Reed's "Growth of the Mind"? I rejoice to be contemporary with that
+    man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives;
+    there must be some oxygen yet, and La Fayette is only just dead.
+
+    Your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+    It occurs to me that 't is unfit to send any white paper so far as
+    to your house, so you shall have a sentence from Carlyle's letter.
+
+[This may be found in Carlyle's first letter, dated 12th August, 1834.]
+Dr. Le Baron Russell, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part
+of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication
+of "Sartor Resartus," which I will repeat in his own words:--
+
+    "It was just before the time of which I am speaking [that of
+    Emerson's marriage] that the 'Sartor Resartus' appeared in 'Fraser.'
+    Emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of 'Fraser,' to
+    Miss Jackson, and we all had the reading of them. The excitement
+    which the book caused among young persons interested in the
+    literature of the day at that time you probably remember. I was
+    quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that I
+    determined to publish an American edition. I consulted James Munroe
+    & Co. on the subject. Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to
+    a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication.
+    This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate,
+    William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing. When this was
+    accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no
+    part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (This is the
+    Preface which appears in the American edition, James Munroe & Co.,
+    1836. It was omitted in the third American from the second London
+    edition,[1] by the same publishers, 1840.) Before the first edition
+    appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, Munroe & Co.
+    offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and
+    to this I assented.
+
+    [Footnote 1: Revised and corrected by the author.]
+
+    "This American edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the
+    'Sartor' in either country, as a distinct edition. Some copies of
+    the sheets from 'Fraser,' it appears, were stitched together and sent
+    to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing
+    to take the responsibility of printing the book. This shows, I think,
+    how much more interest was taken in Carlyle's writings in this country
+    than in England."
+
+On the 14th of May, 1834, Emerson wrote to Carlyle the first letter of
+that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the
+careful editorship of Mr. Charles Norton. This correspondence lasted
+from the date mentioned to the 2d of April, 1872, when Carlyle wrote his
+last letter to Emerson. The two writers reveal themselves as being in
+strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of
+temperament and entirely opposite views of life. The hatred of unreality
+was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with
+Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers,
+find their counterparts in every thinking community. Carlyle did not
+weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments
+there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. The
+Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon; a _De_
+_Profundis_ answered by a _Sursum Corda_. "The ground of my existence
+is black as death," says Carlyle. "Come and live with me a year," says
+Emerson, "and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of
+these years; (when the 'History' has passed its ten editions, and been
+translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you."
+
+
+Section 2. In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia
+Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in the fine
+old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his
+sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. After their
+marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which
+he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their
+daughter still reside. This is the "plain, square, wooden house," with
+horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which
+has been so often described and figured. It is without pretensions, but
+not without an air of quiet dignity. A full and well-illustrated account
+of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in "Poets' Homes,"
+by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879.
+
+On the 12th of September, 1835, Emerson delivered an "Historical
+Discourse, at Concord, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of
+the Incorporation of the Town." There is no "mysticism," no
+"transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts
+are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became
+the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful,
+very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative
+Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson
+ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix.
+One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with
+a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with
+annotations, and trailing a supplement after it. Oracles are brief and
+final in their utterances. Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain
+what they say.
+
+It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies
+and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of
+rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation. The discourses delivered
+on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a
+clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and
+heroines. Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland
+towns of New England. Emerson has told its story in as painstaking,
+faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist. But with this
+fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque
+touches which reveal the poetic philosopher.
+
+    "I have read with care," he says, "the town records themselves.
+    They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively
+    agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search
+    after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of
+    a manifest love of justice. I find our annals marked with a uniform
+    good sense.--The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the
+    event. These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric
+    within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but
+    they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just
+    community." ... "The matters there debated (in town meetings) are
+    such as to invite very small consideration. The ill-spelled pages
+    of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for
+    confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and
+    private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as
+    proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are
+    approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the
+    good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be
+    suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+    fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+    much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+There was nothing in this Address which the plainest of Concord's
+citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure. In fact Mr.
+Emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a
+plain Concord citizen. His son tells me that he was a faithful attendant
+upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and
+careful listener to the debates on town matters. That respect for
+"mother-wit" and for all the wholesome human qualities which reveals
+itself all through his writings was bred from this kind of intercourse
+with men of sense who had no pretensions to learning, and in whom, for
+that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in
+their expression. He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their
+idiosyncrasies; Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the
+fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into
+a dream--peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who
+insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of
+idolaters and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. It would
+be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of
+self-government in a small community than is contained in this simple
+discourse, patient in detail, large in treatment, more effective than
+any unsupported generalities about the natural rights of man, which
+amount to very little unless men earn the right of asserting them by
+attending fairly to their natural duties. So admirably is the working of
+a town government, as it goes on in a well-disposed community, displayed
+in the history of Concord's two hundred years of village life, that
+one of its wisest citizens had portions of the address printed
+for distribution, as an illustration of the American principle of
+self-government.
+
+After settling in Concord, Emerson delivered courses of Lectures in
+Boston during several successive winters; in 1835, ten Lectures on
+English Literature; in 1836, twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of
+History; in 1837, ten Lectures on Human Culture. Some of these lectures
+may have appeared in print under their original titles; all of them
+probably contributed to the Essays and Discourses which we find in his
+published volumes.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1836, a meeting was held to celebrate the
+completion of the monument raised in commemoration of the Concord Fight.
+For this occasion Emerson wrote the hymn made ever memorable by the
+lines:--
+
+  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
+  And fired the shot heard round the world.
+
+The last line of this hymn quickens the heartbeats of every American,
+and the whole hymn is admirable in thought and expression. Until the
+autumn of 1838, Emerson preached twice on Sundays to the church at East
+Lexington, which desired him to become its pastor. Mr. Cooke says that
+when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of
+Emerson's whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied:
+"We are a very simple people, and can understand no one but Mr.
+Emerson." He said of himself: "My pulpit is the Lyceum platform."
+Knowing that he made his Sermons contribute to his Lectures, we need not
+mourn over their not being reported.
+
+In March, 1837, Emerson delivered in Boston a Lecture on War, afterwards
+published in Miss Peabody's "Aesthetic Papers." He recognizes war as one
+of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, to disappear
+with the advance of mankind:--
+
+    "At a certain stage of his progress the man fights, if he be of a
+    sound body and mind. At a certain high stage he makes no offensive
+    demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable
+    heart. At a still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness;
+    passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all
+    converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself,
+    and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity;
+    but being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one
+    engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an
+    individual, but to the common good of all men."
+
+In 1834 Emerson's brother Edward died, as already mentioned, in the West
+India island where he had gone for his health. In his letter to Carlyle,
+of November 12th of the same year, Emerson says: "Your letter, which
+I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened
+place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother
+in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong
+sorrow." It was of him that Emerson wrote the lines "In Memoriam," in
+which he says,--
+
+  "There is no record left on earth
+  Save on tablets of the heart,
+  Of the rich, inherent worth,
+  Of the grace that on him shone
+  Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit;
+  He could not frame a word unfit,
+  An act unworthy to be done."
+
+Another bereavement was too soon to be recorded. On the 7th of October,
+1835, he says in a letter to Carlyle:--
+
+    "I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one
+    too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles
+    Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I
+    believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on
+    all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure
+    pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two
+    gentlemen know each other."
+
+Alas for human hopes and prospects! In less than a year from the date of
+that letter, on the 17th of September, 1836, he writes to Carlyle:--
+
+    "Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your
+    first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I
+    have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the
+    inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well,
+    and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave
+    question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so
+    much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for
+    I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better
+    than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time
+    of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my
+    house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have
+    known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation.
+    He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of
+    man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He
+    postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so
+    that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But
+    some time I shall see you and speak of him."
+
+
+Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book
+of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no
+name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author,
+Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay
+with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. For it has
+proved for many,--I will not say a _pons asinorum_,--but a very narrow
+bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they
+must cross it, or one domain of Emerson's intellect will not be reached.
+
+It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. It
+talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning
+simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until,
+as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of
+his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words
+which "a certain poet sang" to him.
+
+This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was
+peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's
+"Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was
+vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves
+common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to
+travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very
+long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell
+five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats's
+
+          "doubtful tale from fairy-land
+  Hard for the non-elect to understand."
+
+The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.
+
+    "Whatever is too original," says De Quincey, "will be hated at the
+    first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance
+    of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a
+    counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering
+    against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William
+    Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was
+    the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since
+    then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the
+    echo of his name."
+
+No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than
+Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of "Nature," his
+first thoroughly characteristic Essay. There is the same thought in the
+Preface to "The Excursion" that we find in the Introduction to "Nature."
+
+    "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
+    we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
+    relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
+    philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
+    revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"
+
+                            "Paradise and groves
+      Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old
+      Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
+      A history only of departed things,
+      Or a mere fiction of what never was?"
+
+"Nature" is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters,
+which might almost as well have been called cantos.
+
+Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with
+which the aspects of nature inspired him. He had recently for the first
+time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the
+planetary influences above, beneath, around him. The air of the country
+intoxicated him. There are sentences in "Nature" which are as exalted
+as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been
+etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of
+his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. Yet underlying these
+excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured
+the anxious. The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and
+the stars shone again in quiet reflection.
+
+After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses
+himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes "part or particle of
+God," he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled _Commodity_, the
+ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing
+and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of
+Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," as he has
+called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural
+conveniences.
+
+But "a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love
+of _Beauty_" which is his next subject. There are some touches of
+description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and
+impressions for pictures.
+
+Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be
+found here. Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature. "What is
+common to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."--"Nothing
+is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."--"No
+reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." How easily
+these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems,
+"Each and All," and "The Rhodora." A good deal of his philosophy comes
+out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:--
+
+    "Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for
+    the universe; God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty are
+    but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not
+    ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not
+    alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a
+    part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of
+    Nature.".
+
+In the "Rhodora" the flower is made to answer that
+
+  "Beauty is its own excuse for being."
+
+In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse
+itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper
+than itself.
+
+He passes next to a consideration of _Language_. Words are signs of
+natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular
+spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very
+profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in
+which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become
+transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature.
+
+    "A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual
+    processes, will find that always a material image, more or less
+    luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought,
+    which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and
+    brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories."
+
+From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful
+mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material
+images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves
+when great exigencies call for them.
+
+    "The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been
+    nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year,
+    without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson
+    altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long
+    hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in
+    the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their
+    morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the
+    passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again
+    the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and
+    the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
+    infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of
+    power, are put into his hands."
+
+It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say
+that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of
+Wordsworth:--
+
+               "These beauteous forms,
+  Through a long absence, have not been to me
+  As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
+  But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
+  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
+  In hours of weariness sensations sweet
+  Felt in the blood and felt along the heart."
+
+It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may
+have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the
+comparison.
+
+In _Discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence
+of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will.
+Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp,
+because
+
+    "Time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"The moral
+    law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the
+    circumference."--"All things with which we deal preach to us.
+    What is a farm but a mute gospel?"--"From the child's successive
+    possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'Thy
+    will be done!' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under
+    his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the
+    whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character."
+
+The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to.
+He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. When a
+friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with
+sweet and solid wisdom "it is a sign to us that his office is closing,
+and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time." This
+thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles,
+which occurred a few months before "Nature" was published. He had
+already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some
+recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "To a man
+laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
+Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has
+just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down
+over less worth in the population." This was the first effect of the
+loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders
+events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first.
+
+The chapter on _Idealism_ must be read by all who believe themselves
+capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment
+of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the
+existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical
+inquiries." The most essential statement is this:--
+
+    "It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World,
+    that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a
+    certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon,
+    man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test
+    the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the
+    impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what
+    difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or
+    some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?"
+
+We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like
+that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which
+cheat the senses by false appearances.
+
+The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities
+between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The
+philosopher pursues Truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones
+the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought."
+Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature
+and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts
+Nature."--"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"Michael Angelo said of
+external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses
+the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not
+undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed
+understanding." "I have no hostility to Nature," he says, "but a
+child's love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and
+melons."--But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is
+phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the
+world in God,"--as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant
+eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
+
+The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the
+next chapter, which has for its title _Spirit_.
+
+Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the
+demands of the spirit. "It leaves God out of me."--Of these three
+questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory
+answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a
+substance.
+
+    "But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many
+    truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn
+    that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread
+    universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or
+    power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all
+    things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that
+    behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is
+    one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from
+    without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through
+    ourselves."--"As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the
+    bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at
+    his need, inexhaustible power."
+
+Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a
+"creator in the finite."
+
+    "As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more
+    evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from
+    God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer
+    run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us."
+
+All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next
+chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.
+
+This next and last chapter is entitled _Prospects_. He begins with
+a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction,
+undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught
+sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the
+"imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In
+a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for
+the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all--or most of us,
+certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more
+of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and
+to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the
+realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert's
+"Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air
+of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature
+which a certain poet sang to me."--"A man is a god in ruins."--"Man is
+the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He
+filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the
+sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--But he no longer
+fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop."
+Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct."
+Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England
+Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the
+Mount: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect."
+The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us,
+"Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to
+the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." The
+seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, "There
+shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." The sage of
+Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "A correspondent revolution in
+things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable
+appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons,
+enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New
+Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the "Revelation." He
+found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. Yet,
+considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble
+imagery and wonderful beauty. "Nature" is the Book of Revelation of our
+Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a
+poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its
+pantheistic character, as Wordsworth's "Lines composed near Tintern
+Abbey" had been long before. But here and there it found devout readers
+who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical
+beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the "Democratic Review" in
+terms of enthusiastic admiration.
+
+Mr. Bowen, the Professor of Natural Theology and Moral Philosophy
+in Harvard University, treated this singular semi-philosophical,
+semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "Christian Examiner,"
+headed "Transcendentalism," and published in the January number for
+1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his
+subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the
+acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations
+between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article.
+The professor turns the book over and over,--inspects it from plastron
+to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes
+successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound
+philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by
+obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more
+than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after
+some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily
+agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:--
+
+    "On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the
+    criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only
+    allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in
+    itself."
+
+Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837:--
+
+    "Your little azure-colored 'Nature' gave me true satisfaction. I
+    read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a
+    sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back.
+    You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it
+    rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build
+    whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the
+    true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a
+    man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look
+    out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear
+    for the _Ewigen Melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and
+    utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to
+    be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a
+    kind of attempt to write down."
+
+The first edition of "Nature" had prefixed to it the following words
+from Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last
+thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not
+know." This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:--
+
+  "A subtle chain of countless rings
+  The next unto the farthest brings;
+  The eye reads omens where it goes,
+  And speaks all languages the rose;
+  And striving to be man, the worm
+  Mounts through all the spires of form."
+
+The copy of "Nature" from which I take these lines, his own, of course,
+like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was
+printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin's
+"Origin of Species," twenty years and more before the publication of
+"The Descent of Man." But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844,
+had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems
+as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does
+not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to
+catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in
+the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than
+the naturalist's theory that the progenitor of the human race was an
+acephalous mollusk. "I will not be sworn," says Benedick, "but love may
+transform me to an oyster." For "love" read science.
+
+Unity in variety, "_il piu nell uno_" symbolism of Nature and its
+teachings, generation of phenomena,--appearances,--from spirit, to
+which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and
+elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may
+be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an
+aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome,--a
+stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of New England
+scholastic intelligence. But here and there it found a reader to whom it
+was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation,--
+
+                   "The golden key
+  Which opes the palace of eternity,"
+
+inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth,
+because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through
+the purification of their own souls.
+
+Next to "Nature" in the series of his collected publications comes "The
+American Scholar. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+at Cambridge, August 31, 1837."
+
+The Society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the
+uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that
+philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the
+annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many
+distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual
+addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest.
+Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any
+former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured
+in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded
+and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what
+enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"
+
+Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas
+found expression in it. This was to be expected in an address delivered
+before such an audience. Every real thinker's world of thought has its
+centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle
+round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and
+then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through
+those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture;
+for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become
+atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It
+begins with a note like a trumpet call.
+
+    "Thus far," he says, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign
+    of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to
+    give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
+    indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when
+    it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard
+    intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and
+    fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better
+    than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our
+    long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
+    close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot
+    always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events,
+    actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can
+    doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in
+    the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers
+    announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?"
+
+Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was
+in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into
+fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. The fable covers the
+doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial
+manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole
+man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many
+faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is
+one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and
+strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach,
+an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing,
+into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute
+book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship."
+
+This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted
+by omnivorous old Burton: "_Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes
+hominis_." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making.
+It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing
+the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled
+in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a
+fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's
+time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found
+cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when
+in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special
+acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of
+men's thoughts and working faculties.
+
+    "In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
+    intellect. In the right state he is _Man thinking_. In the
+    degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a
+    mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
+    In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is
+    continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory
+    pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites."
+
+Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature
+upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his
+previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of
+the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence.
+"Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is
+hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is
+just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to
+give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel.
+
+    "Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation
+    for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
+    this."
+
+When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to
+become an object of idolatrous regard.
+
+    "Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The
+    sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the
+    incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this
+    book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged.
+    Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not
+    by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set
+    out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle.
+    Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to
+    accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given;
+    forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in
+    libraries when they wrote these books.--One must he an inventor to
+    read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth
+    of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'--When the
+    mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book
+    we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is
+    doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the
+    world."
+
+It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of
+books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him.
+
+    "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.
+    Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen
+    into truth.--The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action
+    past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the
+    intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this
+    by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is
+    converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours."
+
+Emerson does not use the words "unconscious cerebration," but these
+last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. The beautiful
+paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration
+of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so
+Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were
+his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with
+him, at least through the pages of this discourse. The reader shall have
+the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to.
+
+    "There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not,
+    sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by
+    soaring from our body into the empyrean.
+
+    "Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and
+    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;
+he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is
+to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of
+humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather
+confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:--
+
+    "The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
+    ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the
+    hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We
+    have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of
+    the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative,
+    tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of
+    this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There
+    is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant."
+
+The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted.
+
+    "What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young
+    men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not
+    yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his
+    instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."
+
+Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was
+created to bear.
+
+   "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
+    we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first
+    time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the
+    Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
+
+This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence.
+Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel
+Adams supported the affirmative of the question, "Whether it be lawful
+to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be
+preserved." It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there.
+The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was
+startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the
+firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts
+suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic
+illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the
+grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so
+stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet
+had been proclaiming to them "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever
+forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker
+it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more
+like that of immediate inspiration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody.
+
+
+Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an
+Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,
+which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a
+controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus
+when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest
+and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual
+consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for
+the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.
+
+He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the
+change of an expression:--
+
+    "In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath
+    of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with
+    fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and
+    sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new
+    hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
+    Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost
+    spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge
+    globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and
+    prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn."
+
+How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear,
+and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased
+attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed
+the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and
+milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the
+smell of Lebanon." And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when
+it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did
+not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from
+the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of
+Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But "when
+Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and
+cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was
+consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." Such was probably the fate
+of many a copy of this famous discourse.
+
+It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of
+Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been
+applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this
+new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this
+alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the
+theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that
+it is read as calmly to-day as a common "Election Sermon," if such are
+ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the
+reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and
+its tendencies.
+
+The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty,
+deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws
+which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and
+illustration of this mind. What am I? What is?--are questions always
+asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.
+
+But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man
+is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and
+weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
+presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately
+stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in
+each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The
+intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of
+the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we
+associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,
+the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into
+hell."
+
+These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the
+world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one
+mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of
+the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks
+good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being
+shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute
+badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms
+him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then
+deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom."
+
+    "This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively
+    creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest
+    in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in
+    Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt,
+    in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental
+    genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men
+    found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
+    mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the
+    history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
+    infusion."
+
+But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition.
+What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject
+it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the
+church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the
+doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of
+voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul."
+
+The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity
+and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by
+the discourse:--
+
+    "Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with
+    open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,
+    ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
+    Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was
+    true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in
+    man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.
+    He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through
+    me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
+    thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion
+    did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
+    following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear
+    to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this
+    high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This
+    was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say
+    he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his
+    rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not
+    built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a
+    Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He
+    spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and
+    all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the
+    character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian
+    churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one
+    with the blowing clover and the falling rain."
+
+He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of
+historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive,
+the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the
+Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us.
+"To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The
+preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies;
+they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and
+peculiarity.
+
+Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of
+Christ is that the Moral Nature--the Law of Laws--is not explored as the
+fountain of the established teaching in society. "Men have come to speak
+of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were
+dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its
+fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the
+assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is
+closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing
+him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our
+theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not
+was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like
+Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost."
+
+When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the
+"practical application," some of his young hearers must have been
+startled at the style of his address.
+
+    "Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all
+    conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it
+    first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and
+    money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that
+    you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the
+    immeasurable mind."
+
+Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of
+Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and
+secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but
+with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed
+an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed
+as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was
+assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom
+generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity,
+rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same
+divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with
+whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words
+carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the
+spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must
+have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses
+they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one
+having authority, and not as the Scribes.'"
+
+Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its
+doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ
+of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed
+and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in
+which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson's
+discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of
+Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer:--
+
+    "What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I
+    might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known
+    opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time,
+    and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and
+    presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of
+    dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is
+    perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse,
+    and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very
+    important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the
+    nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my
+    opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would
+    rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise.
+    Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as
+    it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not,
+    be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished
+    by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the
+    'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I
+    heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and
+    love."
+
+Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of
+September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the
+idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson's philosophy, and
+sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of
+which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings
+of that most excellent and truly apostolic man.
+
+To this letter Emerson sent the following reply:--
+
+    CONCORD, October 8, 1838.
+
+    "MY DEAR SIR,--I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter
+    of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right
+    manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it
+    assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps I am not so quick to see it
+    as writers generally,--certainly I did not feel any disposition
+    to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your
+    thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think
+    of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men
+    at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of
+    criticism. I have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical
+    writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to
+    rail,--lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed
+    near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the
+    notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated
+    fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no
+    scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I
+    could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not
+    possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on
+    which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments
+    are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in
+    telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it
+    is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see
+    that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the
+    present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly
+    raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I
+    advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make
+    good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such
+    thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have
+    always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the
+    page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing
+    whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the
+    same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that
+    my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society,
+    loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my
+    conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in
+    motley,--and so I am your affectionate servant," etc.
+
+The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no
+part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his
+office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just
+given,--"Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see." But among his
+listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution,
+not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose
+voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the
+long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--Theodore
+Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the
+conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present
+day.
+
+In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course
+of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten
+Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV.
+Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty;
+X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false
+with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life."
+Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures
+or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in "Lectures
+and Biographical Sketches;" and "The Comic" in "Letters and Social
+Aims."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my
+kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke.
+
+The first letter was accompanied by the Poem "The Humble-bee," which
+was first published by Mr. Clarke in the "Western Messenger," from the
+autograph copy, which begins "Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has
+a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected
+works.
+
+    CONCORD, December 7, 1838.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my
+    friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me
+    in the spring if I hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. I
+    remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of
+    yours that the verses, "Take, O take those lips away," were not
+    Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both
+    together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that
+    stanza. I know it is in "Rollo," but it is in "Measure for Measure"
+    also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and
+    critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and
+    those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all
+    for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not,
+    and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we _who_
+    sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and
+    servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
+
+    CONCORD, February 27, 1839.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an
+    answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are
+    quite welcome to the lines "To the Rhodora;" but I think they need
+    the superscription ["Lines on being asked 'Whence is the Flower?'"].
+    Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world," etc] I send you a
+    corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them
+    that I think you must read them once again with your critical
+    spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years
+    ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury
+    called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper
+    than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and
+    am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic
+    date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry,
+    and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any
+    verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these
+    juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses,
+    that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up
+    old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely
+    as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to
+    music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe
+    I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than
+    _afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I
+    may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my
+    MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of
+    a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily
+    treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a
+    year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard
+    to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I
+    remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it;
+    but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall
+    have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself
+    of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle
+    Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent
+    spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he
+    writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring
+    lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind
+    enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done
+    by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to
+    betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any
+    line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the
+    universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the
+    old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you
+    will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every
+    possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I
+    heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year,
+    and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men
+    are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted
+    service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that
+    concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail,
+    of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to
+    trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad
+    to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson's
+    new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers,
+    aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along
+    the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but
+    I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.
+
+    Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery
+of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an
+Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor
+of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have
+been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to
+which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of
+Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious
+old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or
+questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which
+they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous
+repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy
+old dogmatists as dry as ever.
+
+Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling
+at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the
+speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his
+audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of
+the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen,
+provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of
+the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver.
+Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental
+conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place
+and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the
+sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony
+between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary
+colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side
+that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go
+anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief
+from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner,
+such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to
+quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.
+
+The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the
+same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence
+as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem
+misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these
+discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his
+complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned
+its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which
+freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and
+all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find
+some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative
+illustration.
+
+"Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a
+prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and
+earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet,
+he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled
+the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are
+indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery
+productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought."
+For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie
+all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his
+confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual
+independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history
+and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits
+a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:--
+
+    "An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
+    injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
+    possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything
+    that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that
+    he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a
+    grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny
+    to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is
+    piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_
+    annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him
+    talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved."
+
+But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of
+their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be
+forever blighted.
+
+From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his
+tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied.
+"Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of
+Nature to us is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I
+give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" And in the same way he would
+have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to
+the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution
+of things. "He must embrace solitude as a bride." Not superstitiously,
+but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all
+that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of
+the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst
+of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it:--
+
+    "You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear
+    that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What
+    is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask, with
+    derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore
+    truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say,
+    'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early
+    visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and
+    romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then
+    dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and
+    poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand
+    thousand men.--Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from
+    every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to
+    show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you
+    renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for
+    the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has
+    its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world,
+    and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as
+    shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all
+    men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."
+
+The next Address Emerson delivered was "The Method of Nature," before
+the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11,
+1841.
+
+In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: "As usual at this
+season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an
+oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges
+nine days hence.... My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches
+acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done,
+what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent,
+sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and
+stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted
+the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced
+in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.
+
+The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is
+"The Method of Nature." He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments
+and promises of this literary Anniversary.
+
+    "The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the
+    foundations of the castle."--"We hear too much of the results of
+    machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle
+    folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid
+    wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the
+    incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes
+    of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the
+    bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the
+    farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and
+    feature of man."--"While the multitude of men degrade each other,
+    and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a
+    bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself."
+
+I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than
+in any of those which preceded it.
+
+    "Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this
+    saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with
+    whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think
+    meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his
+    ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?"
+
+That there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true
+wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it,
+that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force,"
+that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into
+character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in
+this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how
+far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few
+broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn.
+We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this
+discourse on "The Method of Nature," as the pictorial beauty of
+their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson's
+speculations is well shown in this paragraph:--
+
+    "We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not
+    thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for
+    our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring
+    reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the
+    receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy."--"It is God
+    in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In
+    the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this
+    fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are
+    mine; and all mine are thine.'"
+
+We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same
+paragraph, "I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so
+sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his
+tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond
+explanation."
+
+    "We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency
+    appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is
+    growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else;
+    is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be
+    man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring,
+    a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit
+    and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that
+    it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends,
+    but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no
+    private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by
+    one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life
+    which in conscious beings we call ecstasy."
+
+Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for
+the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.
+
+    "The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify
+    the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of
+    stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!
+    thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning
+    and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry
+    of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of
+    right and wrong."
+
+His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the
+extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:--
+
+    "We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
+    that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
+    house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal
+    activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a
+    natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this
+    one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist,
+    cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that
+    they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they
+    were."
+
+It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity
+recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which
+is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many
+expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and
+vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history
+of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was
+only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold
+benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would
+feel that they lost by his counsels.
+
+    "The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
+    Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
+    generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
+    themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to
+    which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if
+    pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence
+    to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
+    objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible
+    to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never
+    touched; always giving health."
+
+Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses
+and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many
+organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their
+views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their
+special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in
+the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the
+Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he
+preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have
+a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--That he cannot give up
+labor without suffering some loss of power. "How can the man who has
+learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall
+we say all we think?--Perhaps with his own hands.--Let us learn the
+meaning of economy.--Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast
+fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house
+with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I
+may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and
+road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is
+frugality for gods and heroes."
+
+This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This "house with one
+apartment" was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April
+of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on
+intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him
+that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or
+whether this idea was working in Thoreau's mind and was suggested to
+Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed
+so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau
+entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the
+philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others
+carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common
+sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the
+conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to
+prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends
+"Teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more
+commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.
+
+"The Americans have many virtues," he says in this Address, "but they
+have not Faith and Hope." Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the
+burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by "a
+great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual
+and the actual world.
+
+In the "Lecture on the Times" he shows very clearly the effect which a
+nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves
+Reformers had upon him.
+
+    "The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice,
+    but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are
+    quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no
+    more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they
+    reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal
+    and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness
+    that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who
+    are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of
+    mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as
+    the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work
+    of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him;
+    but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done
+    in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management,
+    by tactics and clamor."
+
+All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by
+the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson
+had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser
+and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in
+view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination
+and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts
+that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes
+it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the
+dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who
+sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any
+rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of
+those daring images which defy the critics.
+
+    "As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain,
+    the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall
+    eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we
+    shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds."
+
+He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in
+his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get
+rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been
+accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence
+covers with its soothing tribute!
+
+    "All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame
+    what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but
+    of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment
+    man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised
+    and discredited angels."
+
+The Lecture called "The Transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at
+with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly
+applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples.
+It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and
+accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together
+very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this
+comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson
+explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of
+thoughts cast in a new mould.
+
+    "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism:
+    Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever
+    divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class
+    founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
+    beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class
+    perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us
+    representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they
+    cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the
+    force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on
+    the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
+    individual culture."
+
+    "The materialist takes his departure from the external world,
+    and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his
+    departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an
+    appearance.--His thought, that is the Universe."
+
+The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of
+"Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the
+periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were
+in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of
+it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these "same
+Transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "The Dial," which was
+their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than
+from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any
+other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and
+the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best
+witness.
+
+In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he sketches
+in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the
+development of the "new views" above mentioned. "There are always two
+parties," he says, "the party of the Past and the party of the Future;
+the Establishment and the Movement."
+
+About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity
+manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in
+literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the
+genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early
+causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance
+to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who
+returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward
+Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus
+Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great
+orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life
+in a few old men's memories. It is therefore with delight that one who
+remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his
+full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant,
+grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal
+vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the
+harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the
+glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is
+enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but
+many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great
+master of academic oratory.
+
+Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to
+the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of
+science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the
+influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate
+community, the writings of Channing,--he left it to others to say of
+Emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it
+so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the
+ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at
+organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came
+together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins
+Warren's,--Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full
+of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on
+smoothly enough with the usual small talk,--
+
+    "When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster
+    supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before
+    Dr. Warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to
+    establish aesthetic society in Boston.
+
+    "Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs.
+    Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies
+    and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.--Margaret Fuller,
+    George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr.
+    Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others
+    gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at
+    each other's houses in a serious conversation."
+
+With them was another, "a pure Idealist,--who read Plato as an
+equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were
+intellectual." He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to
+say:--
+
+    "I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston
+    that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain
+    opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy,
+    and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite
+    innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or
+    three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual
+    vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge
+    and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and
+    sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but
+    had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary.
+    I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or
+    sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody
+    knows by whom, or when it was applied."
+
+Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to
+suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.
+
+    "In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human
+    thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any
+    presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts
+    it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this
+    largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist, who thanks
+    no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his
+    conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its
+    reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has
+    done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
+
+    "These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no
+    compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one
+    compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
+    exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
+    in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
+    friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
+    what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
+    service to the race of man."
+
+The person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in
+nature," is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known
+colloquially as a "crank." The person who does not thank, by word or
+look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or
+water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a
+churl.
+
+Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or
+churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some
+of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing
+machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed
+more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that
+their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What
+forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What
+great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you
+performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little
+real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock
+and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled
+no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist"
+dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as
+that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.
+
+In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious
+persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader
+must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and
+not a scoffer:--
+
+    "They are not good citizens, not good members of society:
+    unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens;
+    they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public
+    religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions,
+    foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the
+    temperance society. They do not even like to vote."
+
+After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual
+beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this
+is what they have to say:--
+
+    "'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you
+    want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the
+    labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust:
+    but we do not like your work.'
+
+    'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'
+
+    'We have none.'
+
+    'What will you do, then?' cries the world.
+
+    'We will wait.'
+
+    'How long?'
+
+    'Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.'
+
+    'But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.'
+
+    'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but
+    I will not move until I have the highest command.'"
+
+And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his
+reasons for doing nothing.
+
+It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is
+easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the
+subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life
+and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of
+themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress
+for indolence than "the Everlasting No." The chimney-corner is the true
+arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their
+all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among
+his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a
+fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow.
+Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on
+the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was
+picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of
+themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of
+thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.
+
+Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that
+delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he
+makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.
+
+    "Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must
+    behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet
+    accrue from them to the state. Besides our coarse implements, there
+    must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and
+    telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers,
+    there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges
+    and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct,
+    who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the
+    by-stander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and
+    monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the
+    electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks
+    the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not
+    be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare
+    and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and
+    verify our bearings from superior chronometers."
+
+It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which
+Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were
+naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle,
+and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical
+judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew
+a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:--
+
+    "There has sprung up in Boston," says Dickens, in his "American
+    Notes," "a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On
+    inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I
+    was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be
+    certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this
+    elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the
+    Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I
+    should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+    This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much
+    that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying
+    so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold.
+    Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has
+    not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not
+    least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to
+    detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe.
+    And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a
+    Transcendentalist."
+
+In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The
+Conservative." It was a time of great excitement among the members of
+that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson
+show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more
+beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference
+to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the
+conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as
+well as that of the other. "Conservatism tends to universal seeming and
+treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers
+govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will
+fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a
+general law without a particular application,--law for all that does
+not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine
+resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated
+self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining
+and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so,
+whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed
+of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an
+impossible whole."
+
+He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair
+play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be
+unjust to the present or the past.
+
+We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that
+Dr. Charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because
+he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue
+a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a
+spiritual philosophy." Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in
+a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this
+country, Emerson says:--
+
+    "It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which
+    we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would
+    do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be
+    made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned
+    to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called 'The
+    Transcendentalist;' or, 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like....
+    Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous
+    contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured."
+
+The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to
+know as "The Dial!" A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry
+old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be
+content with Carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as
+thus:--
+
+    "'The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it
+    may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be
+    things not dreamt of over in that _Transoceanic_ parish! I shall
+    certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure
+    forerunner of things better."
+
+There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the
+Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the
+close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest
+which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more
+deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a
+possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm.
+They were to a certain extent synchronous,--the Magazine beginning in
+July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in
+1841, and breaking up in 1847.
+
+"The Dial" was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by
+Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse,
+among them "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "Chardon Street
+and Bible Convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "The
+Problem," "Woodnotes," "The Sphinx," "Fate." The other principal writers
+were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman
+Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot
+Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs.
+Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the
+contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest.
+It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and
+enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard
+a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and
+curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond
+the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number.
+Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her
+part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with
+his "trip-hammer" in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems
+in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others,
+whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are
+still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent
+contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to "The Dial," with all its
+crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the "Anthology."
+Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the
+pledge of a better season.
+
+We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence
+between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before
+the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge
+of our _young people_ than any he has had. It is true that unfledged
+writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more
+interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth
+of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that
+intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the
+inspiration of these "young people" to whom Emerson refers. He has to
+apologize for the first number. "It is not yet much," he says; "indeed,
+though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should
+be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake
+of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--The
+Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and
+whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know." They did
+print "The Problem." There were also some fragments of criticism from
+the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called "The Last
+Farewell," by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson's
+"May-day and other Pieces."
+
+On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple
+of months, Emerson writes:--
+
+    "Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism;
+    and the _Dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains
+    scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored
+    by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least
+    betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public."
+
+Carlyle finds the second number of "The Dial" better than the first, and
+tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with
+his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson's
+readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for
+the most part. "But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only
+a body, which want means a great deal." And again, "'The Dial,' too, it
+is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_
+body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man_, with color in the
+cheeks of him and a coat on his back?"
+
+Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the "dubious
+approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he
+found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object
+of tenderness and religion." So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the
+end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. "I
+cannot bid you quit 'The Dial,'" says Carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is
+Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge_, nevertheless."
+
+In the next letter he says:--
+
+    "I love your 'Dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem
+    to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present
+    Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage,
+    and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such
+    like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of
+    perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what
+    impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the
+    fore-hoof."
+
+A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not
+always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.
+
+To all Carlyle's complaints of "The Dial's" short-comings Emerson did
+not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty,
+with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.
+
+    "For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write
+    as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of
+    these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary
+    history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite
+    ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make
+    confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish
+    to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and
+    evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they
+    reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer
+    in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come,
+    who will easily do the unknown deed."
+
+"All the bright boys and girls in New England," and "'The Dial' dying of
+inanition!" In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:--
+
+    "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social
+    reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his
+    waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live
+    cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and
+    scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.
+    One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and
+    another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on
+    the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope."
+
+Mr. Ripley's project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better
+known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this
+undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would
+have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a
+moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "It was a noble and
+generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better
+living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without
+centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual
+sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our
+educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts."
+The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm
+experiment in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," its founder,
+and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential
+relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "Historic
+Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the
+ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the
+sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he
+says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and
+lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to
+the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in
+ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen
+without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward
+laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest
+humorists?
+
+This is his benevolent summing up:--
+
+    "The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made
+    what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All
+    comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of
+    residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine,
+    variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means
+    of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade,
+    did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine.
+    There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the
+    associates, education; to many, the most important period of their
+    life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with
+    the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of
+    letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were
+    always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room.
+    It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of
+    Reason in a patty-pan."
+
+The public edifice called the "Phalanstery" was destroyed by fire
+in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon
+afterwards it was dissolved.
+
+
+Section 2. Emerson's first volume of his collected Essays was published
+in 1841. In the reprint it contains the following Essays: History;
+Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence;
+Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. "The Young American,"
+which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844.
+
+Once accustomed to Emerson's larger formulae we can to a certain extent
+project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. But we
+cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious
+illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the
+Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by
+the teachable disciple. The reader must be prepared for occasional
+extravagances. Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays,
+for instance. "Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts,
+namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative,
+history is to be read and written." When we come to the application,
+in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such
+discourse as this? The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one
+upon the other, but their sense is continuous.
+
+    "I hold an actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall,
+    see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on
+    the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these
+    worlds of life?--How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and
+    Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are
+    Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?
+    Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau
+    seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the
+    stevedore, the porter?"
+
+The connection of ideas is not obvious. One can hardly help being
+reminded of a certain great man's Rochester speech as commonly reported
+by the story-teller. "Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall
+a hundred and fifty feet high! Greece in her palmiest days never had a
+waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on! No
+people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty
+feet high!"
+
+We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome
+and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux. But the underlying idea of the
+interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous.
+Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that "every history should
+be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and
+looked at facts as symbols."
+
+We have become familiar with his doctrine of "Self-Reliance," which is
+the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he
+always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks
+authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom.
+It is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme
+self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his
+proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.
+
+    "Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the
+    common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a
+    task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
+    that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
+    that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is
+    to others!"
+
+"Compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be
+praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from
+a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that
+judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful,
+and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John
+Bunyan's view:--
+
+  "A Christian man is never long at ease,
+  When one fright's gone, another doth him seize."
+
+Emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and
+trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble
+scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which
+would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.
+
+The Essay on "Spiritual Laws" is full of pithy sayings:--
+
+    "As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as
+    there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect
+    virtue.--A man passes for that he is worth.--The ancestor of every
+    action is a thought.--To think is to act.--Let a man believe in
+    God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul
+    incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some
+    Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour
+    floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and
+    scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top
+    and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms;
+    until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some
+    other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and
+    head of all living nature."
+
+This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud
+of George Herbert's. The Essay on "Love" is poetical, but the three
+poems, "Initial," "Daemonic," and "Celestial Love" are more nearly equal
+to his subject than his prose.
+
+There is a passage in the Lecture on "Friendship" which suggests
+some personal relation of Emerson's about which we cannot help being
+inquisitive:--
+
+    "It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
+    friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
+    other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
+    not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
+    wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
+    reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
+    companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of
+    treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness,
+    a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for
+    infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both."
+
+Was he thinking of his relations with Carlyle? It is a curious subject
+of speculation what would have been the issue if Carlyle had come to
+Concord and taken up his abode under Emerson's most hospitable roof.
+"You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house." How could
+they have got on together? Emerson was well-bred, and Carlyle was
+wanting in the social graces. "Come rest in this bosom" is a sweet air,
+heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season
+of close proximity, by that other strain,--
+
+  "No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole!
+  Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!"
+
+But Emerson may have been thinking of some very different person,
+perhaps some "crude and cold companion" among his disciples, who was not
+equal to the demands of friendly intercourse.
+
+He discourses wisely on "Prudence," a virtue which he does not claim for
+himself, and nobly on "Heroism," which was a shining part of his own
+moral and intellectual being.
+
+The points which will be most likely to draw the reader's attention are
+the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America,
+for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our
+love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all
+one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of
+sad sincerity painful to recognize.
+
+    "Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates
+    Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and
+    forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of
+    humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the
+    good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the
+    natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of
+    his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that
+    will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death
+    impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps
+    of absolute and inextinguishable being."
+
+In the following Essay, "The Over-Soul," Emerson has attempted the
+impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his
+rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his
+readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of
+reaching, he says,--
+
+    "Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to
+    those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare
+    not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall
+    short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
+    their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising
+    of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use
+    sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what
+    hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of
+    the Highest Law."
+
+"The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-_flow_ of a spiritual
+imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous,
+God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms
+borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute
+in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those
+applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols,
+varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual
+intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts
+and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to
+Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according
+to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words,
+and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving
+in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of
+consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea,
+which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision.
+Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon
+Him whom "no man can see and live."
+
+But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled
+"Circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against
+utterances which he will not defend. There can be no doubt that he would
+have confessed as much with reference to "The Over-Soul" as he has
+confessed with regard to "Circles," the Essay which follows "The
+Over-Soul."
+
+    "I am not careful to justify myself.... But lest I should mislead
+    any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the
+    reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value
+    on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
+    pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all
+    things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply
+    experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back."
+
+Perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of Emerson, we might
+borrow Goethe's language about Spinoza, as expressing the feeling with
+which we are left.
+
+    "I am reading Spinoza with Frau von Stein. I feel myself very near
+    to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine.
+
+    "I cannot say that I ever read Spinoza straight through, that at any
+    time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has
+    stood clear in view before me. But when I look into him I seem to
+    understand him,--that is, he always appears to me consistent with
+    himself, and I can always gather from him very salutary influences
+    for my own way of feeling and acting."
+
+Emerson would not have pretended that he was always "consistent with
+himself," but these "salutary influences," restoring, enkindling,
+vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess,
+like Dr. Walter Channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these,
+as he listened to them in a lecture, "made his head ache."
+
+The three essays which follow "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect,"
+"Art," would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we
+should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom.
+
+    "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
+    all things are at risk."
+
+    "God enters by a private door into every individual."
+
+    "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
+    which you please,--you can never have both."
+
+    "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must
+    carry it with us, or we find it not."
+
+But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from
+Babylon.
+
+Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to
+Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838.
+
+    "I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's
+    earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty
+    young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for
+    comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe,
+    $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no
+    other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which
+    was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a
+    rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have
+    food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich
+    no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise
+    man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend,
+    because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not
+    wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife
+    Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and
+    keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest,
+    most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal
+    preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and
+    sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and
+    three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my
+    household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system,
+    and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+    result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely
+    repellent particle."
+
+A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his
+life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: "My little boy
+is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love."
+
+Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once
+more:--
+
+    "My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages
+    by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little
+    boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You
+    can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such
+    a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a
+    very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to
+    tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace
+    and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a
+    perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever
+    child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by
+    scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one
+    girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I
+    shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I
+    should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so
+    gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible
+    and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet
+    sustain."
+
+This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic
+of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody,"--a lament not unworthy of comparison
+with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's
+well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the
+place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.[1]--Publication of the Second
+Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.--Character.
+--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist and Realist.--New
+England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second Visit to England.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: These two addresses are to be found in the first and
+eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of
+Emerson's works, namely, "Nature, Addresses, and Lectures," and
+"Miscellanies."]
+
+Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and
+feeling; American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism; American, so
+far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. He believed in
+American institutions, he trusted the future of the American race. In
+the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered
+February 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent
+patriot could ask. Not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the
+significance of the following contrast.
+
+    "The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest
+    history in the world; but they need all and more than all the
+    resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that
+    country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of
+    society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to
+    avoid it.... It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only
+    say, Let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal
+    institutions.... If only the men are employed in conspiring with the
+    designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we
+    shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others' censures,
+    out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social
+    state than history has recorded."
+
+Thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are
+taken was delivered. The "Young American" of that day is the more than
+middle-aged American of the present. The intellectual independence of
+our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was
+written. But the social alliance between certain classes of Americans
+and English is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the
+wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes
+of the old world. It is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly
+acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired
+fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which
+its representatives are unworthy. The plain and wholesome language of
+Emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. His
+words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following
+the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic,
+bracing, strengthening to the American, who requires to be reminded of
+his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties.
+
+On the first day of August, 1844, Emerson delivered in Concord an
+address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the
+British West India Islands. This discourse would not have satisfied the
+Abolitionists. It was too general in its propositions, full of humane
+and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate
+method of action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson's second series of Essays was published in 1844. There are
+many sayings in the Essay called "The Poet," which are meant for the
+initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read:--
+
+    "All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is
+    the principal event in chronology."
+
+Does this sound wild and extravagant? What were the political ups and
+downs of the Hebrews,--what were the squabbles of the tribes with each
+other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to
+whom we owe the Psalms,--the sweet singer whose voice is still the
+dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind?
+
+The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this
+eloquent apostrophe:--
+
+    "Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or
+    water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight,
+    wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
+    wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
+    into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is
+    Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st
+    walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition
+    inopportune or ignoble."
+
+"Experience" is, as he says himself, but a fragment. It bears marks of
+having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other
+essays. His most important confession is this:--
+
+    "All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I
+    would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly
+    love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my
+    heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in
+    success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from
+    the Eternal."
+
+The Essay on "Character" requires no difficult study, but is well worth
+the trouble of reading. A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone
+and doctrine.
+
+    "Character is Nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it,
+    or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance and of
+    persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all
+    emulation."
+
+    "There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long
+    intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they
+    have been unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an
+    accumulation of that power we consider.
+
+    "The history of those gods and saints which the world has written,
+    and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have
+    exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and
+    who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality
+    of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death
+    which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol
+    for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest
+    fact."
+
+In his Essay on "Manners," Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:--
+
+    "The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and
+    expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner
+    dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions.
+    Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes
+    good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then
+    gentleness.--Power first, or no leading class.--God knows that
+    all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in
+    strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point
+    at original energy.--The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of
+    this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio,
+    Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very
+    carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to
+    value any condition at a high rate.--I could better eat with one
+    who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and
+    unpresentable person.--The person who screams, or uses the
+    superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms
+    to flight.--I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it
+    excels in woman."
+
+So writes Emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which
+seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme.
+
+This essay is plain enough for the least "transcendental" reader.
+Franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of
+many of the qualities which go to the Emersonian ideal of good manners,
+a typical American, equal to his position, always as much so in the
+palaces and salons of Paris as in the Continental Congress, or the
+society of Philadelphia.
+
+"Gifts" is a dainty little Essay with some nice distinctions and some
+hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse:--
+
+    "The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.
+    Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the
+    farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the
+    painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing."
+
+    "Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because
+    they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the
+    utilities of the world.--Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they
+    are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being
+    attached to them."
+
+    "It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning
+    from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very
+    onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally
+    wishes to give you a slap."
+
+Emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the
+tingling effect of a witty over-statement.
+
+We have recognized most of the thoughts in the Essay entitled "Nature,"
+in the previous Essay by the same name, and others which we have passed
+in review. But there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure.
+
+    Here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar:--
+    "Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought
+    again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated,
+    and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of
+    free thought."
+
+And here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this
+Essay:--
+
+    "They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from
+    the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of
+    our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration
+    of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's
+    life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow."
+
+This is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the
+prediction, M. Jules Verne would be the best authority to consult. Poets
+are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative Frenchman
+gave it a name, he would probably call _Onditologie_.
+
+It is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be
+satisfied with the condition of the American political world at the
+present time, or when the Essay on "Politics" was written, some years
+before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many
+respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters
+of the old parties unchanged. This is Emerson's view of them as they
+then were:--
+
+    "Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share
+    the nation between them, I should say that one has the best
+    cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the
+    poet, or the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote
+    with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the
+    abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating
+    in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources
+    of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the
+    so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these
+    liberties. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of
+    democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
+    radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no
+    ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and
+    selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of
+    the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is
+    timid, and merely defensive of property. It indicates no right, it
+    aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous
+    policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor
+    foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor
+    emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the
+    immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any
+    benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate
+    with the resources of the nation."
+
+The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the
+famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find
+a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled "Nominalism and
+Realism." But there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering
+and considering. We have the complaint of the Cambridge "Phi Beta
+Kappa Oration," reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a
+collection of fragmentary men.
+
+As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side
+were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously.
+
+    "In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good
+    deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they
+    round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living.
+
+    "Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in
+    household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees
+    them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind
+    drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion.
+    Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and
+    insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
+    particulars."
+
+_New England Reformers_.--Would any one venture to guess how Emerson
+would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism,
+his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous,
+too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears,
+in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng
+of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites
+many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin?
+
+We must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on
+a Sunday in the year 1844. The Brook Farm experiment was an index of the
+state of mind among one section of the Reformers of whom he was writing.
+To remodel society and the world into a "happy family" was the aim
+of these enthusiasts. Some attacked one part of the old system, some
+another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old
+church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was
+for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was
+meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart
+in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had
+the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he
+was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the
+unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the
+lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and
+women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities.
+He describes these Reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical
+way:--
+
+    "They defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a
+    realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable.
+    What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One
+    apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no
+    man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil;
+    another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink
+    damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death
+    to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made
+    yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he
+    does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element
+    in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No,
+    they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment.
+    Stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us
+    scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of
+    agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny
+    of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox
+    must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the
+    hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk
+    wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect
+    world was to be defended,--that had been too long neglected, and a
+    society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes
+    was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts
+    of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and
+    their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles!"
+
+We have already seen the issue of the famous Brook Farm experiment,
+which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation.
+
+Emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he
+had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing
+impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of
+which he was in no sense responsible.
+
+He says in the lecture we are considering:--
+
+    "These new associations are composed of men and women of superior
+    talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such
+    a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the
+    good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of
+    superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the
+    association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an
+    asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the
+    strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of
+    men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some
+    compromise."
+
+His sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too
+well to believe in a Noah's ark full of idealists.
+
+All this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of
+lectures in Boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in
+and out of New England.
+
+His letters to Carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how
+punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. He
+was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to
+play the part of an accountant.
+
+He speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and
+that some of this company exacted much time and attention,--more than he
+could spare,--is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in
+his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered
+in prose.
+
+In 1846 Emerson's first volume of poems was published. Many of the poems
+had been long before the public--some of the best, as we have seen,
+having been printed in "The Dial." It is only their being brought
+together for the first time which belongs especially to this period,
+and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in
+connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the
+title, "May-Day and other Pieces."
+
+In October, 1847, he left Concord on a second visit to England, which
+will be spoken of in the following chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" Visit to Europe.--England.
+--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published. I. Uses
+of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli."
+
+
+A new periodical publication was begun in Boston in 1847, under the name
+of the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." Emerson wrote the "Editor's
+Address," but took no further active part in it, Theodore Parker being
+the real editor. The last line of this address is characteristic: "We
+rely on the truth for aid against ourselves."
+
+On the 5th of October, 1847, Emerson sailed for Europe on his second
+visit, reaching Liverpool on the 22d of that month. Many of his admirers
+were desirous that he should visit England and deliver some courses of
+lectures. Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions
+during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit
+have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. Mr. Conway
+quotes passages from a letter of Emerson's which show that he had some
+hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be
+heard by the English audiences favorably disposed towards him.
+
+"I feel no call," he said, "to make a visit of literary propagandism in
+England. All my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at
+home." He does not like the idea of "coaxing" or advertising to get
+him an audience. He would like to read lectures before institutions or
+friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. He has had a good many
+decisive tokens of interest from British men and women, but he doubts
+whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps
+in London. It proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire
+to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of
+the kingdom.
+
+From Liverpool he proceeded immediately to Manchester, where Mr. Ireland
+received him at the Victoria station. After spending a few hours with
+him, he went to Chelsea to visit Carlyle, and at the end of a week
+returned to Manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements
+which had been arranged for him. Mr. Ireland's account of Emerson's
+visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons
+is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons
+visited by Emerson. He lectured at Edinburgh, where his liberal way of
+thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. But he
+did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. A young student, Mr. George
+Cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by Mr.
+Ireland, I borrow a single sentence,--one only, but what could a critic
+say more?
+
+Speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he
+says: "In this respect, I take leave to think that Emerson is the most
+mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared."
+Emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never
+addicted. But what would youth be without its extravagances,--its
+preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and
+unstinted admiration?
+
+I need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other
+notabilities whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought "the
+two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and
+De Quincey." His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon
+him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe
+that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of
+his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy
+behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles
+Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous
+vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric
+rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never
+forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long
+endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter,"
+which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would
+have been discordant to Emerson's ears, which were offended by such
+noisy manifestations.
+
+During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished
+him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but
+never printed.
+
+From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for
+publication. These make up the volume entitled "Representative Men,"
+which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its
+contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and
+conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a
+good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical,
+and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men
+considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own
+affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography,
+no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of
+his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not
+Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest
+us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and
+Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we
+see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally,
+unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first
+to recognize.
+
+Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation.
+Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of
+all great men: "The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we
+are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to
+which also Plato was debtor."
+
+Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes "rough and
+smooth," "scourges of God," and "darlings of the human race." He likes
+Julius Caesar, Charles the Fifth, of Spain, Charles the Twelfth, of
+Sweden, Richard Plantagenet, and Bonaparte.
+
+    "I applaud," he says, "a sufficient man, an officer equal
+    to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master
+    standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome,
+    eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination
+    into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff,
+    or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the
+    world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and
+    all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of
+    persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our
+    thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the
+    potentate is nothing.--
+
+    "The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
+    qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less,
+    and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--All that
+    respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the
+    individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a
+    catholic existence."
+
+No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But
+Plato takes the first place in Emerson's gallery of six great personages
+whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says:--
+
+    "Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical
+    compliment to the Koran, when he said, 'Burn the libraries; for
+    their value is in this book.' Out of Plato come all things that are
+    still written and debated among men of thought."--
+
+    "In proportion to the culture of men they become his
+    scholars."--"How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up
+    out of night to be _his men_!--His contemporaries tax him with
+    plagiarism.--But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are
+    praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and
+    Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and
+    every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone
+    quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."
+
+The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when
+he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his
+storehouses.
+
+A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of
+the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples.
+
+The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest
+expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the
+Indian Scriptures. "'The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu,
+who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as
+not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor
+coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are
+others, others; nor am I, I.' As if he had said, 'All is for the soul,
+and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings;
+and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is
+imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" All of which we see
+reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."--"The country of unity, of
+immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in
+abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of
+a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith
+in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius
+of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its
+philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade,
+freedom."--"Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of
+each."
+
+But Emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of
+another,--"The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell
+what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides
+of every great question from him."
+
+The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of
+holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform
+soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,--are
+fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called
+"Plato: New Readings."
+
+Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or,
+the Mystic." The believers in his special communion as a revealer of
+divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The
+believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence
+at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching
+themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,
+which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in
+its bosom." The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims
+put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer.
+"Philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called
+them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will
+not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen
+with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the
+poets, they can take their choice of Emerson's poetical or prose
+estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In
+"The Test," the Muse says:--
+
+  "I hung my verses in the wind,
+  Time and tide their faults may find;
+  All were winnowed through and through,
+  Five lines lasted good and true ...
+  Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
+  Nor time unmake what poets know.
+  Have you eyes to find the five
+  Which five hundred did survive?"
+
+In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets
+referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, _Swedenborg_, and Goethe.
+
+And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that "his
+books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead
+prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird
+ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so
+transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a
+beautiful person, is a kind of warning." Yet Emerson says of him that
+"He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue
+to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature."
+
+Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer,
+he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.
+
+"Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned
+Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for
+Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other
+reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes
+him as being.
+
+    "There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never
+    a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never
+    insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that
+    he cares for.
+
+    "The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.
+    I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the
+    language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and
+    they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.--
+
+    "Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and
+    himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests,
+    or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish
+    to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or
+    time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes
+    pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we
+    pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he
+    rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones
+    underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration;
+    contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.
+    There is but one exception,--in his love for Socrates. In speaking
+    of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion."
+
+The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same
+characteristics. Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he
+must have found a great relief in getting into "the middle of the road"
+with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often
+led him round to the point from which he started.
+
+As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative
+and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the
+Essay itself.
+
+In writing of "Shakespeare; or, the Poet," Emerson naturally gives
+expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of
+poetry.
+
+"Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
+originality." A poet has "a heart in unison with his time and
+country."--"There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production,
+but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions,
+and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of
+in his times."
+
+When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of
+amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and
+library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd
+of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a
+great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time
+to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: "A great poet who
+appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which
+is anywhere radiating." Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was
+their wit. "Chaucer is a huge borrower." Emerson gives a list of authors
+from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have
+learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury's which I have had the
+privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us.
+
+The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing,
+especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough.
+He was arguing in his own cause,--not defending himself, as if there
+were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim
+of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their
+acquisitions.
+
+    "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
+    tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us."--"Shakespeare is as
+    much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the
+    crowd. A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and
+    think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of
+    doors."
+
+After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare,
+he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares "the
+halfness and imperfection of humanity."
+
+    "He converted the elements which waited on his command into
+    entertainment. He was master of the revels to mankind."
+
+And so, after this solemn verdict on Shakespeare, after looking at the
+forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet,
+Israelite, German, and Swede, he says: "It must be conceded that these
+are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet-priest, who
+shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves
+with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with
+equal inspiration."
+
+It is not to be expected that Emerson should have much that is new to
+say about "Napoleon; or, the Man of the World."
+
+The stepping-stones of this Essay are easy to find:--
+
+    "The instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle
+    class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate
+    democrat.--
+
+    "Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his
+    fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers." As Plato borrowed,
+    as Shakespeare borrowed, as Mirabeau "plagiarized every good
+    thought, every good word that was spoken in France," so Napoleon is
+    not merely "representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other
+    minds."
+
+He was "a man of stone and iron,"--equipped for his work by nature as
+Sallust describes Catiline as being. "He had a directness of action
+never before combined with such comprehension. Here was a man who in
+each moment and emergency knew what to do next. He saw only the object;
+the obstacle must give way."
+
+"When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and
+satisfied."--
+
+"I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern
+society.--He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the
+internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the
+opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse."
+
+But he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and
+finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson
+gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation
+superfluous:--
+
+    "In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power
+    and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but
+    with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
+    Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
+
+    "So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the
+    power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry
+    of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; '_Assez de
+    Bonaparte_.'"
+
+    It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death
+    we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible
+    satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by
+    her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks
+    and ruins.
+
+    But after all, Carlyle's "_carriĆØre ouverte aux talens_" is the
+    expression for Napoleon's great message to mankind.
+
+"Goethe; or, the Writer," is the last of the Representative Men who
+are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the
+fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in
+the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that
+he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could
+hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found
+the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with
+side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds
+an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his
+author. "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"He has
+said the best things about nature that ever were said.--He flung into
+literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has
+been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the
+Prometheus.--He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and
+sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not
+spiritualist.--I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives
+of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of
+conventions,--two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have
+severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for
+this time and for all time."
+
+This must serve as an _ex pede_ guide to reconstruct the Essay which
+finishes the volume.
+
+In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which
+Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took
+a part. Emerson's account of her conversation and extracts from
+her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his
+interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid
+portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written
+of her than by anything she ever wrote herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1858-1858. AEt. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club."
+
+
+After Emerson's return from Europe he delivered lectures to different
+audiences,--one on Poetry, afterwards published in "Letters and Social
+Aims," a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of
+which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many
+others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of
+Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same
+year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York.
+His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the
+planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is
+the only practical course, and is innocent." It would cost two thousand
+millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there
+ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would
+be?"
+
+His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph
+from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could
+not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free
+Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project
+for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in
+1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in
+steel and not in gold:--
+
+  "Pay ransom to the owner,
+    And fill the bag to the brim.
+  Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
+    And ever was. Pay him."
+
+His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with
+indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at
+Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the
+front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode
+inscribed to W.H. Channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of
+the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the
+cause of all the trouble.
+
+  "The over-god
+  Who marries Right to Might,
+  Who peoples, unpeoples,--
+  He who exterminates
+  Races by stronger races,
+  Black by white faces,--
+  Knows to bring honey
+  Out of the lion."
+
+Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he
+refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where
+
+  "Things are of the snake."
+
+The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to
+borrow Mr. Cooke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men
+took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a
+heartier assent to the outward methods adopted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a
+lecture read to the "Woman's Rights Convention" in 1855, he takes bold,
+and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in
+the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way
+in which he expresses himself:
+
+    "I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in
+    public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it.
+    Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous
+    impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be
+    equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a
+    church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do
+    theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish
+    a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse
+    them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our
+    Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.--The new movement
+    is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may
+    proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to
+    desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish."
+
+Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor,
+that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord
+before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He
+afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for "Putnam's Magazine," from
+which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch
+concluded:--
+
+    "He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make
+    what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an
+    impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is
+    an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class
+    remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are
+    native."
+
+The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough
+for an Elizabethan monumental inscription.
+
+  "With beams December planets dart
+  His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
+  July was in his sunny heart,
+  October in his liberal hand."
+
+Emerson's "English Traits," forming one volume of his works, was
+published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not
+a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired
+the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the
+wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is
+indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic
+characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final;
+they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less
+sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded,
+sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence
+made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him
+well-disposed to all the world.
+
+A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which
+Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal
+portion of his record. Only one _place_ is given as the heading of a
+chapter,--_Stonehenge_. The other eighteen chapters have general titles,
+_Land, Race, Ability, Manners_, and others of similar character.
+
+He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the
+British Aristocracy:--
+
+    "Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the
+    House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy
+    and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything
+    they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and
+    killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin.
+    Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent
+    and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy
+    thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by
+    assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and
+    snake, which they severally resembled."
+
+The race preserves some of its better characteristics.
+
+    "They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age.
+    The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin,
+    a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the
+    island."
+
+English "Manners" are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck,
+vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself,
+safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly,
+and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and
+religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.
+
+    "They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and
+    mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the
+    cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They
+    hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use
+    a studied plainness."
+
+    "In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,
+    but the dinner is the capital institution."
+
+    "They confide in each other,--English believes in English."--"They
+    require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in
+    public men."
+
+    "As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented.
+    Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy."
+
+Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly
+two hundred years ago.
+
+    "_New England_, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing
+    and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless
+    instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those
+    _Melancholy Indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all
+    service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby
+    to lay _Violent Hands_ upon themselves at the last. These are among
+    the _unsearchable Judgments_ of God."
+
+If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the
+Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the
+likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.
+
+    "They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of
+    waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run
+    into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly
+    carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense;
+    leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew
+    hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock
+    in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every
+    secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic;
+    they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why
+    she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the
+    inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate
+    and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from
+    shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror
+    they cause."
+
+This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to
+Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.
+
+    "A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the
+    curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first
+    deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them
+    justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and
+    low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a
+    savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The
+    stability of England is the security of the modern world."
+
+Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than
+the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted,
+and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism
+and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English
+civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating
+castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their
+colonies."
+
+In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or
+the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain,
+or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust
+doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if
+they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a
+generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not
+grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson
+saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England.
+A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a
+field of mushrooms.
+
+The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and
+fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flashes of light
+that have not come through its stained windows.
+
+    "The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on
+    the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's
+    chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed
+    hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him,
+    and the religion of a gentleman.
+
+    "The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing
+    left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and
+    reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to
+    take wine with him."
+
+Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told
+a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from
+nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an
+archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but Sydney Smith
+would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch
+of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his
+little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose
+unwieldy bulk he is playing.
+
+Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established
+Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with
+soft-spoken words.
+
+    "Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake
+    the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde,
+    et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in
+    England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson,
+    and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame."
+
+"English Traits" closes with Emerson's speech at Manchester, at the
+annual banquet of the "Free Trade Athenaeum." This was merely an
+occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had
+sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up
+in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in
+their utterance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated
+by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people,
+tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with
+Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all
+this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations
+of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine
+admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its
+playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a
+self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and
+mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not
+be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame
+Tussaud's exhibition, the Lord-Mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if
+one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American
+traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went
+up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the
+little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through
+the wide-awake town of Concord.
+
+In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing
+the name of "The Atlantic Monthly." Professor James Russell Lowell
+was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the
+originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old
+contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them
+Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of
+them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh
+volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as "The
+Romany Girl," "Days," "Brahma," "Waldeinsamkeit," "The Titmouse,"
+"Boston Hymn," "Saadi," and "Terminus."
+
+At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association,
+which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club," the members
+dining together on the last Saturday of every month.
+
+The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present
+day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic
+connection, and the "Atlantic Club" has been spoken of as if there was
+or had been such an institution, but it never existed.
+
+Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality
+before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic
+idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of
+crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the
+habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House"
+of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a
+club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its
+first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as
+visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat
+Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable
+rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always
+pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's
+conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust,
+sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger
+who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the
+table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana,
+Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar,
+eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical
+critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion
+of freedom, Andrew, "the great War Governor" of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe,
+the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy
+of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of
+the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured
+utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental
+phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular
+attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at
+its table, until within a year or two of his death.
+
+Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed
+unrecorded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+1858-1863: AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Worship; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions.
+
+
+The Essay on Persian Poetry, published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in
+1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the
+influence of Oriental poetry on Emerson's verse. In many of the shorter
+poems and fragments published since "May-Day," as well as in the
+"Quatrains" and others of the later poems in that volume, it is
+sometimes hard to tell what is from the Persian from what is original.
+
+On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held
+at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the
+poet's birth. He spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such
+beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as
+one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers
+was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that "every word seemed to have just
+dropped down to him from the clouds." Judge Hoar, who was another of his
+hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his
+time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself
+present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these
+gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His
+words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most
+natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with,
+but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his
+inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.
+
+I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed
+to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most
+devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:--
+
+
+CONCORD, May 13, 1859.
+
+Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these
+lines, which I will hasten to finish. Louis Napoleon will not bayonet
+you the while,--keep him at the door. So long I have promised to
+write! so long I have thanked your long suffering! I have let pass the
+unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with
+Gisela von Arnim (Bettina's daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and
+Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,--wandering in
+Europe with hope of meeting you,--yet met. This contumacy of mine I
+shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer
+first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when
+once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are
+drawn.--Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and
+coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you
+did not like Germany. Where then did Goethe find his lovers? Do all the
+women have bad noses and bad mouths? And will you stop in England, and
+bring home the author of "Counterparts" with you? Or did----write the
+novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them? How
+strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret! I think
+our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent.
+But----is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him.
+I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than
+mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the
+first day. The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and
+creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the
+irresistibility of our bias. Still this is only science, and must remain
+science. Our _praxis_ is never altered for that. We must forever hold
+our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed.
+
+I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an
+immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new
+stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer
+no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in
+our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good
+understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or
+pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but
+from a more convenient nature. But 'tis almost chemistry at last, though
+a meta-chemistry. I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer,
+however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth,
+that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of
+peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in
+the most passive acceptance,--if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out
+around me at this moment the new June,--the leaves say June, though the
+calendar says May,--and we must needs hail our young relatives again,
+though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters
+receiving a late-born brother or sister. Nature herself seems a little
+ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game
+again without a new bract or sepal. But you will think me incorrigible
+with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this
+summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers. My children scan
+curiously your E.'s drawings, as they have seen them.
+
+The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours!
+
+R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke
+of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor
+to his memory. Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in
+the Music Hall to Mr. Parker's society after his death. In 1862, he lost
+his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for August of the same year. Thoreau
+had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson
+is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the
+canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
+
+The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston
+in September, 1862. The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the
+following extract:--
+
+    "Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the
+    earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see
+    Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold
+    them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart
+    with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the
+    melioration of our planet:--
+
+  "'Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
+  And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.'"
+
+The "Conduct of Life" was published in 1860. The chapter on "Fate" might
+leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what
+he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that
+his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in
+adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. But let
+him hold fast to this reassuring statement:--
+
+    "If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm
+    liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty,
+    the power of character.--We are sure, that, though we know not how,
+    necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world,
+    my polarity with the spirit of the times."
+
+But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the
+mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the
+limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are
+illustrated.
+
+    "Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must
+    see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a
+    man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.--The
+    way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider,
+    the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the
+    crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these
+    are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just
+    dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
+    the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive
+    races,--race living at the expense of race.--Let us not deny it up
+    and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its
+    end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
+    instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a
+    clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity."
+
+Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he
+believed in so fully:--
+
+    "They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a
+    lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear."
+
+But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic
+predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who
+dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words,
+which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the
+delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:--
+
+    "People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine
+    brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with
+    high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to
+    distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that
+    a free-soiler."
+
+Let us see what Emerson has to say of "Power:"--
+
+    "All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were
+    _causationists_. They believed that things went not by luck, but by
+    law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that
+    joins the first and the last of things.
+
+    "The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young
+    orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--Imbecility; imbecility
+    in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in
+    all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and
+    fear. This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no
+    habit of self-reliance or original action.--
+
+    "We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_
+    condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of
+    main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found
+    in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the
+    supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive,
+    yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and
+    absorbents provided to take off its edge."
+
+The "two economies which are the best _succedanea"_ for deficiency of
+temperament are concentration and drill. This he illustrates by example,
+and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which "Poor
+Richard" would have cheerfully approved. He might have accepted also the
+Essay on "Wealth" as having a good sense so like his own that he could
+hardly tell the difference between them.
+
+    "Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and
+    wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet
+    water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress
+    when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick
+    lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross
+    the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in
+    books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and
+    auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it
+    added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day,
+    and knowledge and good will. Wealth begins with these articles of
+    necessity.--
+
+    "To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and
+    chief men of each race.--
+
+    "The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the
+    thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their
+    word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush
+    to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest
+    civilization should be undone."
+
+Who can give better counsels on "Culture" than Emerson? But we must
+borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. All kinds of
+secrets come out as we read these Essays of Emerson's. We know something
+of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet.
+It is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite
+portraits Mr. Galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as
+follows:--
+
+    "The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism
+    is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong
+    necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual
+    attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such
+    necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely
+    overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and
+    disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which
+    each individual persists to be what he is.
+
+    "The antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and
+    variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world,
+    with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with
+    eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and
+    religion: books, travel, society, solitude."
+
+    "We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they
+    must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their
+    best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for
+    occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude,
+    the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the
+    cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it
+    farther than suns and stars."
+
+We must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. Try the
+rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth
+knowing. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims
+high, must dread an easy home and popular manners."
+
+Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble
+career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least.
+But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he
+respected. It was "the hand of Douglas" again,--the same feeling that
+Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the
+introduction to this volume.
+
+Here are a few good sayings about "Behavior."
+
+    "There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an
+    egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke
+    of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage."
+
+Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of "Manners" in his Essay under the
+above title.
+
+    "The basis of good manners is self-reliance.--Manners require time,
+    as nothing is more vulgar than haste.--
+
+    "Men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first
+    time,--and every time they meet.--
+
+    "It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his
+    talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that
+    stands by himself, the universe stands by him also."
+
+In his Essay on "Worship," Emerson ventures the following prediction:--
+
+    "The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming
+    ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind
+    must have a faith which is science.--There will be a new church
+    founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a
+    manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church
+    of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will
+    have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol
+    and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture,
+    poetry."
+
+It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and
+unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the
+established facts of science and history when these last reach it in
+their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science
+more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date
+than "Beauty," or "Illusions." But accidental circumstances made such
+confusion in the strata of Emerson's published thought that one is often
+at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer
+layer.
+
+We come to "Considerations by the Way." The common-sense side of
+Emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical
+intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher
+of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth.
+
+    "Franklin said, 'Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they
+    begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it
+    discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'"
+
+"Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the
+minority, surely." Here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant,"
+which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered
+lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this
+matter of the _vox populi_. "Leave this hypocritical prating about the
+masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and
+need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede
+anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
+draw individuals out of them."
+
+PĆØre Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer
+in due time. After reading what Emerson says about "the masses," one is
+tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and
+be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not
+make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great
+necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which
+he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often
+discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the
+Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble
+ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather
+than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something
+of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing
+in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens,
+entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses
+his listeners and readers.
+
+The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the
+following passage:--
+
+    "The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of
+    everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left
+    their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My
+    boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors,
+    and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the
+    intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word
+    has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my
+    stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box!
+    I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to
+    sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy
+    in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact,
+    which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days
+    so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the
+    imagination."
+
+One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce
+of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day
+memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if
+often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A
+coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a
+Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification.
+Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something
+could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he
+cannot lift the object he would fain idealize.
+
+The habitual readers of Emerson do not mind an occasional
+over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them
+amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two
+always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up
+as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no
+one should venture upon Emerson. If he had seen the lecturer's smile
+as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact
+unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found
+a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never
+show him.
+
+The Essay on "Illusions" has little which we have not met with, or shall
+not find repeating itself in the Poems.
+
+During this period Emerson contributed many articles in prose and
+verse to the "Atlantic Monthly," and several to "The Dial," a second
+periodical of that name published in Cincinnati. Some of these have
+been, or will be, elsewhere referred to.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of Abraham Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus."
+
+
+The "Boston Hymn" was read by Emerson in the Music Hall, on the first
+day of January, 1863. It is a rough piece of verse, but noble from
+beginning to end. One verse of it, beginning "Pay ransom to the owner,"
+has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it:--
+
+  "I cause from every creature
+    His proper good to flow:
+  As much as he is and doeth
+    So much shall he bestow.
+
+  "But laying hands on another
+    To coin his labor and sweat,
+  He goes in pawn to his victim
+    For eternal years in debt.
+
+  "To-day unbind the captive,
+    So only are ye unbound:
+  Lift up a people from the dust,
+    Trump of their rescue, sound!"
+
+"Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is
+more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than
+the plain song of the "Boston Hymn."
+
+  "But best befriended of the God
+  He who, in evil times,
+  Warned by an inward voice,
+  Heeds not the darkness and the dread,
+  Biding by his rule and choice,
+  Feeling only the fiery thread
+  Leading over heroic ground,
+  Walled with mortal terror round,
+  To the aim which him allures,
+  And the sweet heaven his deed secures.
+  Peril around, all else appalling,
+  Cannon in front and leaden rain
+  Him duly through the clarion calling
+  To the van called not in vain."
+
+It is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they
+were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand
+years:--
+
+  "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+  So near is God to man,
+  When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
+  The youth replies, _I can_."
+
+"Saadi" was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1864, "My Garden" in
+1866, "Terminus" in 1867. In the same year these last poems with many
+others were collected in a small volume, entitled "May-Day, and
+Other Pieces." The general headings of these poems are as follows:
+May-Day.--The Adirondacs.--Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces.--Nature
+and Life.--Elements.--Quatrains.--Translations.--Some of these poems,
+which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous
+pages. "The Adirondacs" is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared
+for its poetical character with "May-Day," one passage from which,
+beginning,
+
+  "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. In this volume will be found
+"Brahma," "Days," and others which are well known to all readers of
+poetry.
+
+Emerson's delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and
+sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham
+Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the
+homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth and delicacy:--
+
+    "Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor;
+    the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four
+    years,--four years of battle-days,--his endurance, his fertility
+    of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found
+    wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his
+    fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the
+    centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American
+    people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow
+    with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true
+    representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of
+    his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart,
+    the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue."
+
+In his "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association,"
+Emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and
+sufficiently "transcendental" way: intelligibly for those who wish to
+understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept
+the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, "The Sphinx."
+
+    --"As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within
+    his own mind,--is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds
+    with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to
+    face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the
+    power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste,
+    all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a
+    religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the
+    private action."
+
+Nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the
+suggestive remark,--
+
+    --"What I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by
+    which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true
+    Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure
+    benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of
+    active duty, that worship finds expression.--The interests that grow
+    out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the
+    old eternal duties."
+
+    In a later address before the same association, Emerson says:--
+    "I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous
+    dispensation,--certainly not to the _doctrine_ of Christianity.--If
+    you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a
+    thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of
+    nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on
+    the teachings."
+
+The "Progress of Culture" was delivered as a Phi Beta Kappa oration just
+thirty years after his first address before the same society. It is very
+instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a
+whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in
+1867, at the age of sixty-four. Both are hopeful, but the second is more
+sanguine than the first. He recounts what he considers the recent gains
+of the reforming movement:--
+
+    "Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or
+    adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an
+    honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil
+    status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she
+    controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her
+    share in power."
+
+He enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of
+intelligence,--"All, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary,
+teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and
+superseding kings."
+
+He repeats some of his fundamental formulae.
+
+    "The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral
+    sentiment.
+
+    "Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any
+    material force, that thoughts rule the world.
+
+    "Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter."
+
+And most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in
+1867,--especially in the view of future possibilities. "Bad kings and
+governors help us, if only they are bad enough." _Non tali auxilio_, we
+exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these
+concluding words: "I read the promise of better times and of greater
+men."
+
+In the year 1866, Emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as
+the "grand climacteric." In that year Harvard University conferred upon
+him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest honor in its gift.
+
+In that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips,
+he met his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, at the Brevoort House, in New
+York. Then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in his second volume, under the
+title "Terminus." This was the first time that Dr. Emerson recognized
+the fact that his father felt himself growing old. The thought, which
+must have been long shaping itself in the father's mind, had been so far
+from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly
+avowed. The poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes
+about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. The
+reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a
+particular purpose, but here is the whole poem:--
+
+  TERMINUS.
+
+  It is time to be old,
+  To take in sail:--
+  The god of bounds,
+  Who sets to seas a shore,
+  Came to me in his fatal rounds,
+  And said: "No more!
+  No farther shoot
+  Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
+  Fancy departs: no more invent;
+  Contract thy firmament
+  To compass of a tent.
+  There's not enough for this and that,
+  Make thy option which of two;
+  Economize the failing river,
+  Not the less revere the Giver,
+  Leave the many and hold the few,
+  Timely wise accept the terms,
+  Soften the fall with wary foot;
+  A little while
+  Still plan and smile,
+  And,--fault of novel germs,--
+  Mature the unfallen fruit.
+  Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
+  Bad husbands of their fires,
+  Who when they gave thee breath,
+  Failed to bequeath
+  The needful sinew stark as once,
+  The baresark marrow to thy bones,
+  But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
+  Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
+  Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
+  Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.
+
+  "As the bird trims her to the gale
+  I trim myself to the storm of time,
+  I man the rudder, reef the sail,
+  Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
+  'Lowly faithful, banish fear,
+  Right onward drive unharmed;
+  The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
+  And every wave is charmed.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication
+of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return.
+
+
+During three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a
+series of Lectures at Harvard University on the "Natural History of the
+Intellect." These Lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a
+great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or
+reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an
+extract from Prof. Thayer's "Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." He is
+there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics.
+It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms
+employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words "subject and
+object" with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin
+shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions.
+Once he ventures on the _not me_, but in the main he uses plain English
+handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ.
+
+"Society and Solitude" was published in 1870. The first Essay in the
+volume bears the same name as the volume itself.
+
+In this first Essay Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims
+of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of
+solitude. We are driven "as with whips into the desert." But there is
+danger in this seclusion. "Now and then a man exquisitely made can live
+alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.--Here again, as
+so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and
+our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.--The
+conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our
+sympathy."
+
+The Essay on "Civilization" is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a
+very agreeable way. The framed or stone-house in place of the cave or
+the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting,
+and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful
+combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the
+press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with
+special brilliancy:--
+
+    "Right position of woman in the State is another index.--Place the
+    sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality
+    gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that
+    is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and
+    learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that I have
+    thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of
+    good women."
+
+My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader
+will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:--
+
+    "The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and
+    compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart,
+    longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven
+    by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from
+    home,--
+
+  "'The pulses of her iron heart
+      Go beating through the storm.'"
+
+I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be
+an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "The
+Steamboat:"
+
+  "The beating of her restless heart
+    Still sounding through the storm."
+
+It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer
+lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his
+verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's
+special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that
+
+    'tis better to be quoted wrong
+  Than to be quoted not at all.
+
+This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy
+to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How
+could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly
+announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that
+he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having
+any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and
+doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:--
+
+    "Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,
+    to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods
+    themselves."--
+
+    "'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that
+    the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON
+    TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and
+    bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find
+    all their teams going the other way,--Charles's Wain, Great Bear,
+    Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those
+    interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love,
+    freedom, knowledge, utility."--
+
+Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the
+same constellation; the _Dipper_ is what our people often call it, and
+the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the
+North Star.
+
+I find in the Essay on "Art" many of the thoughts with which we are
+familiar in Emerson's poem, "The Problem." It will be enough to cite
+these passages:--
+
+    "We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in
+    hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had
+    a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in
+    the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the
+    artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work
+    of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.--
+
+    --"The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the
+    tragedies of Aeschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals,
+    the plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but
+    in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.--
+
+    --"The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest
+    and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid
+    every stone.--
+
+    "Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake,
+    whose melody is sweeter than he knows."
+
+The discourse on "Eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial,
+than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its
+general purport:--
+
+    "Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards,
+    it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,
+    speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it
+    must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.--
+
+    "He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion
+    must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on
+    character and insight.--
+
+    --"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.--
+
+    --"Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their
+    integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they
+    toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a
+    reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or
+    morals, as above the whole world and themselves also."
+
+"Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it
+sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of
+the goblet which holds some tonic draught:--
+
+    "Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in
+    his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the
+    soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham
+    and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations
+    when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,
+    the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to
+    swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful
+    and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that
+    all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more
+    charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching
+    than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--All day,
+    between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,
+    sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he
+    fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before
+    him."
+
+Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about
+"Farming." Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an
+address before the "Middlesex Agricultural Society," and printed in the
+"Transactions" of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and
+the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some
+general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:--
+
+    "The farmer's office is precise and important, but you must not try
+    to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to
+    fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.--This hard work will
+    always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor
+    by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men
+    of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and
+    timely."
+
+Emerson's chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are
+correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his
+imaginative presentation. He tells the commonest facts so as to make
+them almost a surprise:--
+
+    "By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have
+    found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting
+    the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that
+    Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises
+    to pay a better rent than all the superstructure."
+
+In "Works and Days" there is much good reading, but I will call
+attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest
+of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson's assertions and
+predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of
+"the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables
+a man to change his blood as often as his linen!" And once more,
+
+"We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the
+air."
+
+Possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on
+wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles.
+
+The other point I have marked is that we find in this Essay a prose
+version of the fine poem, printed in "May-Day" under the title "Days." I
+shall refer to this more particularly hereafter.
+
+It is wronging the Essay on "Books" to make extracts from it. It is all
+an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the
+public libraries. If I commit the wrong I have spoken of, it is under
+protest against myself. Every word of this Essay deserves careful
+reading. But here are a few sentences I have selected for the reader's
+consideration:--
+
+    "There are books; and it is practicable to read them because they
+    are so few.--
+
+    "I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go
+    there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is
+    already within the four walls of my study at home.--
+
+    "The three practical rules which I have to offer are, 1. Never read
+    any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books.
+    3. Never read any but what you like, or, in Shakspeare's phrase,--
+
+      "'No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en;
+        In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.'"
+
+Emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his Essay on
+"Clubs," but nothing very notable on the special subject of the Essay.
+Perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the
+"Saturday Club," of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself
+around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. But he
+was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of
+talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and
+remembered more. He was hardly what Dr. Johnson would have called a
+"clubable" man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he
+would never have come from Concord so regularly to attend them. He gives
+two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which I have
+been speaking:--
+
+    "I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in
+    their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to
+    an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion
+    shall have its just influence on public questions of education and
+    politics."
+
+    "A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means
+    of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage."
+
+I do not think "public questions of education and politics" were very
+prominent at the social meetings of the "Saturday Club," but "worthy
+foreigners," and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the
+meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and
+callings.
+
+All that Emerson has to say about "Courage" is worth listening to, for
+he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more
+cowards than are found in the battle-field. He spoke his convictions
+fearlessly; he carried the spear of Ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate
+save that which protects him
+
+  "Whose armor is his honest thought,
+    And simple truth his utmost skill."
+
+He mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of
+mankind: 1. Disinterestedness; 2. Practical Power; 3. Courage. "I need
+not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank.
+They forgive everything to it. And any man who puts his life in peril in
+a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men."--There are
+good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this Essay or Lecture,
+which closes with the spirited ballad of "George Nidiver," written "by a
+lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known."
+
+Men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its
+subject, like the one now before me, "Success." Emerson complains of the
+same things in America which Carlyle groaned over in England:--
+
+    "We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing
+    advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is
+    lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.--
+
+    "Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to
+    all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for
+    success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take
+    Michael Angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something
+    of worth and value.'"
+
+Reading about "Success" is after all very much like reading in old books
+of alchemy. "How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and
+treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and
+the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate
+directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into
+Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. "Success" in its
+vulgar sense,--the gaining of money and position,--is not to be reached
+by following the rules of an instructor. Our "self-made men," who govern
+the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by
+adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were
+placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "Poor Richard," or any
+other moralist or economist.--For such as these is meant the cheap
+cynical saying quoted by Emerson, "_Rien ne rƩussit mieux que le
+succĆØs_."
+
+But this is not the aim and end of Emerson's teaching:--
+
+    "I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition
+    in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public
+    opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one
+    feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly,
+    and the other hospitality of mind."
+
+And so, though there is no alchemy in this Lecture, it is profitable
+reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character,
+the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the
+market-place.
+
+The Essay on "Old Age" has a special value from its containing two
+personal reminiscences: one of the venerable Josiah Quincy, a brief
+mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825,
+Emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-President John Adams,
+soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is enough to
+allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all.
+
+But many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. He
+recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has
+weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so
+that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling
+that he has found expression,--that his condition, in particular and in
+general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing
+his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future:--
+
+    "When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well
+    spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works
+    that belong to these. But the central wisdom which was old in
+    infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions,
+    leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard
+    that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that
+    whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is
+    announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles
+    our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the
+    inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving
+    skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the
+    inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment."
+
+Other literary labors of Emerson during this period were the
+Introduction to "Plutarch's Morals" in 1870, and a Preface to William
+Ellery Channing's Poem, "The Wanderer," in 1871. He made a speech at
+Howard University, Washington, in 1872.
+
+In the year 1871 Emerson made a visit to California with a very pleasant
+company, concerning which Mr. John M. Forbes, one of whose sons married
+Emerson's daughter Edith, writes to me as follows. Professor James B.
+Thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an
+account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow Mr. Forbes's
+letter:--
+
+    BOSTON, February 6, 1884.
+
+    MY DEAR DR.,--What little I can give will be of a very rambling
+    character.
+
+    One of the first memories of Emerson which comes up is my meeting
+    him on the steamboat at returning from Detroit East. I persuaded him
+    to stop over at Niagara, which he had never seen. We took a carriage
+    and drove around the circuit. It was in early summer, perhaps in
+    1848 or 1849. When we came to Table Rock on the British side, our
+    driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage.
+    We passed on by rail, and the next day's papers brought us the
+    telegraphic news that Table Rock had fallen over; perhaps we were
+    among the last persons on it!
+
+    About 1871 I made up a party for California, including Mr. Emerson,
+    his daughter Edith, and a number of gay young people. We drove with
+    B----, the famous Vermont coachman, up to the Geysers, and then made
+    the journey to the Yosemite Valley by wagon and on horseback. I wish
+    I could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at
+    this time. With the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes
+    drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently
+    indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes
+    of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. I especially
+    remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his
+    reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse's mouth,
+    without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding
+    Pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was
+    he, at the moment, of his surroundings.
+
+    In San Francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers,
+    in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were
+    deposited the stupefied Mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of
+    humanity to be found in the world. The contrast between them and
+    the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all
+    beholders.
+
+    When we reached Salt Lake City on our way home he made a point of
+    calling on Brigham Young, then at the summit of his power. The
+    Prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of
+    hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. He did not seem
+    to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so
+    doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast
+    between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces.
+
+    I regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and
+    other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of Professor
+    J.B. Thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you
+    some notes that would be valuable.
+
+    Perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is
+    his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at Naushon, no
+    doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost
+    none of their value from being transferred to his pages. Next to
+    his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable
+    recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs
+    which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor
+    which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which
+    you and I know he possessed in a marked degree.
+
+    Yours always,
+
+    J.M. FORBES.
+
+Professor James B. Thayer's little book, "A Western Journey with Mr.
+Emerson," is a very entertaining account of the same trip concerning
+which Mr. Forbes wrote the letter just given. Professor Thayer kindly
+read many of his notes to me before his account was published, and
+allows me to make such use of the book as I see fit. Such liberty must
+not be abused, and I will content myself with a few passages in which
+Emerson has a part. No extract will interest the reader more than the
+following:--
+
+    "'How _can_ Mr. Emerson,' said one of the younger members of the
+    party to me that day, 'be so agreeable, all the time, without
+    getting tired!' It was the _naive_ expression of what we all had
+    felt. There was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was
+    always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and
+    there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom
+    he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own
+    estimation. One thing particularly impressed me,--the sense that he
+    seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It
+    was the behavior of one who really _believed_ in an immortal life,
+    and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and
+    grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they
+    were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual
+    charm of our gracious friend. Years afterwards, on that memorable
+    day of his funeral at Concord, I found that a sentence from his own
+    Essay on Immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself
+    all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power:
+    'Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of
+    eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and Nature also, and gave
+    grandeur to the passing hour.'"
+
+This extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the
+same subject.
+
+    "The next evening, Sunday, the twenty-third, Mr. Emerson read his
+    address on 'Immortality,' at Dr. Stebbins's church. It was the first
+    time that he had spoken on the Western coast; never did he speak
+    better. It was, in the main, the same noble Essay that has since
+    been printed.
+
+    "At breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the 'Alta
+    California.' It gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it
+    warmly, and closed with the following observations: 'All left the
+    church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative
+    genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the
+    English language had contributed to that end.'"
+
+The story used to be told that after the Reverend Horace Holley had
+delivered a prayer on some public occasion, Major Ben. Russell, of ruddy
+face and ruffled shirt memory, Editor of "The Columbian Centinel,"
+spoke of it in his paper the next day as "the most eloquent prayer ever
+addressed to a Boston audience."
+
+The "Alta California's" "elegant tribute" is not quite up to this
+rhetorical altitude.
+
+    "'The minister,' said he, 'is in no danger of losing his position;
+    he represents the moral sense and the humanities.' He spoke of his
+    own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that 'some one had
+    lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the
+    name of Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty
+    about it. When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a
+    Republican, he welcomed it. It did not bind him to what he did
+    not like. What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of
+    negation?'"
+
+    "I made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent
+    course of lectures at Cambridge, 'The Natural History of the
+    Intellect.' This opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas!
+    I could recall but little of it,--little more than the mere hintings
+    of what he said. He cared very little for metaphysics. But he
+    thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own
+    mind,--about memory, for example. These he had set down from time
+    to time. As for making any methodical history, he did not undertake
+    it."
+
+Emerson met Brigham Young at Salt Lake City, as has been mentioned, but
+neither seems to have made much impression upon the other. Emerson spoke
+of the Mormons. Some one had said, "They impress the common people,
+through their imagination, by Bible-names and imagery." "Yes," he said,
+"it is an after-clap of Puritanism. But one would think that after this
+Father Abraham could go no further."
+
+The charm of Boswell's Life of Johnson is that it not merely records
+his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser
+peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and
+shades to a portrait on canvas. We are much obliged to Professor Thayer
+therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been
+good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take
+leave of his agreeable little volume:--
+
+    "At breakfast we had, among other things, pie. This article at
+    breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson's weaknesses. A pie stood before
+    him now. He offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and
+    then one or two others, who also declined; and then Mr.----; he too
+    declined. 'But Mr.----!' Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous
+    emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting
+    the entire weight of his character into his manner,--'but Mr.----,
+    _what is pie for_?'"
+
+A near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with Emerson, and
+when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very
+desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace. Presently
+he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in
+the other,--such a wedge! She could hardly have been more dismayed
+if one of Caesar's _cunei_, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge
+against her.
+
+Yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good
+creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees. In
+semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate
+stomachs. But here was Emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never,
+so far as I remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other
+side, was Carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with
+indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness
+habitually centred beneath his diaphragm.
+
+Like his friend Carlyle and like Tennyson, Emerson had a liking for a
+whiff of tobacco-smoke:--
+
+    "When alone," he said, "he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar. But
+    in company it was singular to see how different it was. To one who
+    found it difficult to meet people, as he did, the effect of a cigar
+    was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as silent as he likes, and
+    yet be good company. And so Hawthorne used to say that he found it.
+    On this journey Mr. Emerson generally smoked a single cigar after
+    our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both. This
+    was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with
+    him at home."
+
+Professor Thayer adds in a note:--
+
+    "Like Milton, Mr. Emerson 'was extraordinary temperate in his Diet,'
+    and he used even less tobacco. Milton's quiet day seems to have
+    closed regularly with a pipe; he 'supped,' we are told, 'upon ...
+    some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water
+    went to bed.'"
+
+As Emerson's name has been connected with that of Milton in its nobler
+aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like Milton, indulging in
+this semi-philosophical luxury.
+
+One morning in July, 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson woke to find their room
+filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the
+room over them. The alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did
+their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was
+destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to Emerson,
+including his father's sermons. Emerson got wet and chilled, and it
+seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory
+which came over his declining years.
+
+His kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve
+his temporary needs. A study was made ready for him in the old Court
+House, and the "Old Manse," which had sheltered his grandfather, and
+others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant.
+
+On the 15th of October he spoke at a dinner given in New York in honor
+of James Anthony Froude, the historian, and in the course of this same
+month he set out on his third visit to Europe, accompanied by his
+daughter Ellen. We have little to record of this visit, which was
+suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted
+for him. He went to Egypt, but so far as I have learned the Sphinx had
+no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself
+upon the mysterious and dream-compelling Nile it may be suspected that
+the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision,--that,
+as to his Humble-bee,
+
+  "All was picture as he passed."
+
+But while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him. The
+sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound. It did not
+confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement
+organized itself almost without effort. If any such had been needed, the
+attached friend whose name is appended to the Address to the Subscribers
+to the Fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house would have been as
+energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring
+the reprint of "Sartor Resartus." I have his kind permission to publish
+the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily
+carried out.
+
+    _To the Subscribers to the Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson's
+    House, after the Fire of July_ 24, 1872:
+
+    The death of Mr. Emerson has removed any objection which may have
+    before existed to the printing of the following correspondence. I
+    have now caused this to be done, that each subscriber may have the
+    satisfaction of possessing a copy of the touching and affectionate
+    letters in which he expressed his delight in this, to him, most
+    unexpected demonstration of personal regard and attachment, in the
+    offer to restore for him his ruined home.
+
+    No enterprise of the kind was ever more fortunate and successful in
+    its purpose and in its results. The prompt and cordial response to
+    the proposed subscription was most gratifying. No contribution was
+    solicited from any one. The simple suggestion to a few friends of
+    Mr. Emerson that an opportunity was now offered to be of service
+    to him was all that was needed. From the first day on which it was
+    made, the day after the fire, letters began to come in, with cheques
+    for large and small amounts, so that in less than three weeks I
+    was enabled to send to Judge Hoar the sum named in his letter as
+    received by him on the 13th of August, and presented by him to Mr.
+    Emerson the next morning, at the Old Manse, with fitting words.
+
+    Other subscriptions were afterwards received, increasing the amount
+    on my book to eleven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. A part
+    of this was handed directly to the builder at Concord. The balance
+    was sent to Mr. Emerson October 7, and acknowledged by him in his
+    letter of October 8, 1872.
+
+    All the friends of Mr. Emerson who knew of the plan which was
+    proposed to rebuild his house, seemed to feel that it was a
+    privilege to be allowed to express in this way the love and
+    veneration with which he was regarded, and the deep debt of
+    gratitude which they owed to him, and there is no doubt that a much
+    larger amount would have been readily and gladly offered, if it had
+    been required, for the object in view.
+
+    Those who have had the happiness to join in this friendly
+    "conspiracy" may well take pleasure in the thought that what they
+    have done has had the effect to lighten the load of care and anxiety
+    which the calamity of the fire brought with it to Mr. Emerson, and
+    thus perhaps to prolong for some precious years the serene and noble
+    life that was so dear to all of us.
+
+    My thanks are due to the friends who have made me the bearer of this
+    message of good-will.
+
+    LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+    BOSTON, May 8, 1882.
+
+
+    BOSTON, August 13, 1872.
+
+    DEAR MR. EMERSON:
+
+    It seems to have been the spontaneous desire of your friends, on
+    hearing of the burning of your house, to be allowed the pleasure of
+    rebuilding it.
+
+    A few of them have united for this object, and now request your
+    acceptance of the amount which I have to-day deposited to your order
+    at the Concord Bank, through the kindness of our friend, Judge Hoar.
+    They trust that you will receive it as an expression of sincere
+    regard and affection from friends, who will, one and all, esteem it
+    a great privilege to be permitted to assist in the restoration of
+    your home.
+
+    And if, in their eagerness to participate in so grateful a work,
+    they may have exceeded the estimate of your architect as to what
+    is required for that purpose, they beg that you will devote the
+    remainder to such other objects as may be most convenient to you.
+
+    Very sincerely yours,
+
+    LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+
+    CONCORD, August 14, 1872.
+
+    DR. LE B. RUSSELL:
+
+    _Dear Sir_,--I received your letters, with the check for ten
+    thousand dollars inclosed, from Mr. Barrett last evening. This
+    morning I deposited it to Mr. Emerson's credit in the Concord
+    National Bank, and took a bank book for him, with his little balance
+    entered at the top, and this following, and carried it to him with
+    your letter. I told him, by way of prelude, that some of his friends
+    had made him treasurer of an association who wished him to go to
+    England and examine Warwick Castle and other noted houses that
+    had been recently injured by fire, in order to get the best ideas
+    possible for restoration, and then to apply them to a house which
+    the association was formed to restore in this neighborhood.
+
+    When he understood the thing and had read your letter, he seemed
+    very deeply moved. He said that he had been allowed so far in life
+    to stand on his own feet, and that he hardly knew what to say,--that
+    the kindness of his friends was very great. I said what I thought
+    was best in reply, and told him that this was the spontaneous act of
+    friends, who wished the privilege of expressing in this way their
+    respect and affection, and was done only by those who thought it a
+    privilege to do so. I mentioned Hillard as you desired, and also
+    Mrs. Tappan, who, it seems, had written to him and offered any
+    assistance he might need, to the extent of five thousand dollars,
+    personally.
+
+    I think it is all right, but he said he must see the list of
+    contributors, and would then say what he had to say about it. He
+    told me that Mr. F.C. Lowell, who was his classmate and old friend,
+    Mr. Bangs, Mrs. Gurney, and a few other friends, had already sent
+    him five thousand dollars, which he seemed to think was as much as
+    he could bear. This makes the whole a very gratifying result, and
+    perhaps explains the absence of some names on your book.
+
+    I am glad that Mr. Emerson, who is feeble and ill, can learn what a
+    debt of obligation his friends feel to him, and thank you heartily
+    for what you have done about it. Very truly yours,
+
+    E.R. HOAR.
+
+
+    CONCORD, August 16, 1872.
+
+    MY DEAR LE BARON:
+
+    I have wondered and melted over your letter and its accompaniments
+    till it is high time that I should reply to it, if I can. My
+    misfortunes, as I have lived along so far in this world, have been
+    so few that I have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of
+    good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has
+    come to me. And this late calamity, however rude and devastating,
+    soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins,
+    so that I can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment
+    with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished
+    me. But I cannot read your letter or think of its message without
+    delight, that my companions and friends bear me so noble a
+    good-will, nor without some new aspirations in the old heart toward
+    a better deserving. Judge Hoar has, up to this time, withheld from
+    me the names of my benefactors, but you may be sure that I shall not
+    rest till I have learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at
+    night and at morning.
+
+    Your affectionate friend and debtor,
+
+    R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+    DR. LE BARON RUSSELL
+
+    CONCORD, October 8, 1872.
+
+    MY DEAR DOCTOR LE BARON:
+
+    I received last night your two notes, and the cheque, enclosed in
+    one of them, for one thousand and twenty dollars.
+
+    Are my friends bent on killing me with kindness? No, you will say,
+    but to make me live longer. I thought myself sufficiently loaded
+    with benefits already, and you add more and more. It appears that
+    you all will rebuild my house and rejuvenate me by sending me in my
+    old days abroad on a young man's excursion.
+
+    I am a lover of men, but this recent wonderful experience of their
+    tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts day by day. Now that
+    I have all or almost all the names of the men and women who have
+    conspired in this kindness to me (some of whom I have never
+    personally known), I please myself with the thought of meeting each
+    and asking, Why have we not met before? Why have you not told me
+    that we thought alike? Life is not so long, nor sympathy of thought
+    so common, that we can spare the society of those with whom we best
+    agree. Well, 'tis probably my own fault by sticking ever to my
+    solitude. Perhaps it is not too late to learn of these friends a
+    better lesson.
+
+    Thank them for me whenever you meet them, and say to them that I am
+    not wood or stone, if I have not yet trusted myself so far as to go
+    to each one of them directly.
+
+    My wife insists that I shall also send her acknowledgments to them
+    and you.
+
+    Yours and theirs affectionately,
+
+    R.W. EMERSON.
+
+    DR. LE BARON KUSSELL.
+
+
+The following are the names of the subscribers to the fund for
+rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house:--
+
+Mrs. Anne S. Hooper.
+Miss Alice S. Hooper.
+Mrs. Caroline Tappan.
+Miss Ellen S. Tappan.
+Miss Mary A. Tappan.
+Mr. T.G. Appleton.
+Mrs. Henry Edwards.
+Miss Susan E. Dorr.
+Misses Wigglesworth.
+Mr. Edward Wigglesworth.
+Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.
+Mrs. Sarah S. Russell.
+Friends in New York and Philadelphia, through Mr. Williams.
+Mr. William Whiting.
+Mr. Frederick Beck.
+Mr. H.P. Kidder.
+Mrs. Abel Adams.
+Mrs. George Faulkner.
+Hon. E.R. Hoar.
+Mr. James B. Thayer.
+Mr. John M. Forbes.
+Mr. James H. Beal.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lodge.
+Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge.
+Mr. H.H. Hunnewell.
+Mrs. S. Cabot.
+Mr. James A. Dupee.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lowell.
+Mrs. M.F. Sayles.
+Miss Helen L. Appleton.
+J.R. Osgood & Co.
+Mr. Richard Soule.
+Mr. Francis Geo. Shaw.
+Dr. R.W. Hooper.
+Mr. William P. Mason.
+Mr. William Gray.
+Mr. Sam'l G. Ward.
+Mr. J.I. Bowditch.
+Mr. Geo. C. Ward.
+Mrs. Luicia J. Briggs.
+Mr. John E. Williams.
+Dr. Le Baron Russell.
+
+In May, 1873, Emerson returned to Concord. His friends and
+fellow-citizens received him with every token of affection and
+reverence. A set of signals was arranged to announce his arrival.
+Carriages were in readiness for him and his family, a band greeted him
+with music, and passing under a triumphal arch, he was driven to his
+renewed old home amidst the welcomes and the blessings of his loving and
+admiring friends and neighbors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and
+Originality.--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--
+Greatness.--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems.
+
+
+In December, 1874, Emerson published "Parnassus," a Collection of Poems
+by British and American authors. Many readers may like to see his
+subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together.
+They are as follows: "Nature."--"Human Life."--"Intellectual."
+--"Contemplation."--"Moral and Religious."--"Heroic."--"Personal."
+--"Pictures."--"Narrative Poems and Ballads."--"Songs."--"Dirges and
+Pathetic Poems."--"Comic and Humorous."--"Poetry of Terror."--"Oracles
+and Counsels."
+
+I have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of Mr. George Willis
+Cooke's "Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy," that
+I am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his
+excellent work.
+
+"This collection," he says,
+
+    "was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying
+    into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. Many
+    of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on
+    the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost
+    everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet
+    Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious
+    poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections.
+    With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional
+    poems which have attracted devout souls.--His poetical sympathies
+    are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the
+    seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any
+    other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. The
+    names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently
+    appear. Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to
+    Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make
+    up the list of favorites. Many little known pieces are included, and
+    some whose merit is other than poetical.--This selection of poems
+    is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. I
+    not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and
+    introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general
+    reader. The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of
+    the poems and poets appearing in these selections."
+
+I will only add to Mr. Cooke's criticism these two remarks: First, that
+I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look
+for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies
+at least, there was no paged index where each author's pieces were
+collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss
+of time and patience, under various heads, "imitating the careful search
+that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris." The other remark is that
+each one of Emerson's American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted
+would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of
+his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some
+specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen
+fit to indulge us.
+
+In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among
+the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector. He
+received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was
+elected. He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling:--
+
+    "I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen
+    on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in
+    the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my
+    too partial advocate."
+
+Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to "Letters and Social Aims,"
+that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the
+collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the
+illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of
+mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case
+have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. Sentences, even
+whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what
+even he would have tolerated:--
+
+    "There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his
+    full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and
+    arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely
+    to the matter."
+
+This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just
+enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is
+that entitled "Poetry and Imagination." I have room for little more than
+the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these
+it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are "Introductory;"
+"Poetry;" "Imagination;" "Veracity;" "Creation;" "Melody, Rhythm, Form;"
+"Bards and Trouveurs;" "Morals;" "Transcendency." Many thoughts with
+which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this
+Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his
+leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh
+in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score of pointed
+sayings, striking images, large generalizations. Some of these we find
+repeated in his verse. Thus:--
+
+    "Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and
+    makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a
+    mortal man!"
+
+And so in the well remembered lines of "The Problem":--
+
+  "Himself from God he could not free."
+
+"He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his thought made him,
+and made the sun and stars."
+
+  "Art might obey but not surpass.
+  The passive Master lent his hand
+  To the vast soul that o'er him planned."
+
+Hope is at the bottom of every Essay of Emerson's as it was at the
+bottom of Pandora's box:--
+
+    "I never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the
+    immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology,
+    symbols, religion of our own.
+
+    --"Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every
+    fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song."
+
+Under the title "Social Aims" he gives some wise counsel concerning
+manners and conversation. One of these precepts will serve as a
+specimen--if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear:--
+
+    "Shun the negative side. Never worry people with; your contritions,
+    nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness;
+    even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of
+    unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it."
+
+We have had one Essay on "Eloquence" already. One extract from this new
+discourse on the same subject must serve our turn:--
+
+    "These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain
+    speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but
+    we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your
+    fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes
+    of sincerity. Speak what you know and believe; and are personally in
+    it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to_
+    _translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the
+    person to whom you speak_."
+
+The italics are Emerson's.
+
+If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth
+before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and
+strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson's
+Essay on "Resources":--
+
+    "A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching
+    pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds,
+    and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than
+    sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being
+    odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives;
+    if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what
+    man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic;
+    that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man
+    is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to
+    nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has
+    experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put into genial and
+    working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and
+    gratitude to the Cause of Causes."
+
+The Essay or Lecture on "The Comic" may have formed a part of a series
+he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. Two or three sayings
+in it will show his view sufficiently:--
+
+    "The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or
+    well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to
+    be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of
+    performance.
+
+    "If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect
+    between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why
+    we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest
+    than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by
+    stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic
+    seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It
+    appears to be an essential element in a fine character.--A rogue
+    alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost,
+    his fellow-men can do little for him."
+
+These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by
+well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very
+recent date.
+
+"Quotation and Originality" furnishes the key to Emerson's workshop. He
+believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not
+in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king
+borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and
+superscription.
+
+    "All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every
+    moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two
+    strands.--We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences,
+    religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses,
+    tables and chairs by imitation.--
+
+    "The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and
+    stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his
+    invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.
+
+    "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of
+    it."--
+
+--"The Progress of Culture," his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has
+already been mentioned.
+
+--The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating,
+is repeated and enforced in the Essay on "Greatness."
+
+    "There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree.
+    Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.--Stick to
+    your own; don't inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national
+    crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of
+    heaven for you to walk in.
+
+    "Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own,
+    differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this
+    specialty the _bias_ of each individual. And none of us will ever
+    accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens
+    to this whisper which is heard by him alone."
+
+If to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is
+concentration.--To the bias of the individual mind must be added the
+most catholic receptivity for the genius of others.
+
+    "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every
+    man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of
+    him."--
+
+    "The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded
+    the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself governed others;
+    sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his
+    cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be
+    himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it is whom we
+    seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall
+    he found."
+
+What has Emerson to tell us of "Inspiration?"
+
+    "I believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by
+    inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury.--
+
+    "How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our
+    affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of
+    these."
+
+I will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to
+reproduce his comments on each:--
+
+1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed
+sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the
+faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially
+the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude
+of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel
+in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means
+chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader.
+
+    "Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working
+    mood."
+
+What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on "Immortality"? It is
+to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation
+to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed
+in this discourse,--what does it mean? We must tack together such
+sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:--
+
+    "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction,
+    namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall
+    continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we,
+    if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so."
+
+This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the
+possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues:--
+
+    "Schiller said, 'What is so universal as death must be benefit.'"
+
+He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu
+thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror
+of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two
+skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of
+years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure
+to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in
+permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created
+things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last
+plainly:--
+
+    "Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the
+    world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma."
+
+But turn over a few pages and we may read:--
+
+    "I confess that everything connected with our personality fails.
+    Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a
+    complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We
+    have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to
+    which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The
+    soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not
+    to be good. 'If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,'
+    said one of the old saints, 'and these by any man's suffering are
+    enlarged and enthroned.'"
+
+Once more we get a dissolving view of Emerson's creed, if such a word
+applies to a statement like the following:--
+
+    --"I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are
+    better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for.
+    The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down
+    in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's 'Ode' is the best modern
+    essay on the subject."
+
+Wordsworth's "Ode" is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more?
+The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an
+early period of Emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge
+into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The
+eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs
+to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of
+reason.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the "Fight at
+the Bridge," Emerson delivered a short Address at the unveiling of the
+statue of "The Minute-Man," erected at the place of the conflict, to
+commemorate the event. This is the last Address he ever wrote, though he
+delivered one or more after this date. From the manuscript which lies
+before me I extract a single passage:--
+
+    "In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England,
+    but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had
+    arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play
+    its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine
+    Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the
+    Colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England
+    was so dear to us that the Colonies could only be absolutely
+    disunited by violence from England, and only one man could compel
+    the resort to violence. Parliament wavered, Lord North wavered, all
+    the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he
+    was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent,
+    America was instantly united, and the Nation born."
+
+There is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written
+at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary
+labors.
+
+Emerson's collected "Poems" constitute the ninth volume of the recent
+collected edition of his works. They will be considered in a following
+chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies."
+
+
+The decline of Emerson's working faculties went on gently and gradually,
+but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. His faithful daughter,
+Ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding
+his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an
+echo before the voice whose words it was to shape for him when his mind
+faltered and needed a momentary impulse.
+
+With her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time
+to read a paper before a select audience. Thus, March 30, 1878, he
+delivered a Lecture in the Old South Church,--"Fortune of the Republic."
+On the 5th of May, 1879, he read a Lecture in the Chapel of Divinity
+College, Harvard University,--"The Preacher." In 1881 he read a paper on
+Carlyle before the Massachusetts Historical Society.--He also published
+a paper in the "North American Review," in 1878,--"The Sovereignty of
+Ethics," and one on "Superlatives," in "The Century" for February, 1882.
+
+But in these years he was writing little or nothing. All these papers
+were taken from among his manuscripts of different dates. The same
+thing is true of the volumes published since his death; they were
+only compilations from his stores of unpublished matter, and their
+arrangement was the work of Mr. Emerson's friend and literary executor,
+Mr. Cabot. These volumes cannot be considered as belonging to any single
+period of his literary life.
+
+Mr. Cabot prefixes to the tenth volume of Emerson's collected works,
+which bears the title, "Lectures and Biographical Sketches," the
+following:--
+
+"NOTE.
+
+"Of the pieces included in this volume the following, namely, those from
+'The Dial,' 'Character,' 'Plutarch,' and the biographical sketches of
+Dr. Ripley, of Mr. Hoar, and of Henry Thoreau, were printed by Mr.
+Emerson before I took any part in the arrangement of his papers. The
+rest, except the sketch of Miss Mary Emerson, I got ready for his use
+in readings to his friends, or to a limited public. He had given up
+the regular practice of lecturing, but would sometimes, upon special
+request, read a paper that had been prepared for him from his
+manuscripts, in the manner described in the Preface to 'Letters and
+Social Aims,'--some former lecture serving as a nucleus for the new.
+Some of these papers he afterwards allowed to be printed; others,
+namely, 'Aristocracy,' 'Education,' 'The Man of Letters,' 'The Scholar,'
+'Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,' 'Mary Moody
+Emerson,' are now published for the first time."
+
+Some of these papers I have already had occasion to refer to. From
+several of the others I will make one or two extracts,--a difficult
+task, so closely are the thoughts packed together.
+
+From "Demonology":--
+
+    "I say to the table-rappers
+
+                                   'I will believe
+      Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,'
+      And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!"
+
+    "Meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the
+    supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away
+    all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments
+    which haunt us. Willingly I too say Hail! to the unknown, awful
+    powers which transcend the ken of the understanding."
+
+I will not quote anything from the Essay called "Aristocracy." But let
+him who wishes to know what the word means to an American whose life has
+come from New England soil, whose ancestors have breathed New England
+air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation
+of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation.
+
+"Perpetual Forces" is one of those prose poems,--of his earlier epoch,
+I have no doubt,--in which he plays with the facts of science with
+singular grace and freedom.
+
+What man could speak more fitly, with more authority of "Character,"
+than Emerson? When he says, "If all things are taken away, I have
+still all things in my relation to the Eternal," we feel that such an
+utterance is as natural to his pure spirit as breathing to the frame in
+which it was imprisoned.
+
+We have had a glimpse of Emerson as a school-master, but behind and far
+above the teaching drill-master's desk is the chair from which he speaks
+to us of "Education." Compare the short and easy method of the wise man
+of old,--"He that spareth his rod hateth his son," with this other, "Be
+the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of
+his virtue,--but no kinsman of his sin."
+
+"The Superlative" will prove light and pleasant reading after these
+graver essays. [Greek: Maedhen agan]--_ne quid nimis_,--nothing in
+excess, was his precept as to adjectives.
+
+Two sentences from "The Sovereignty of Ethics" will go far towards
+reconciling elderly readers who have not forgotten the Westminster
+Assembly's Catechism with this sweet-souled dealer in spiritual
+dynamite:--
+
+    "Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the
+    pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the
+    pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.--
+
+    "If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of
+    Platonism, or of Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more
+    truly, have not yet their own legitimate force."
+
+So, too, this from "The Preacher":--
+
+    "All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation
+    against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and
+    its use.--The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the
+    substantial benefit endures."
+
+The special interest of the Address called "The Man of Letters" is, that
+it was delivered during the war. He was no advocate for peace where
+great principles were at the bottom of the conflict:--
+
+    "War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral
+    aspects at once.--War ennobles the age.--Battle, with the sword,
+    has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and
+    West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie."
+
+"The Scholar" was delivered before two Societies at the University of
+Virginia so late as the year 1876. If I must select any of its wise
+words, I will choose the questions which he has himself italicized to
+show his sense of their importance:--
+
+    "For all men, all women, Time, your country, your condition, the
+    invisible world are the interrogators: _Who are you? What do you?
+    Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your consciousness?
+    Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any soul_?
+
+    "Can he answer these questions? Can he dispose of them? Happy if you
+    can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life!
+    Happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer
+    them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general
+    mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all
+    who know them."
+
+The Essay on "Plutarch" has a peculiar value from the fact that Emerson
+owes more to him than to any other author except Plato, who is one of
+the only two writers quoted oftener than Plutarch. _Mutato nomine_, the
+portrait which Emerson draws of the Greek moralist might stand for his
+own:--
+
+    "Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in
+    character, in institutions, in science--natural, moral, or
+    metaphysical, or in memorable sayings drew his attention and came to
+    his pen with more or less fulness of record.
+
+    "A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an
+    intellectual co-perception. Plutarch's memory is full and his
+    horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his.
+
+    "Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends
+    him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his
+    moral sentiment is always pure.--
+
+    "I do not know where to find a book--to borrow a phrase of Ben
+    Jonson's--'so rammed with life,' and this in chapters chiefly
+    ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental.--His
+    vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an
+    incident.--
+
+    "In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to
+    discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents.--'Tis all
+    Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this
+    emperor.
+
+    "It is in consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I
+    confess that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a
+    faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but
+    he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a
+    necessity for completing his studies.
+
+    "He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like
+    another Berkeley, 'Matter is itself privation.'--
+
+    "Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the
+    method. He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and
+    prefers to sit as a scholar with Plato than as a disputant.
+
+    "His natural history is that of a lover and poet, and not of a
+    physicist.
+
+    "But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature
+    and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of
+    character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to
+    the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his
+    rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the
+    soul. La Harpe said that 'Plutarch is the genius the most naturally
+    moral that ever existed.'
+
+    "Plutarch thought 'truth to be the greatest good that man can
+    receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give.'
+
+    "All his judgments are noble. He thought with Epicurus that it is
+    more delightful to do than to receive a kindness.
+
+    "Plutarch was well-born, well-conditioned--eminently social, he was
+    a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and
+    knew the high value of good conversation.--
+
+    "He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its
+    victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities
+    of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental
+    associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially
+    marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the
+    intellect by the force of morals."
+
+How much, of all this would have been recognized as just and true if it
+had been set down in an obituary notice of Emerson!
+
+I have already made use of several of the other papers contained in this
+volume, and will merely enumerate all that follow the "Plutarch." Some
+of the titles will be sure to attract the reader. They are "Historic
+Notes of Life and Letters in New England;" "The Chardon Street
+Convention;" "Ezra Ripley, D.D.;" "Mary Moody Emerson;" "Samuel Hoar;"
+"Thoreau;" "Carlyle."--
+
+Mr. Cabot prefaces the eleventh and last volume of Emerson's writings
+with the following "Note":--
+
+    "The first five pieces in this volume, and the 'Editorial Address'
+    from the 'Massachusetts Quarterly Review,' were published by Mr.
+    Emerson long ago. The speeches at the John Brown, the Walter Scott,
+    and the Free Religious Association meetings were published at the
+    time, no doubt with his consent, but without any active co-operation
+    on his part. The 'Fortune of the Republic' appeared separately in
+    1879; the rest have never been published. In none was any change
+    from the original form made by me, except in the 'Fortune of the
+    Republic,' which was made up of several lectures for the occasion
+    upon which it was read."
+
+The volume of "Miscellanies" contains no less than twenty-three pieces
+of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects. The
+five referred to as having been previously published are, "The Lord's
+Supper," the "Historical Discourse in Concord," the "Address at the
+Dedication of the Soldiers' Monument in Concord," the "Address on
+Emancipation in the British West Indies," and the Lecture or Essay on
+"War,"--all of which have been already spoken of.
+
+Next in order comes a Lecture on the "Fugitive Slave Law." Emerson says,
+"I do not often speak on public questions.--My own habitual view is to
+the well-being of scholars." But he leaves his studies to attack the
+institution of slavery, from which he says he himself has never suffered
+any inconvenience, and the "Law," which the abolitionists would always
+call the "Fugitive Slave _Bill_." Emerson had a great admiration for
+Mr. Webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the
+seventh of March, just four years before the delivery of this Lecture.
+He warns against false leadership:--
+
+    "To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all
+    foolish trust in others.--He only who is able to stand alone is
+    qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which
+    a soul exists in this world,--to be himself the counter-balance of
+    all falsehood and all wrong.--The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and
+    strong and selfish.--England maintains trade, not liberty."
+
+Cowper had said long before this:--
+
+                    "doing good,
+  Disinterested good, is not our trade."
+
+And America found that England had not learned that trade when, fifteen
+years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free
+and slave states threatened the ruin of the great Republic, and England
+forgot her Anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of "a great
+empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth."
+
+It must be remembered that Emerson had never been identified with the
+abolitionists. But an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp
+point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long:--
+
+    "The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us
+    the lessons of centuries. I do not see how a barbarous community and
+    a civilized community can constitute one State. I think we must get
+    rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom."
+
+These were his words on the 26th of May, 1856, in his speech on "The
+Assault upon Mr. Sumner." A few months later, in his "Speech on the
+Affairs of Kansas," delivered almost five years before the first gun
+was fired at Fort Sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and
+commanding words:--
+
+    "The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough.
+    A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be
+    than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. I think the
+    American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new,
+    it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the
+    enemy three thousand miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic
+    interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a
+    net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war.
+
+    "Fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic,
+    I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves
+    into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning
+    from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the
+    sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the
+    country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no
+    country to return to. Come home and stay at home while there is a
+    country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any
+    who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes
+    and depart to some land where freedom exists."
+
+Two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of
+the family of John Brown, on the 18th of November, 1859, the other after
+his execution:--
+
+    "Our blind statesmen," he says, "go up and down, with committees of
+    vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy.
+    They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its
+    birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the
+    arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah
+    Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before
+    Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it."
+
+From his "Discourse on Theodore Parker" I take the following vigorous
+sentence:--
+
+    "His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond
+    all men in pulpits,--I cannot think of one rival,--that the essence
+    of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or
+    it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with
+    ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or
+    private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or
+    unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier
+    nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the
+    high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants,--it is
+    hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious
+    music, or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of
+    Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are."
+
+The Lecture on "American Civilization," made up from two Addresses, one
+of which was delivered at Washington on the 31st of January, 1862, is,
+as might be expected, full of anti-slavery. That on the "Emancipation
+Proclamation," delivered in Boston in September, 1862, is as full of
+"silent joy" at the advent of "a day which most of us dared not hope
+to see,--an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and
+uncertainties."
+
+From the "Remarks" at the funeral services for Abraham Lincoln, held
+in Concord on the 19th of April, 1865, I extract this admirably drawn
+character of the man:--
+
+    "He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by
+    step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening
+    his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an
+    entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty
+    millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds
+    articulated by his tongue."
+
+The following are the titles of the remaining contents of this volume:
+"Harvard Commemoration Speech;" "Editor's Address: Massachusetts
+Quarterly Review;" "Woman;" "Address to Kossuth;" "Robert Burns;"
+"Walter Scott;" "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious
+Association;" "Speech at the Annual Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association;" "The Fortune of the Republic." In treating of the
+"Woman Question," Emerson speaks temperately, delicately, with perfect
+fairness, but leaves it in the hands of the women themselves to
+determine whether they shall have an equal part in public affairs. "The
+new movement," he says, "is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and
+woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart
+is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to
+accomplish."
+
+It is hard to turn a leaf in any book of Emerson's writing without
+finding some pithy remark or some striking image or witty comment which
+illuminates the page where we find it and tempts us to seize upon it for
+an extract. But I must content myself with these few sentences from "The
+Fortune of the Republic," the last address he ever delivered, in which
+his belief in America and her institutions, and his trust in the
+Providence which overrules all nations and all worlds, have found
+fitting utterance:--
+
+    "Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here
+    let there be what the earth waits for,--exalted manhood. What this
+    country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its
+    materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall
+    serve man, and not man corn.
+
+    "They who find America insipid,--they for whom London and Paris have
+    spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. I
+    not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for
+    more than there is in the world.
+
+    "Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course
+    of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little
+    wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows
+    the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to
+    their good."
+
+With this expression of love and respect for his country and trust
+in his country's God, we may take leave of Emerson's prose writings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+EMERSON'S POEMS.
+
+
+The following "Prefatory Note" by Mr. Cabot introduces the ninth volume
+of the series of Emerson's collected works:--
+
+    "This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS
+    and MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876 Mr. Emerson published a
+    selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many.
+    Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the
+    expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some
+    pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix, on
+    various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Emerson's approval,
+    but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it
+    seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their
+    completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished
+    doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of
+    these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify
+    their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been
+    admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts
+    found in the Essays.
+
+    "In coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole
+    preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the
+    opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of
+    time.
+
+    "As was stated in the Preface to the first volume of this edition of
+    Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the "Selected
+    Poems" have not always been followed here, but in some cases
+    preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in
+    fuller strength than at the time of the last revision.
+
+    "A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of "May-Day," in the
+    part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as
+    bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature."
+
+Emerson's verse has been a fertile source of discussion. Some have
+called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of
+the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize
+its true claims. His prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is
+something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his
+prose. An illustration presently to be given will make this point clear.
+
+Poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to
+the plainer garments of the household and the street. Full dress, as
+we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the
+redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet.
+
+It reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its
+drapery and ornaments. A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet
+excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the
+fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we
+should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon
+by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under
+the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,--the flowers
+and jewels of his vocabulary.
+
+Here is a prose sentence from Emerson's "Works and Days:"--
+
+    "The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go
+    like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party;
+    but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring,
+    they carry them as silently away."
+
+Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference
+between prose and poetry:--
+
+  "DAYS.
+
+  "Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
+  Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
+  And marching single in an endless file,
+  Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
+  To each they offer gifts after his will,
+  Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all.
+  I, in my pleachƩd garden watched the pomp,
+  Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
+  Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
+  Turned and departed silent. I too late
+  Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."
+
+--Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball! The
+full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like
+bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives
+like edges of embroidery. That one word _pleachƩd,_ an heir-loom from
+Queen Elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and
+charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. But mark that now the
+poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first
+extract. It is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he
+now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. It
+is himself who is the object of scorn. Self-revelation of beauty
+embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation
+in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. Passion
+that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic
+utterance. And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which
+shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm
+that "_In_ vino _veritas_" is not truer than _In_ carmine _veritas_.
+As a further illustration of what has just been said of the
+self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson's verse more
+especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily
+presence and infirmities in his poetry,--subjects he never referred to
+in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.
+
+Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so
+many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip
+on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was
+shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the
+metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract
+of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of
+survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds
+his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration.
+
+Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?
+
+    "The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to
+    them, of all men, the severest criticism is due."
+
+These are Emerson's words in the Preface to "Parnassus."
+
+His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They
+lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems
+to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited
+from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but
+with the context. Milton had been speaking of "Logic" and of "Rhetoric,"
+and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple,
+sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be
+forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used
+absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be
+very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the
+poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some
+of the best of Milton's own.
+
+In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson
+was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet
+or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the
+term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat
+at eighty degrees of RĆ©aumur is a very different matter. The rank of
+poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to
+our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to
+this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular
+poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the
+popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered
+passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry.
+Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a
+great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that
+length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is
+crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation.
+And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in
+the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope's "Essay on
+Man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "Paradise Lost" and
+"Paradise Regained" both together? For all that, we know there is a
+school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of
+poet.
+
+It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in
+a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and
+conversation. It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those
+authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. And
+after all, few will dare assert that "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is
+greater as a poem than Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's "Ode
+to a Nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so
+often quoted as
+
+  "To point a moral or adorn a tale."
+
+We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson's poetry
+with Emerson's own self-estimate. He says in a fit of humility, writing
+to Carlyle:--
+
+    "I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of
+    literature, the reporters, suburban men."
+
+But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland:--
+
+    "He once said to me, 'I am not a great poet--but whatever is of me
+    _is a poet_.'"
+
+These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and
+different periods.
+
+Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his
+self-distrust and his consciousness of the "vision," if not "the
+faculty, divine," are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic
+confessional:--
+
+  "A dull uncertain brain,
+  But gifted yet to know
+  That God has cherubim who go
+  Singing an immortal strain,
+  Immortal here below.
+  I know the mighty bards,
+  I listen while they sing,
+  And now I know
+  The secret store
+  Which these explore
+  When they with torch of genius pierce
+  The tenfold clouds that cover
+  The riches of the universe
+  From God's adoring lover.
+  And if to me it is not given
+  To fetch one ingot thence
+  Of that unfading gold of Heaven
+  His merchants may dispense,
+  Yet well I know the royal mine
+    And know the sparkle of its ore,
+  Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,--
+    Explored, they teach us to explore."
+
+These lines are from "The Poet," a series of fragments given in the
+"Appendix," which, with his first volume, "Poems," his second, "May-Day,
+and other Pieces," form the complete ninth volume of the new series.
+These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be
+found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of
+Emerson's self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had
+most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading "The Poet."
+
+Emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this
+passage from "Merlin" sufficiently shows:--
+
+  "Thy trivial harp will never please
+  Or fill my craving ear;
+  Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
+  Free, peremptory, clear.
+  No jingling serenader's art
+  Nor tinkling of piano-strings
+  Can make the wild blood start
+  In its mystic springs;
+  The kingly bard
+  Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
+  As with hammer or with mace;
+  That they may render back
+  Artful thunder, which conveys
+  Secrets of the solar track,
+  Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Great is the art,
+  Great be the manners of the bard.
+  He shall not his brain encumber
+  With the coil of rhythm and number;
+  But leaving rule and pale forethought
+  He shall aye climb
+  For his rhyme.
+  'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say,
+  'In to the upper doors,
+  Nor count compartments of the floors,
+  But mount to paradise
+  By the stairway of surprise.'"
+
+And here is another passage from "The Poet," mentioned in the quotation
+before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater
+miracles than those ascribed to Orpheus:--
+
+  "A Brother of the world, his song
+  Sounded like a tempest strong
+  Which tore from oaks their branches broad,
+  And stars from the ecliptic road.
+  Time wore he as his clothing-weeds,
+  He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.
+  As melts the iceberg in the seas,
+  As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,
+  As snow-banks thaw in April's beam,
+  The solid kingdoms like a dream
+  Resist in vain his motive strain,
+  They totter now and float amain.
+  For the Muse gave special charge
+  His learning should be deep and large,
+  And his training should not scant
+  The deepest lore of wealth or want:
+  His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
+  Every maxim of dreadful Need;
+  In its fulness he should taste
+  Life's honeycomb, but not too fast;
+  Full fed, but not intoxicated;
+  He should be loved; he should be hated;
+  A blooming child to children dear,
+  His heart should palpitate with fear."
+
+We look naturally to see what poets were Emerson's chief favorites. In
+his poems "The Test" and "The Solution," we find that the five whom
+he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe.
+
+Here are a few of his poetical characterizations from "The Harp:"--
+
+  "And this at least I dare affirm,
+  Since genius too has bound and term,
+  There is no bard in all the choir,
+  Not Homer's self, the poet-sire,
+  Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,
+  Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure,
+  Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,
+  Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,
+  Scott, the delight of generous boys,
+  Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,--
+  Not one of all can put in verse,
+  Or to this presence could rehearse
+  The sights and voices ravishing
+  The boy knew on the hills in spring."--
+
+In the notice of "Parnassus" some of his preferences have been already
+mentioned.
+
+Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the
+one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of
+criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman
+amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a
+violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of
+description are not odious.
+
+The difference between Emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries
+with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and
+arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and
+infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular.
+The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something
+definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols
+used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is
+a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days
+and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that
+hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not
+provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day
+use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are
+too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated
+terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that
+he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual
+life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught
+quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly
+known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that
+he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the
+hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor
+Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using
+the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of
+nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments,--he
+reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates
+undertook to "hew Mount Athos to the shape of man" in the likeness of
+Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes
+"Cheshire's haughty hill" stand before us an impersonation of kingly
+humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked.
+
+This is the fascination of Emerson's poetry; it moves in a world of
+universal symbolism. The sense of the infinite fills it with its
+majestic presence. It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the
+every-day aspects of nature. But he looks always with the eye of a poet,
+never with that of the man of science. The law of association of ideas
+is wholly different in the two. The scientific man connects objects in
+sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective
+resemblances. His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and
+contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws
+that govern, the subjects of his study. The poet links the most remote
+objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of
+fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by
+his instinct for the beautiful. The man of science clings to his object,
+as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full
+as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head
+up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens
+above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a
+Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. The
+poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are
+examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet
+is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of
+Fraunhofer's lines to the man of science.
+
+Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the
+best sense of that word. But his realities reached to the highest
+heavens: like Milton,--
+
+  "He passed the flaming bounds of place and time;
+  The living throne, the sapphire blaze
+  Where angels tremble while they gaze,
+  HE SAW"--
+
+Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. If Galileo had been
+a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse
+thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson.
+
+Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors
+of his imagination. He was ready to see beauty everywhere:--
+
+  "Thou can'st not wave thy staff in air,
+  Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
+  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
+  And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
+
+He called upon the poet to
+
+  "Tell men what they knew before;
+  Paint the prospect from their door."
+
+And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life
+with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or
+into a milking-pail.
+
+This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted
+moods he would have us
+
+  "Give to barrows, trays and pans
+  Grace and glimmer of romance."
+
+But in his Lecture on "Poetry and Imagination," he says:--
+
+    "What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound
+    of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps
+    Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet."
+
+The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are
+forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He
+himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the
+prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists"
+have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr.
+Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if
+they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader
+a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of
+selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy
+Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all
+stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page
+of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and
+exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as
+he might see fit.
+
+French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the
+slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that
+
+  "In the mud and scum of things
+  There alway, alway something sings."
+
+Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even
+there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected
+districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the
+genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they
+disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too
+wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du
+Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments,
+and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless
+circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not
+for a mere sensational effect.
+
+What a range of subjects from "The Problem" and "Uriel" and
+"Forerunners" to "The Humble-Bee" and "The Titmouse!" Nor let the reader
+who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the
+singularly impressive home-poem, "Hamatreya," beginning with the names
+of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord,--probably the
+same he owned after the last of them:--
+
+    "Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,"
+
+and ending with the austere and solemn "Earth-Song."
+
+Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical
+expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part
+of metrical composition. His muse picked her way as his speech did in
+conversation and in lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with
+rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born
+singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with
+"Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make
+rhyme without actual verbicide:--
+
+  "Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
+  And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are!
+
+And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this?
+
+  "In Adirondac lakes
+  At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed."
+
+It was surely not difficult to say--
+
+  "At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide."
+And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we
+like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more
+neatly and disposed more nicely. When he is at his best, his lines flow
+with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and
+sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs
+against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over.
+
+There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often,
+indulges in. This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line.
+It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. Shakespeare, the
+supreme artist, and Milton, the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,"
+knew how to use it effectively. Shelley employed it freely. Bryant
+indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of
+the "North American Review" in defence of its use. Willis was fond of
+it. As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,--may even
+have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse.
+But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. A humpback
+may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many
+humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. Can any ear
+reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson's?
+
+  "Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship
+  Of minds that each can stand against the world
+  By its own meek and incorruptible will?"
+
+These lines that lift their backs up in the middle--span-worm lines, we
+may call them--are not to be commended for common use because some great
+poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our
+recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson
+has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his
+leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood.
+
+As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared
+of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have
+tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in
+triolets, or attempt any cat's-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand.
+
+If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless
+versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something
+in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. Who
+would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking
+_lagena_?--Read his poem to the Aeolian harp ("The Harp") and his model
+betrays itself:--
+
+  "These syllables that Nature spoke,
+  And the thoughts that in him woke
+  Can adequately utter none
+  Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
+  Therein I hear the Parcae reel
+  The threads of man at their humming wheel,
+  The threads of life and power and pain,
+  So sweet and mournful falls the strain.
+  And best can teach its Delphian chord
+  How Nature to the soul is moored,
+  If once again that silent string,
+  As erst it wont, would thrill and ring."
+
+There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar
+to most true lovers of poetry. Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians
+by placing "The Sphinx" at the entrance of his temple of song. This poem
+was not fitted to attract worshippers. It is not easy of comprehension,
+not pleasing in movement. As at first written it had one verse in it
+which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed
+upon to omit it in the later versions. There are noble passages in it,
+but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. A commonplace young
+person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come
+by and by to the verse:--
+
+  "Have I a lover
+    Who is noble and free?--
+  I would he were nobler
+    Than to love me."
+
+The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think _c'est
+magnifique, mais ce n'est pas_--_l'amour_.
+
+The third poem in the volume, "The Problem," should have stood first in
+order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson's poems. All his earlier
+verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst
+of song in a poetic nature. "Each and All," "The Humble-Bee," "The
+Snow-Storm," should be read before "Uriel," "The World-Soul," or
+"Mithridates." "Monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for
+Emerson's poetry, and after this "Woodnotes."
+
+In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their
+descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is
+like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of
+descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ His subtle
+selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants,
+as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for
+its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different
+conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its
+descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the
+imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the
+pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes
+with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then
+mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the
+poem called "Destiny":--
+
+  "Alas! that one is born in blight,
+  Victim of perpetual slight:
+  When thou lookest on his face,
+  Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways!
+  None shall ask thee what thou doest,
+  Or care a rush for what thou knowest.
+  Or listen when thou repliest,
+  Or remember where thou liest,
+  Or how thy supper is sodden;'
+  And another is born
+  To make the sun forgotten."
+
+Of all Emerson's poems the "Concord Hymn" is the most nearly complete
+and faultless,--but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a
+poem as Collins might have written,--it has the very movement and
+melody of the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," and of the "Dirge in
+Cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one
+conspicuous line,
+
+  "And fired the shot heard round the world,"
+
+must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little
+poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn,
+musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records
+the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power
+that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom
+and her martyrs.
+
+These poems of Emerson's find the readers that must listen to them and
+delight in them, as the "Ancient Mariner" fastened upon the man who must
+hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them,
+and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the
+question, let him read the paragraph of "May-Day," beginning,--
+
+  "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+"Sea-shore," the fine fragments in the "Appendix" to his published
+works, called, collectively, "The Poet," blocks bearing the mark of
+poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct,
+and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the
+"Threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has
+the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with
+all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's
+picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in
+the language,--with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis,"
+leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as of wider scope and
+larger pattern.
+
+Many critics will concede that there is much truth in Mr. Arnold's
+remark on the want of "evolution" in Emerson's poems. One is struck
+with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical
+workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of
+poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot
+help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete "Christabel," and his
+"Abyssinian Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of.
+We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm
+of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which
+Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we
+go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which
+the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away
+half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of
+sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other
+apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest
+a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be
+something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic
+and artistic anaemia and insufficiency,--the opposite of what we find
+showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on
+the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault. Life seemed lustier
+in Old England than in New England to Emerson, to Hawthorne, and to
+that admirable observer, Mr. John Burroughs. Perhaps we require another
+century or two of acclimation.
+
+Emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties.
+He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal
+respiratory measure,--octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration
+is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal
+facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and
+also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and
+labor. I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had
+been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he
+habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought.
+
+Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. The
+golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their
+way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair
+belonged to their personalities. So with the poets; for Wordsworth the
+air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between
+storm and sunshine. Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist
+that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot. Without its own
+characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by
+
+    "The light that never was on sea or land,"
+
+we may have good verse but no true poem. In his poetry there is not
+merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon.
+
+Emerson's poetry is eminently subjective,--if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the
+word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two
+of his own chapters in his "Modern Painters." These are the chapter
+on "The Pathetic Fallacy," and the one which follows it "On Classical
+Landscape." In these he treats of the transfer of a writer's mental or
+emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. He
+asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by
+the singular name mentioned, "the pathetic fallacy," because, he says,
+"he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the
+landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern
+painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature,
+imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval
+painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual
+qualities of the object itself."
+
+Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" may be found almost
+anywhere in Emerson's poems. Here is one which offers itself without
+search:--
+
+  "Daily the bending skies solicit man,
+  The seasons chariot him from this exile,
+  The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,
+  The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
+  Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
+  Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home."
+
+The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with
+a defect. If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the
+_sympathetic illusion_, his readers might have looked upon it more
+justly.
+
+It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the
+resemblances between Emerson's poetry and that of other poets. Two or
+three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others
+may be mentioned.
+
+In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at
+least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of
+that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. Both
+are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates
+himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged
+to him.
+
+  "Good-by, proud world,"
+
+recalls Spenser and Raleigh. "The Humble-Bee" is strongly marked by the
+manner and thought of Marvell. Marvell's
+
+  "Annihilating all that's made
+  To a green thought in a green shade,"
+
+may well have suggested Emerson's
+
+  "The green silence dost displace
+  With thy mellow, breezy bass."
+
+"The Snow-Storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of
+Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by
+comparison with either.
+
+"Woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been
+found in Milton's "Comus;" this, for instance:--
+
+  "All constellations of the sky
+  Shed their virtue through his eye.
+  Him Nature giveth for defence
+  His formidable innocence."
+
+Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of
+his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were
+original.
+
+So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many
+moods, but with one pervading spirit:--
+
+  "Melting matter into dreams,
+  Panoramas which I saw,
+  And whatever glows or seems
+  Into substance, into Law."
+
+We think in reading his "Poems" of these words of Sainte-Beuve:--
+
+    "The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who
+    suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious,
+    and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to
+    complete in your turn."
+
+Just what he shows himself in his prose, Emerson shows himself in his
+verse. Only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of
+his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is
+higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and
+pour in continuous streams. Where they came from, or whither they flow
+to empty themselves, we cannot always say,--it is enough to enjoy them
+as they flow by us.
+
+Incompleteness--want of beginning, middle, and end,--is their too common
+fault. His pages are too much like those artists' studios all hung round
+with sketches and "bits" of scenery. "The Snow-Storm" and "Sea-Shore"
+are "bits" out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far
+as they go, but forcing us to ask, "Where is the painting for which
+these scraps are studies?" or "Out of what great picture have these
+pieces been cut?"
+
+We do not want his fragments to be made wholes,--if we did, what hand
+could be found equal to the task? We do not want his rhythms and rhymes
+smoothed and made more melodious. They are as honest as Chaucer's,
+and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any
+versifying drill-sergeant,--if we wanted them reshaped whom could we
+trust to meddle with them?
+
+His poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws
+on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its
+air is full of Aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze
+wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and
+from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden
+brilliancy.
+
+After all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons,
+we have to recognize that there is a charm in Emerson's poems
+which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a
+hyacinth,--any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from
+all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its
+articulating representatives should call us by name.
+
+All our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery
+of _style_. "The style is of [a part of] the man himself," said Buffon,
+and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, "The style is the
+man."
+
+The "personal equation" which differentiates two observers is not
+confined to the tower of the astronomer. Every human being is
+individualized by a new arrangement of elements. His mind is a safe with
+a lock to which only certain letters are the key. His ideas follow in
+an order of their own. His words group themselves together in special
+sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the
+total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with
+his individuality. We may not be able to assign the reason of the
+fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. But
+this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought;
+that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the
+accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and
+eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity
+of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and
+phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own,
+with a _curiosa felicitas_ which captivates and enthrals the reader who
+comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all
+he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and
+moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as
+a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding
+of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues,
+shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the
+Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services.
+
+
+Mr. Conway gives the following account of two visits to Emerson after
+the decline of his faculties had begun to make itself obvious:--
+
+    "In 1875, when I stayed at his house in Concord for a little time,
+    it was sad enough to find him sitting as a listener before those
+    who used to sit at his feet in silence. But when alone with him he
+    conversed in the old way, and his faults of memory seemed at
+    times to disappear. There was something striking in the kind of
+    forgetfulness by which he suffered. He remembered the realities
+    and uses of things when he could not recall their names. He would
+    describe what he wanted or thought of; when he could not recall
+    'chair' he could speak of that which supports the human frame, and
+    'the implement that cultivates the soil' must do for plough.--
+
+    "In 1880, when I was last in Concord, the trouble had made heavy
+    strides. The intensity of his silent attention to every word that
+    was said was painful, suggesting a concentration of his powers to
+    break through the invisible walls closing around them. Yet his face
+    was serene; he was even cheerful, and joined in our laughter at some
+    letters his eldest daughter had preserved, from young girls, trying
+    to coax autograph letters, and in one case asking for what price he
+    would write a valedictory address she had to deliver at college. He
+    was still able to joke about his 'naughty memory;' and no complaint
+    came from him when he once rallied himself on living too long.
+    Emerson appeared to me strangely beautiful at this time, and the
+    sweetness of his voice, when he spoke of the love and providence at
+    his side, is quite indescribable."--
+
+One of the later glimpses we have of Emerson is that preserved in the
+journal of Mr. Whitman, who visited Concord in the autumn of 1881. Mr.
+Ireland gives a long extract from this journal, from which I take the
+following:--
+
+    "On entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to
+    several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle
+    pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one,
+    remained silent through the whole talk and discussion. And so, there
+    Emerson sat, and I looking at him. A good color in his face, eyes
+    clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old
+    clear-peering aspect quite the same."
+
+Mr. Whitman met him again the next day, Sunday, September 18th, and
+records:--
+
+    "As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the
+    eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best
+    suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost
+    always with a smile."
+
+Dr. Le Baron Russell writes to me of Emerson at a still later period:--
+
+    "One incident I will mention which occurred at my last visit
+    to Emerson, only a few months before his death. I went by Mrs.
+    Emerson's request to pass a Sunday at their house at Concord towards
+    the end of June. His memory had been failing for some time, and his
+    mind as you know was clouded, but the old charm of his voice and
+    manner had never left him. On the morning after my arrival Mrs.
+    Emerson took us into the garden to see the beautiful roses in which
+    she took great delight. One red rose of most brilliant color she
+    called our attention to especially; its 'hue' was so truly 'angry
+    and brave' that I involuntarily repeated Herbert's line,--
+
+      'Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,'--
+
+    from the verses which Emerson had first repeated to me so long ago.
+    Emerson looked at the rose admiringly, and then as if by a sudden
+    impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low bow, 'I take off
+    my hat to it.'"
+
+Once a poet, always a poet. It was the same reverence for the beautiful
+that he had shown in the same way in his younger days on entering the
+wood, as Governor Rice has told us the story, given in an earlier
+chapter.
+
+I do not remember Emerson's last time of attendance at the "Saturday
+Club," but I recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words
+had become well marked. "My memory hides itself," he said. The last time
+I saw him, living, was at Longfellow's funeral. I was sitting opposite
+to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked
+intently upon the face of the dead poet. A few minutes later he rose
+again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently
+remembering that he had just done so. Mr. Conway reports that he said to
+a friend near him, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I
+have entirely forgotten his name."
+
+Dr. Edward Emerson has very kindly furnished me, in reply to my request,
+with information regarding his father's last years which will interest
+every one who has followed his life through its morning and midday to
+the hour of evening shadows.
+
+"May-Day," which was published in 1867, was made up of the poems written
+since his first volume appeared. After this he wrote no poems, but with
+some difficulty fitted the refrain to the poem "Boston," which had
+remained unfinished since the old Anti-slavery days. "Greatness," and
+the "Phi Beta Kappa Oration" of 1867, were among his last pieces of
+work. His College Lectures, "The Natural History of the Intellect,"
+were merely notes recorded years before, and now gathered and welded
+together. In 1876 he revised his poems, and made the selections from
+them for the "Little Classic" edition of his works, then called
+"Selected Poems." In that year he gave his "Address to the Students of
+the University of Virginia." This was a paper written long before, and
+its revision, with the aid of his daughter Ellen, was accomplished with
+much difficulty.
+
+The year 1867 was about the limit of his working life. During the last
+five years he hardly answered a letter. Before this time it had become
+increasingly hard for him to do so, and he always postponed and thought
+he should feel more able the next day, until his daughter Ellen was
+compelled to assume the correspondence. He did, however, write some
+letters in 1876, as, for instance, the answer to the invitation of the
+Virginia students.
+
+Emerson left off going regularly to the "Saturday Club" probably in
+1875. He used to depend on meeting Mr. Cabot there, but after Mr. Cabot
+began to come regularly to work on "Letters and Social Aims," Emerson,
+who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings.
+The trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his
+staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a
+part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and
+readings and to church. His hearing was very slightly impaired, and his
+sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled,
+and that "M's" and "N's" troubled him to read. He recognized the members
+of his own family and his _old_ friends; but, as I infer from this
+statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new
+acquaintances, as is common with old persons.
+
+He continued the habit of reading,--read through all his printed works
+with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and
+endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. In these Dr. Emerson found
+written "Examined 1877 or 1878," but he found no later date.
+
+In the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his
+table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a
+child. He liked to look over the "Advertiser," and was interested in the
+"Nation." He enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to
+guests.
+
+All this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of Dr.
+Emerson in answer to my questions. The twilight of a long, bright day
+of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and
+gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing
+and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to
+the very verge of its earthly existence.
+
+But darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. From
+these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of
+the worn-out bodily frame.
+
+In April, 1882, Emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he
+could hardly speak. When his son, Dr. Edward Emerson, called to see him,
+he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression
+than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. As he lay on his couch he
+pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of Carlyle "the
+good man,--my friend." His son told him that he had seen Carlyle, which
+seemed to please him much. On the following day the unequivocal signs of
+pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. He still recognized
+those around him, among the rest Judge Hoar, to whom he held out his
+arms for a last embrace. A sharp pain coming on, ether was administered
+with relief. And in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him
+and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. He lived very nearly to the
+completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born May 25, 1803, and
+his death occurring on the 27th of April, 1882.
+
+Mr. Ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for
+the most part, taken the following extracts:--
+
+    "The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson took place
+    at Concord on the 30th of April. A special train from Boston carried
+    a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted
+    by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church
+    where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town
+    bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with
+    other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped,
+    and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at
+    the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman.
+
+    "The services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred
+    at 2.30, and were conducted by Rev. W.H. Furness of Philadelphia, a
+    kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. They were simple in
+    character, and only Dr. Furness took part in them. The body lay in
+    the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and
+    close friends of the deceased. The only flowers were contained in
+    three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and
+    white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were filled
+    with friends and neighbors.
+
+    "At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival
+    of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was
+    packed. In front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of
+    pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow
+    jonquils, the gift of Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Among the floral
+    tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the Emerson
+    school. By the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums
+    and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath.
+
+    "Before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut
+    coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid was turned back,
+    and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small
+    bouquet of roses. While the coffin was being carried in, 'Pleyel's
+    Hymn' was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the
+    deceased. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge
+    E. Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the
+    congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his
+    voice many times trembling with emotion."
+
+I subjoin this most impressive "Address" entire, from the manuscript
+with which Judge Hoar has kindly favored me:--
+
+    "The beauty of Israel is fallen in its high place! Mr. Emerson
+    has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing
+    company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his
+    grave,--to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our
+    parting tribute of memory and love.
+
+    "There is nothing to mourn for him. That brave and manly life was
+    rounded out to the full length of days. That dying pillow was
+    softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to
+    the sleep which the Lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the
+    face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the
+    opening heavens.
+
+    "Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his
+    fame is established and secure. Throughout this great land and from
+    beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great
+    public loss. But we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was
+    _ours_. He was descended from the founders of the town. He chose our
+    village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. It was
+    to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was
+    our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and
+    the elders with reverence. He was our ornament and pride.
+
+                    "'He is gone--is dust,--
+      He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished!
+      For him there is no longer any future.
+      His life is bright--bright without spot it was
+      And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour
+      Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap.
+      Far off is he, above desire and fear;
+      No more submitted to the change and chance
+      Of the uncertain planets.--
+
+      "'The bloom is vanished from my life,
+      For, oh! he stood beside me like my youth;
+      Transformed for me the real to a dream,
+      Clothing the palpable and the familiar
+      With golden exhalations of the dawn.
+      Whatever fortunes wait my future toils,
+      The _beautiful_ is vanished and returns not.'
+
+    "That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high
+    aspirations,--those lips of eloquent music,--that great soul, which
+    trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality,--that large
+    heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,--that
+    hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no
+    repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,--oh,
+    friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there
+    no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and
+    farewell!"
+
+Judge Hoar's remarks were followed by the congregation singing the
+hymns, "Thy will be done," "I will not fear the fate provided by Thy
+love." The Rev. Dr. Furness then read selections from the Scriptures.
+
+The Rev. James Freeman Clarke then delivered an "Address," from which I
+extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any
+that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their
+subject,--for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or
+write of Emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not
+wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion.
+
+    "The saying of the Liturgy is true and wise, that 'in the midst of
+    life we are in death.' But it is still more true that in the midst
+    of death we are in life. Do we ever believe so much in immortality
+    as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a
+    few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? 'He is not here:
+    he is risen.' That power which we knew,--that soaring intelligence,
+    that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit,--_that_ cannot have
+    been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. It
+    has left its darkened dust behind. It has outsoared the shadow of
+    our night. God does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to
+    nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell,
+    or some bodily tissue. Life does not die, but matter dies off from
+    it. The highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which
+    meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose,
+    insight,--this agent of immense resource and boundless power,--this
+    has not been subdued by its instrument. When we think of such an one
+    as he, we can only think of life, never of death.
+
+    "Such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on 'Immortality.'
+    But he himself was the best argument for immortality. Like the
+    greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the
+    higher evidence of universal instincts,--the vast streams of belief
+    which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those
+    shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the
+    Atlantic and Pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the
+    revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun."
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Let us then ponder his words:--
+
+          'Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
+          What rainbows teach and sunsets show?
+          Voice of earth to earth returned,
+          Prayers of saints that inly burned,
+          Saying, _What is excellent
+          As God lives, is permanent;
+          Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
+          Hearts' love will meet thee again._
+
+         *       *       *       *
+
+          House and tenant go to ground
+          Lost in God, in Godhead found.'"
+
+After the above address a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M.
+Brown, of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the
+church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott recited the
+following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion:---
+
+      "His harp is silent: shall successors rise,
+      Touching with venturous hand the trembling string,
+      Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise,
+      And wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing?
+      Shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes,
+      As when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise,
+      World-wide his native melodies did sing,
+      Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories?
+      Ah, no! That matchless lyre shall silent lie:
+      None hath the vanished minstrel's wondrous skill
+      To touch that instrument with art and will.
+      With him, winged poesy doth droop and die;
+      While our dull age, left voiceless, must lament
+      The bard high heaven had for its service sent."
+
+
+    "Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors,
+    friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the
+    dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore
+    a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession
+    took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall
+    pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies
+    of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being
+    concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray
+    surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. The services
+    here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final
+    resting-place.
+
+    "The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal
+    clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the
+    Lord's Prayer, ending at the words, 'and deliver us from evil.'
+    In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pronounced the
+    benediction. After it was over the grandchildren passed the open
+    grave and threw flowers into it."
+
+So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
+and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.--A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard.
+
+
+Emerson's earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so
+slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the
+accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has
+been long living in the companionship of his thought. Still, he had to
+be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all
+immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to
+let them all "soar and sing" as he left his earthly half-way house. It
+is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the
+daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals,
+ourselves among the rest. But Emerson has said truly "Great geniuses
+have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about
+them. They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life
+was trivial and commonplace."
+
+The reader has had many extracts from Emerson's writings laid before
+him. It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are
+so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like
+distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he
+says from his undiluted thought. His books are all so full of his life
+to their last syllable that we might letter every volume _Emersoniana_,
+by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+From the numerous extracts I have given from Emerson's writings it may
+be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man
+and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. But he may
+probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from
+the hand of his biographer, if the author of this Memoir may borrow the
+name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the
+same field. He may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of
+the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading.
+He will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the Memoir
+if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the
+interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate.
+
+Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of
+scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in
+the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that
+he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly
+have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very
+light for a man of his stature. He got on the scales at Cheyenne, on
+his trip to California, comparing his weight with that of a lady of
+the party. A little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller,
+Professor Thayer, "How much did I weigh? A hundred and forty?" "A
+hundred and forty and a half," was the answer. "Yes, yes, a hundred and
+forty and a half! That _half_ I prize; it is an index of better things!"
+
+Emerson's head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a
+philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the
+_cephalometer_ used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches
+and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven
+and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It
+was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly
+equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most
+heads.
+
+His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this
+peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like "Ammon's great son," he carried
+one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose
+somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide,
+well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in
+its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin
+shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His
+expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement,
+centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New
+Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three
+cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied
+thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port
+of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring
+intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious. Few of our
+fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished
+personages than our present minister at the Court of St. James. In
+a recent letter to myself, which I trust Mr. Lowell will pardon my
+quoting, he says of Emerson:--
+
+"There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he
+habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if
+ever, only rise in spurts."
+
+From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars
+relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record.
+
+His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick.
+His eyes were of the "strongest and brightest blue." The member of the
+family who tells me this says:--
+
+"My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else
+had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in
+sea-captains. I have seen three sea-captains who had them."
+
+He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very
+limited, if we may judge from this family story. When he was in College,
+and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented
+himself, intending to learn to sing. The master received him, and when
+his turn came, said to him, "Chord!" "What?" said Emerson. "Chord!
+Chord! I tell you," repeated the master. "I don't know what you mean,"
+said Emerson. "Why, sing! Sing a note." "So I made some kind of a noise,
+and the singing-master said, 'That will do, sir. You need not come
+again.'"
+
+Emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in
+the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with
+others using it, but always _pie_ at breakfast. "It stood before him and
+was the first thing eaten." Ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour
+of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven.
+Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could
+do night after night. He never was hungry,--could go any time from
+breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for
+food when it was set before him.
+
+He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and
+often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the
+better.
+
+It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life
+long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency.
+He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about
+ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to
+Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily
+inheritance. In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:--
+
+  "I bear in youth the sad infirmities
+  That use to undo the limb and sense of age."
+
+Four years later:--
+
+  "Has God on thee conferred
+    A bodily presence mean as Paul's,
+  Yet made thee bearer of a word
+    Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?"
+
+and again, in the same year:--
+
+  "Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,
+  Trembling for the body's sake."--
+
+Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing
+in "Terminus" his inherited weakness of organization.
+
+And in writing to Carlyle, he says:--
+
+"You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and
+postponement of the blonde constitution."
+
+Again, "I am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast
+debility and procrastination."
+
+He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be
+observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that
+semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His
+presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough
+to make him a rapid and enduring walker.
+
+Emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the
+lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly
+penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as
+to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through
+his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a
+well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite
+sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon
+pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until
+it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.
+
+He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it
+were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to
+seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while
+his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground
+swell," as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed
+convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to
+Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.
+
+Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered
+the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of
+the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity,
+and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail,
+--which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it
+to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of
+inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been very
+accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it
+is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work
+with a spade, cried out, "Take care, papa,--you will dig your leg."
+
+He used to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about
+his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the
+nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the
+words.
+
+There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the
+earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he
+had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary
+that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with
+endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.
+
+Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy,
+over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos
+eseito]--Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have
+been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling
+learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with
+impunity.
+
+In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham,
+Emerson is reported as saying, "God has given me the seeing eye, but not
+the working hand." His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its
+envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in
+connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all
+this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden
+and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the
+patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one
+thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left
+no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with
+natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its
+various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity
+(_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it
+appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity,
+according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for
+an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that
+Franklin showed in the affairs of common life.
+
+He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become
+able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships.
+We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first
+edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears
+in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that
+recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still.
+What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded
+worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between
+the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience
+and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to
+make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham
+gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections
+which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his
+equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed,
+and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed
+itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree.
+
+Of Emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory
+of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked
+or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be
+his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity
+apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the
+part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little
+children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic
+smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated
+with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are
+living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has
+already been written. Margaret Fuller,--I must call my early schoolmate
+as I best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of
+five artists,--Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully
+commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives
+in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne
+awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.
+
+How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came
+to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That "majesty" Mr.
+Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that
+doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly
+upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew
+would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent
+persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would
+have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to
+the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too
+exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many
+others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal
+frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better
+sphere of being.
+
+Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village
+in which he lived. He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on
+no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures,
+was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt
+to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came
+flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What was the errand on which he visited our earth,--the message with
+which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life?
+
+Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. These may be opened
+earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can
+tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound.
+
+Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they
+were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country,
+perhaps by too long contact with the "Sons of Liberty," and their
+revolutionary notions. But the most "liberal" Boston pulpit still held
+to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any
+independent thinker.
+
+In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, "began," as
+was said of another,--"to be about thirty years of age." He had opened
+his sealed orders and had read therein:
+
+Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.
+
+Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice
+of God in thine own soul.
+
+Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy
+fellow-servants.
+
+Thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit
+of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold
+interests of life and the typical characters of history.
+
+Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul, in conscious
+union with the Infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence.
+
+This pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing
+is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. Its least
+appearance is not unworthy of thy study. Let thy soul be open and thine
+eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere.
+
+Go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they
+must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with
+the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see
+God.
+
+Teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect
+freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that
+today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to
+reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning's sun.
+
+To thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World,
+that here, here in our America, is the home of man; that here is the
+promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded.
+
+Thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent,
+hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere
+thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was true to the orders he had received. Through doubts, troubles,
+privations, opposition, he would not
+
+                              "bate a jot
+  Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
+  Right onward."
+
+All through the writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests
+itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest
+sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane"
+where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the
+homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners,
+And all his work was done, not so much
+
+  "As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye,"
+
+as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship.
+
+He was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to
+a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. He might have been an
+idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw
+all about him. He gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and
+trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him
+above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has
+held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a
+volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a
+confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and
+Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that
+professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the
+fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings
+of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions.
+
+Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely
+made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not
+in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague
+aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them,
+in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he
+
+  "Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer."
+
+Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout
+listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn,
+who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was
+over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life
+in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.
+
+  "His was the task and his the lordly gift
+  Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift."
+
+This was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier,
+calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more
+help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude
+could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.
+
+"Nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his
+genius," as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a
+poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in
+circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these
+directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and
+he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room
+naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from
+the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very
+popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a
+very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.
+
+--"I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished
+in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos
+not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as
+conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics,
+argument and confession." So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.
+
+It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave
+most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view
+the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson
+was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a
+play-actor.
+
+The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were,
+accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the
+lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of
+Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given
+length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and
+lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience
+would tire before the allotted time was over.
+
+Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists.
+They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative
+observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in
+their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen
+portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes
+little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an
+elevated sentiment.
+
+It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer
+in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had
+learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his
+apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must
+work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the
+playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good
+estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and
+published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in
+the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never
+became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances
+until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he
+was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor,
+writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and
+dangerous winter season.
+
+He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man
+could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed
+plain people whose classics were the Bible and the "Farmer's Almanac."
+Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by
+his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found
+his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow.
+
+When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public
+in the shape of an Essay. But the Essay never lost the character it
+borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a
+lay sermon,--_concio ad populum_. We must always remember what we are
+dealing with. "Expect nothing more of my power of construction,--no
+ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs
+tied together."--"Here I sit and read and write, with very little
+system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent
+particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer
+and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom
+of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," he says, "and there it
+tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing,
+sneer, or pray, according to your genius." In England, he says, "I find
+this lecturing a key which opens all doors." But he did not tend to
+overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so
+diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again,
+"I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and
+am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received."
+Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the
+earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares
+about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest
+itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments.
+But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations
+enough. I remember Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could
+fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very
+advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was
+unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely,
+saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that
+season.
+
+No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages
+with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he
+was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was
+deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the
+end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly,
+without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild
+surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full
+measure to his audience with perfect fairness.
+
+  [Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes
+  Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei
+  Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]
+
+or, in Bryant's version,
+
+  "as the scales
+  Are held by some just woman, who maintains
+  By spinning wool her household,--carefully
+  She poises both the wool and weights, to make
+  The balance even, that she may provide
+  A pittance for her babes."--
+
+As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. It is needless to handle
+this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it. Of their effect on
+his younger listeners he says, "To some of us that long past experience
+remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson
+awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of
+the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may
+fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of 'Chevy Chase,' and we in
+Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of
+victory."
+
+There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in
+Emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. So might "Peace, be
+still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. I remember
+that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror,
+I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson's,
+where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. An
+hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the
+diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for
+a careworn soul.
+
+An author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many
+quarries. Emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide
+range of authors. I shall presently show how extensive was his reading.
+No doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would
+seem, thoroughly. But let no one be frightened away from his pages by
+the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or
+Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not
+pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a
+man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks
+very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.
+
+"As he confesses in the Essay on 'Books,' his learning is second hand;
+but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use
+of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of
+his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the
+original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than
+of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive
+glimpses, and he is content."
+
+One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has
+"contrived to read" almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has
+fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has
+not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to
+Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well
+be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to Goethe are
+very frequent.
+
+Emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly
+know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse
+him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather
+quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson
+quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because
+another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with
+a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously
+appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse
+in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than
+many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his
+authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all,
+and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named
+references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are
+three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred
+and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven
+are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times
+or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or
+more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names
+alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one
+thousand and sixty-five references.
+
+  Authorities.  Number of times mentioned.
+  Shakespeare.....112
+  Napoleon.........84
+  Plato............81
+  Plutarch.........70
+  Goethe...........62
+  Swift............49
+  Bacon............47
+  Milton...........46
+  Newton...........43
+  Homer............42
+  Socrates.........42
+  Swedenborg.......40
+  Montaigne........30
+  Saadi............30
+  Luther...........30
+  Webster..........27
+  Aristotle........25
+  Hafiz............25
+  Wordsworth.......25
+  Burke............24
+  Saint Paul.......24
+  Dante............22
+  Shattuck (Hist. of
+    Concord).......21
+  Chaucer..........20
+  Coleridge........20
+  Michael Angelo...20
+  The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times.
+
+It is interesting to observe that Montaigne, Franklin, and Emerson all
+show the same fondness for Plutarch.
+
+Montaigne says, "I never settled myself to the reading of any book of
+solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."
+
+Franklin says, speaking of the books in his father's library, "There was
+among them Plutarch's Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think
+that time spent to great advantage."
+
+Emerson says, "I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to
+all the ancient writers."
+
+Studies of life and character were the delight of all these four
+moralists. As a judge of character, Dr. Hedge, who knew Emerson well,
+has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of "English
+Traits" can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the
+intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes.
+
+_Noscitur a sociis_ is as applicable to the books a man most affects as
+well as to the companions he chooses. It is with the kings of
+thought that Emerson most associates. As to borrowing from his royal
+acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve.
+
+"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.
+There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By
+necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."
+
+What Emerson says of Plutarch applies very nearly to himself.
+
+"In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate
+between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into
+the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not
+stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all."
+
+Mr. Ruskin and Lord Tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend
+themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Emerson would never have taken
+the trouble to do such a thing. His mind was overflowing with thought as
+a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from
+an endless variety of sources. He drew ashore whatever he wanted that
+would serve his purpose. He makes no secret of his mode of writing. "I
+dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature;
+but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of
+a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities."
+Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of
+his "lapidary style" and say "I build my house of boulders."
+
+"It is to be remembered," says Mr. Ruskin, "that all men who have sense
+and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they
+meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest
+is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human
+minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the
+world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original
+powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to
+their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it."
+
+The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson's words
+and thoughts and those of others.
+
+Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. "Scorn trifles"
+comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph
+Waldo.--"What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?
+This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." So writes Ralph Waldo
+Emerson in his Lecture "New England Reformers."--"Hiding the badges of
+royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest
+their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags."
+Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the "Harvard Register" nearly
+twenty years before.
+
+  "The hero is not fed on sweets,
+  Daily his own heart he eats."
+
+The image comes from Pythagoras _via_ Plutarch.
+
+Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a
+sentence which recalls Carlyle.
+
+"The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.
+The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all
+its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a
+long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule."
+
+Compare this passage from "English Traits" with the following one from
+Carlyle's "French Revolution":--
+
+"So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and
+character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch
+all men:--till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire,
+the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day!
+For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass;
+most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the
+burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing
+will put out."
+
+  "O what are heroes, prophets, men
+  But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow
+  A momentary music."
+
+The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns's letters, again in
+one of Coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a
+letter of Leibnitz.
+
+  "He builded better than he knew"
+
+is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson. The thought is constantly
+recurring in our literature. It helps out the minister's sermon; and a
+Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the "Address
+without a Phoenix" among the Drury Lane mock poems. Can we find any
+trace of this idea elsewhere?
+
+In a little poem of Coleridge's, "William Tell," are these two lines:
+
+  "On wind and wave the boy would toss
+  Was great, nor knew how great he was."
+
+The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle
+called "Characteristics." It reappears in Emerson's poem "Fate."
+
+  "Unknown to Cromwell as to me
+  Was Cromwell's measure and degree;
+  Unknown to him as to his horse,
+  If he than his groom is better or worse."
+
+It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this
+connection. In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest
+themselves. All the best poetry the world has known is full of such
+resemblances. If we find Emerson's wonderful picture, "Initial Love"
+prefigured in the "Symposium" of Plato, we have only to look in the
+"Phaedrus" and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare's
+famous group,--
+
+  "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet."
+
+Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental
+coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed
+from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished
+copies, _Ć©ditions de luxe_ of sayings that all the world knows are old,
+but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again.
+The more improved versions of the world's great thoughts we have, the
+better, and we look to the great minds for them. The larger the river
+the more streams flow into it. The wide flood of Emerson's discourse has
+a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries.
+
+It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his
+lectures and essays. He was always on the lookout in conversation for
+things to be remembered. He picked up facts one would not have expected
+him to care for. He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple's time at
+Kalamazoo. I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me
+right. He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown
+in several instances. Another example is where he speaks of Quintus
+Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the
+self-sacrificing equestrian. Little inaccuracies of this kind did not
+concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could
+not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular
+article.
+
+Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him.
+Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most
+easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau.
+Carlyle's harsh virility could not be without its effect on his
+valid, but sensitive nature. Alcott's psychological and physiological
+speculations interested him as an idealist. Thoreau lent him a new set
+of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a
+poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as
+vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like
+those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest
+stone in the darkest night,--or come nearer to seeing it than those of
+most mortals. Emerson's long intimacy with him taught him to give an
+outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to
+him but for this companionship. A nicer analysis would detect many
+alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits
+predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood
+out distinct from the common family qualities. Mr. Whipple has well
+said: "Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his
+ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his
+genius? Indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words,
+and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius 'to spring,
+like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the
+past and refuse all history.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson's place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He cannot
+properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered
+lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have
+been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments
+rather than of the results of systematic study. He was a man of
+intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism.
+This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost,
+if not quite, unintelligible. We can, for this reason, understand why
+the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and Dr. Walter
+Channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. But it is not
+always a writer's fault that he is not understood. Many persons have
+poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand
+themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. But that which is
+mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring
+imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. It is to be hoped that no
+reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found
+under the title "Diogenes," in the work of his namesake, Diogenes
+Laertius. I translate from the Latin version.
+
+"Plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of _mensality_ and _cyathity_
+[_tableity_, and _gobletity_]. 'I can see a table and a goblet,' said
+the cynic, 'but I can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.'
+'Quite so,' answered Plato, 'because you have the eyes to see a goblet
+and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and
+gobletity.'"
+
+This anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following Emerson into
+the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation.
+
+Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a
+spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, "as
+the wise Spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. This, of
+course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than
+Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India,
+fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers
+and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux,
+Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has
+his fancies on the subject. The geography of an undiscovered country and
+the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to
+romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge.
+
+That the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a
+simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different
+proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its
+retina,--why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such
+questions very simply by saying it is so.
+
+The poet in Emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the
+philosopher. He speaks of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of
+Immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. It
+sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble
+Ode as working truths.
+
+     "Not in entire forgetfulness,
+      And not in utter nakedness,
+  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+      From God, who is our home."
+
+In accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a
+preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant:--
+
+    "Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
+     On whom those truths do rest
+  Which we are toiling all our lives to find."--
+
+These are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the
+poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and
+the age of eight years, at which Wordsworth finds the little girl of
+  whom he speaks in the lines,--
+
+             "A simple child--
+    That lightly draws its breath
+  And feels its life in every limb,--
+    What should it know of death?"
+
+What should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which
+Time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone
+render appreciable to the consciousness? Undoubtedly every brain has its
+own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own
+individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a
+good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as Dryden called it, from a
+good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth
+to plant himself on his instincts. But the individual to whom this
+counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts.
+He has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. His
+instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous
+conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided
+tendencies. The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what
+is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological
+language, from God or the devil. That which was a safe guide for Emerson
+might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy. The cloud of glory
+which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts,
+which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,--not the
+truths themselves. And too many children come into life trailing after
+them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory.
+
+It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new
+doctrine,--new to his young disciples,--of planting themselves on their
+instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting
+to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the
+door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which
+listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of
+babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as
+one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a
+very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "The Dial"
+was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness,
+incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to
+satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.
+
+The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less
+than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence.
+It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we
+cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance
+in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout
+religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious
+free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right
+and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its
+legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or
+institutions.
+
+All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of
+emancipation. For the Fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of Medmenham
+Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense _ce que voudras_. There was
+an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some
+susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally
+of the Bedlam sort. Emerson's disciples were never accused of falling
+into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself
+distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing
+effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign
+influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the
+effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the
+regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.
+
+Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration
+of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not
+yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but
+so was throwing the tea overboard. A provincial affair, if the Bohemian
+press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was
+fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over
+the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Too much has been made of Emerson's mysticism. He was an intellectual
+rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let
+go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of
+common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being
+could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob
+Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader
+may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic
+asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the
+contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in
+the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to
+insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable,
+the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played
+with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified
+the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual
+divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach
+to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out
+of itself. If "Rejected Addresses" had not been written half a century
+before Emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant
+to ridicule and parody it.
+
+       "The song of Braham is an Irish howl;
+       Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
+  And nought is everything and everything is nought."
+
+Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma
+that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.
+
+Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the "Yoga" doctrine
+of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The
+oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic
+dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a
+peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to
+construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be,
+of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and
+ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to
+build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a
+human soul had ever constructed.
+
+Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel,"
+illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's
+calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes
+refers to,--that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I
+become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. This
+was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his
+most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well
+known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for
+a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the
+spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.
+
+Emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question
+sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to
+the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a
+charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and
+disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have
+a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "Uriel" is a poem which finds itself
+perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt
+not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment,
+it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the
+voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest
+imaginative conceptions.
+
+Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of
+universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return.
+Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects
+in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the
+landscape. Here is a curious extract from "The Adirondacs," in which the
+reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron's--
+
+  "The sky is changed,--and such a change! O night
+  And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."--
+
+Now Emerson:--
+
+  "And presently the sky is changed; O world!
+  What pictures and what harmonies are thine!
+  The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
+  _So like the soul of me, what if't were me_?"
+
+We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem
+printed among the "Translations" in the Appendix to Emerson's Poems.
+These are the last two lines of "The Flute, from Hilali":--
+
+  "Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,
+  If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?"
+
+The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley's "Ode
+to the West Wind":
+
+              "Be thou, Spirit fierce,
+  My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"
+
+Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops
+of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical
+metempsychosis.
+
+The laird of Balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him
+cherry-brandy instead of port wine. In driving home over a wild tract of
+land called Munrimmon Moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got
+out of the gig and brought them to him. The hat he recognized, but not
+the wig. "It's no my wig, Hairy [Harry], lad; it's no my wig," and he
+would not touch it. At last Harry lost his patience: "Ye'd better tak'
+it, sir, for there's nae waile [choice] o' wigs on Munrimmon Moor."
+And in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman,
+whose _Ego_ was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she
+had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of
+her four-footed companion:--
+
+  "If it be I, he'll wag his little tail;
+  And if it be not I, he'll loudly bark and wail."
+
+I have not lost my reverence for Emerson in showing one of his fancies
+for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. He would
+doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense
+of humor. But I take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about
+"a foresmell of the Infinite" which Mr. Conway has attributed to me, who
+am innocent of all connection with it.
+
+The mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial
+concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special
+endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. It is
+not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great
+composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise
+the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine
+contemplation. The bewildered reader must not forget that passage of
+arms, previously mentioned, between Plato and Diogenes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson looked rather askance at Science in his early days. I remember
+that his brother Charles had something to say in the "Harvard Register"
+(1828) about its disenchantments. I suspect the prejudice may have come
+partly from Wordsworth. Compare this verse of his with the lines of
+Emerson's which follow it.
+
+  "Physician art thou, one all eyes;
+  Philosopher, a fingering slave,
+  One that would peep and botanize
+  Upon his mother's grave?"
+
+Emerson's lines are to be found near the end of the Appendix in the new
+edition of his works.
+
+  "Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
+  And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
+  In love he cannot therefore cease his trade;
+  Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
+  He feels it, introverts his learned eye
+  To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.
+  His mother died,--the only friend he had,--
+  Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
+  Couched like a cat, sat watching close behind
+  And throttled all his passion. Is't not like
+  That devil-spider that devours her mate
+  Scarce freed from her embraces?"
+
+The same feeling comes out in the Poem "Blight," where he says the
+"young scholars who invade our hills"
+
+  "Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
+  And all their botany is Latin names;"
+
+and in "The Walk," where the "learned men" with their glasses are
+contrasted with the sons of Nature,--the poets are no doubt meant,--much
+to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. Emerson's mind
+was very far from being of the scientific pattern. Science is
+quantitative,--loves the foot-rule and the balance,--methodical,
+exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. The poet is curious,
+asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the
+answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it. Emerson wonders,
+for instance,--
+
+  "Why Nature loves the number five,"
+
+but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any
+farther. He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany
+from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr.
+Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial
+anaesthesia. It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz,
+who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most
+delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science
+and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came
+among us. At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their
+specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves
+the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his
+Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says:--
+
+"Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet's
+curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the
+feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection
+they awake."--
+
+This was Emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of
+nature.
+
+Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes
+quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects.
+His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are
+independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is
+frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the
+special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound
+that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing
+_audacities_:--
+
+"There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is
+naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."--
+
+"He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and
+carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic."--
+
+"If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long
+hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy
+which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature."--
+
+"Tapping the tempest for a little side wind."--
+
+"The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot
+every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and
+employment and bind them fast in one web."--
+
+He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes
+the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe,
+Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word "husband"
+in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word "haughty" is so
+fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its
+employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But
+his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like
+dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty Ariel,"--"fine Ariel." It
+belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to
+Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators
+are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of
+Emerson's. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic
+traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn
+fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and
+his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;"
+his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word "fine," with a
+certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the
+word "melioration."
+
+We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel
+with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The "point and
+surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch
+belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is
+very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects,
+ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool
+and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison
+grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such
+delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to
+match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the
+slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced
+organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling
+the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an
+unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he "peddles out all the
+wit he can gather from Time or from Nature," and we find that "he has
+changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying
+about the morning light as merchandise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as
+home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen
+sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets
+familiar to all of us,--"This great, intelligent, sensual, and
+avaricious America." This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his
+Essay, "Works and Days," he is quite as outspoken: "This mendicant
+America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America." "I
+see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the
+respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "The war," he
+says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." All his
+life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization.
+All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them.
+To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the
+ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "Here,"
+he said, in words I have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is
+the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded."
+
+Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent;
+he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him
+as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our
+fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. So it pleases us
+to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of
+Franklin's bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of
+Emerson's:--
+
+  "A blessing through the ages thus
+  Shield all thy roofs and towers,
+  GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
+  Thou darling town of ours!"
+
+Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not
+fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend
+their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop,
+and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the
+penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of
+the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. His courtesy and kindness
+to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. Poets who come to recite
+their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are
+among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted
+his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but
+collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable
+inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one
+phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far
+as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his
+most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in
+its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The natural purity and elevation of Emerson's character show themselves
+in all that he writes. His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him
+from his writings. This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all
+the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so
+spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave
+their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some
+superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about
+Boileau,--
+
+  "Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,--cela porte malheur."
+
+(Don't let us abuse Nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up
+dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had
+their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the
+assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him,
+and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy,
+sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England
+was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The
+_dour_ Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and
+they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise
+above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until
+he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and
+find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. So
+did the music of Emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our
+stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would
+have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When
+a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened
+persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs
+as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the
+convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about
+which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep
+and anxious and devout religious scepticism.
+
+It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by
+Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his
+ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but
+when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the
+end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the
+more he found himself perplexed.
+
+The name most frequently applied to Emerson's form of belief is
+Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can
+tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief
+in the omnipresence of the Deity?
+
+Theodore Parker explained Emerson's position, as he understood it, in an
+article in the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." I borrow this quotation
+from Mr. Cooke:--
+
+"He has an absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of
+Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it.
+He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or
+morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy
+for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates
+at Andover or Cambridge."
+
+We read in his Essay, "Self-Reliance ": "This is the ultimate fact which
+we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all
+into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the
+Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in
+which it enters into all lower forms."
+
+The "ever-blessed ONE" of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the
+doctrine of the Trinity. The "Over-Soul" of Emerson is that aspect of
+Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a
+divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in
+all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as
+he was willing to be called a Platonist.
+
+Explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like
+this. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the
+Almighty unto perfection?" But on certain great points nothing could be
+clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of
+spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His
+views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character,
+brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him
+afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any
+denial of the self-governing power of the will.
+
+His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. In all
+he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in
+all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his light and guide; through
+all nature he looked up to nature's God; and if he did not worship the
+"man Christ Jesus" as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed
+his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of
+him as more like Christ than any man he had known.
+
+Emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church
+from which he had parted. Since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not
+of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of
+well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an
+impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent
+sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before.
+Their official Confessions of Faith make far less difference in their
+human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago.
+These ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials
+with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little
+bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long
+as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully
+treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that.
+
+Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of
+Emerson's religious teachings I will select two as typical.
+
+Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in
+Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has
+written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the
+New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with
+the following sentence:--
+
+"Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of
+Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one
+of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole,
+tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a
+great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest
+of human life: 'HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.'"
+
+"But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report," says
+Mr. Conway "('Macmillan,' June, 1879), that religion had there passed
+through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that 'the genial
+atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all
+the churches equally.'"
+
+What is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of Christianity?
+The good Baptist minister's Essay is full of it. He comes asking what
+has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of
+"fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same
+Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him.
+The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if
+he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations
+ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later
+he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was
+called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished
+to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into
+pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals.
+
+It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the
+self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the
+Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness
+of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely
+claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote:--
+
+"Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place
+these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man
+sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again
+to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our
+faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the
+Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be
+there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and
+the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of
+conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the
+spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of
+voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself
+there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from
+the dead, to swell their number."
+
+The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson's writings and life
+is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and
+critics. The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by
+three considerable Memoirs. Mr. George Willis Cooke's elaborate work is
+remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson's teachings.
+Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway's "Emerson at Home and Abroad" is a lively
+picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. Mr.
+Alexander Ireland's "Biographical Sketch" brings together, from a great
+variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of
+Emerson's history and the comments of those whose opinions were best
+worth reproducing. I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the
+various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject.
+
+From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our
+intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and
+appreciative criticisms of Emerson's Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the
+portrait of the New England "Plotinus-Montaigne" in his brilliant "Fable
+for Critics," to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John
+Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson's
+writings have furnished one of the most enduring _piĆØces de rĆ©sistance_
+at the critical tables of the old and the new world.
+
+He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and
+writers: Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services;
+Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss
+Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him "a noble man."
+Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson's
+fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but
+unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned
+whether they would pass current with posterity. He found discerning
+critics in France, Germany, and Holland. Better than all is the
+testimony of those who knew him best. They who repeat the saying that
+"a prophet is not without honor save in his own country," will find an
+exception to its truth in the case of Emerson. Read the impressive words
+spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the
+glowing tributes of three of Concord's poets,--Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing,
+and Mr. Sanborn,--and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame
+had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored,
+beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his
+own fireside.
+
+It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the
+language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the
+adamant of Shakespeare," and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison
+or Gray's Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought
+entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified
+the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as
+a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. _Corpora non agunt
+nisi soluta_, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as
+material substances before they can act. "That which thou sowest is not
+quickened except it die," or rather lose the form with which it was
+sown. Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of "The
+Burial of Sir John Moore" an immortal, and endowed the language with a
+classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. But what is the gift of a
+mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? How many lives
+have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost
+in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their
+influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which
+they formed a part and the generations that came after them! We can dare
+to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr.
+Cranch:--
+
+  "The wise will know thee and the good will love,
+    The age to come will feel thy impress given
+  In all that lifts the race a step above
+    Itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven."
+
+It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson's best literary work in prose and
+verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or
+fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and
+the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends,
+indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly
+pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose
+footsteps Christendom professes to follow. The time was when the divine
+authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported
+to have wrought. As the faith in these exceptions to the general laws
+of the universe diminished, the teachings of the Master, of whom it was
+said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon
+as evidence of his divine mission. Now, when a comparison of these
+teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to
+have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the
+sinless and self-devoted servant of God and friend of man is appealed to
+as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation
+of the Divinity.
+
+Judged by his life Emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity.
+He was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even
+the jail. But the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing
+it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of Queen
+Mary's martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. His faith was too large and
+too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too
+honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred
+calling. His writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of
+admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them
+their true value. It was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on
+so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the
+privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise.
+No matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks,
+carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to
+his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without
+which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. He shaped an ideal for
+the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after
+truth. Look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall
+see it everywhere. Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you
+shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul. Trust yourself because
+you trust the voice of God in your inmost consciousness.
+
+There are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts
+beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. So
+transparent was the life of Emerson; so clearly did the true nature of
+the man show through it. What he taught others to be, he was himself.
+His deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere
+among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest
+manifestations of character. Here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may
+have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if He who knew what was in man
+had wandered from door to door in New England as of old in Palestine, we
+can well believe that one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet"
+would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been
+that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+[For many references, not found elsewhere, see under the general
+headings of _Emerson's Books, Essays, Poems_.]
+
+
+  Abbott, Josiah Gardiner, a pupil of Emerson, 49, 50.
+
+  Academic Races, 2, 3. (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Action, subordinate, 112.
+
+  Adams, John, old age, 261.
+
+  Adams, Samuel, Harvard debate, 115.
+
+  Addison, Joseph, classic, 416.
+
+  Advertiser, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+  Aeolian Harp, his model, 329, 340.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Harp.)
+
+  Aeschylus, tragedies, 253. (See _Greek_.)
+
+  Agassiz, Louis:
+    Saturday Club, 222;
+    companionship, 403.
+
+  Agriculture:
+    in Anthology, 30;
+    attacked, 190;
+    not Emerson's field, 255, 256, 365.
+
+  Akenside, Mark, allusion, 16.
+
+  Alchemy, adepts, 260, 261.
+
+  Alcott, A. Bronson:
+    hearing Emerson, 66;
+    speculations, 86;
+    an idealist, 150;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    sonnet, 355;
+    quoted, 373;
+    personality traceable, 389.
+
+  Alcott, Louisa M., funeral bouquet, 351.
+
+  Alexander the Great:
+    allusion, 184;
+    mountain likeness, 322.
+
+  Alfred the Great, 220, 306.
+
+  Allston, Washington, unfinished picture, 334.
+      (See _Pictures_.)
+
+  Ambition, treated in Anthology, 30.
+
+  America:
+    room for a poet, 136, 137;
+    virtues and defects, 143;
+    faith in, 179;
+    people compared with English, 216;
+    things awry, 260;
+    _aristocracy_, 296;
+    in the Civil War, 304;
+    Revolution, 305;
+    Lincoln, the true history of his time, 307;
+    passion for, 308, 309;
+    artificial rhythm, 329;
+    its own literary style, 342;
+    home of man, 371;
+    loyalty to, 406;
+    epithets, 406, 407.
+      (See _England, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Amici, meeting Emerson, 63.
+      (See _Italy_.)
+
+  Amusements, in New England, 30.
+
+  Anaemia, artistic, 334.
+
+  Ancestry:
+    in general, 1-3;
+    Emerson's, 3 _et seq._
+      (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Andover, Mass.:
+    Theological School, 48;
+    graduates, 411.
+
+  Andrew, John Albion:
+    War Governor, 223;
+    hearing Emerson, 379.
+      (See _South_.)
+
+  Angelo. (See _Michael Angelo_.)
+
+  Antinomianism:
+    in The Dial, 162;
+    kept from, 177.
+      (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Anti-Slavery:
+    in Emerson's pulpit, 57;
+    the reform, 141, 145, 152;
+    Emancipation address, 181;
+    Boston and New York addresses, 210-212;
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 228;
+    Fugitive Slave Law, and other matters, 303-307.
+      (See _South_.)
+
+  Antoninus, Marcus, allusion, 16.
+
+  Architecture, illustrations, 253.
+
+  Arianism, 51.
+      (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+  Aristotle:
+    influence over Mary Emerson, 17;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Arminianism, 51.
+      (See _Methodism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Arnim, Gisela von, 225.
+
+  Arnold, Matthew:
+    quotation about America, 137:
+    lecture, 236;
+    on Milton, 315;
+    his Thyrsis, 333;
+    criticism, 334;
+    string of Emerson's epithets, 406.
+
+  Aryans, comparison, 312.
+
+  Asia:
+    a pet name, 176;
+    immovable, 200.
+
+  Assabet River, 70, 71.
+
+  Astronomy:
+    Harp illustration, 108;
+    stars against wrong, 252, 253.
+    (See _Galileo, Stars, Venus_, etc.)
+
+  Atlantic Monthly:
+    sketch of Dr. Ripley, 14, 15;
+    of Mary Moody Emerson, 16;
+    established, 221;
+    supposititious club, 222;
+    on Persian Poetry, 224;
+    on Thoreau, 228;
+    Emerson's contributions, 239, 241;
+    Brahma, 296.
+
+  Atmosphere:
+    effect on inspiration, 290;
+    spiritual, 413, 414.
+
+  Augustine, Emerson's study of, 52.
+
+  Authors, quoted by Emerson, 381-383.
+    (See _Plutarch_, etc.)
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis:
+    allusion, 22, 111;
+    times quoted, 382.
+
+  Bancroft, George:
+    literary rank, 33;
+    in college, 45.
+
+  Barbier, Henri Auguste, on Napoleon, 208.
+
+  Barnwell, Robert W.:
+    in history, 45;
+    in college, 47.
+
+  Beaumont and Fletcher, disputed, line, 128, 129.
+
+  Beauty:
+    its nature, 74, 94, 95;
+    an end, 99, 135, 182;
+    study, 301.
+
+  Beecher, Edward, on preexistence, 391.
+    (See _Preexistence_.)
+
+  Behmen, Jacob:
+    mysticism, 201, 202, 396;
+    citation, 380.
+
+  Berkeley, Bishop:
+    characteristics, 189;
+    matter, 300.
+
+  Bible:
+    Mary Emerson's study, 16;
+    Mosaic cosmogony, 18;
+    the Exodus, 35;
+    the Lord's Supper, 58;
+    Psalms, 68, 181, 182, 253;
+    lost Paradise, 101;
+    Genesis, Sermon on the Mount, 102;
+    Seer of Patmos, 102, 103;
+    Apocalypse, 105;
+    Song of Songs, 117;
+    Baruch's roll, 117, 118;
+    not closed, 122;
+    the Sower, 154;
+    Noah's Ark, 191;
+    Pharisee's trumpets, 255;
+    names and imagery, 268;
+    sparing the rod, 297;
+    rhythmic mottoes, 314;
+    beauty of Israel, 351;
+    face of an angel, 352;
+    barren fig-tree, 367;
+    a classic, 376;
+    body of death, "Peace be still!" 379;
+    draught of fishes, 381;
+    its semi-detached sentences, 405;
+    Job quoted, 411;
+    "the man Christ Jesus," 412;
+    scattering abroad, 414.
+    (See _Christ, God, Religion,_ etc.)
+
+  Bigelow, Jacob, on rural cemeteries, 31.
+
+  Biography, every man writes his own, 1.
+
+  Blackmore, Sir Richard, controversy, 31.
+
+  Bliss Family, 9.
+
+  Bliss, Daniel, patriotism, 72.
+
+  Blood, transfusion of, 256.
+
+  Books, use and abuse, 110, 111.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Boston, Mass.:
+    First Church, 10, 12, 13;
+    Woman's Club, 16;
+    Harbor, 19;
+    nebular spot, 25, 26;
+    its pulpit darling, 27;
+    Episcopacy, 28;
+    Athenaeum, 31;
+    magazines, 28-34;
+    intellectual character, lights on its three hills, high caste
+  religion, 34;
+    Samaria and Jerusalem, 35;
+    streets and squares, 37-39;
+    Latin School, 39, 40, 43;
+    new buildings, 42;
+    Mrs. Emerson's boarding-house, the Common as a pasture, 43;
+    Unitarian preaching, 51;
+    a New England centre, 52;
+    Emerson's settlement, 54;
+    Second Church, 55-61;
+    lectures, 87, 88, 191;
+    Trimount Oracle, 102;
+    stirred by the Divinity-School address, 126;
+    school-keeping, Roxbury, 129;
+    aesthetic society, 149;
+    Transcendentalists, 155, 156;
+    Bay, 172;
+    Freeman Place Chapel, 210:
+    Saturday Club, 221-223;
+    Burns Centennial, 224, 225;
+    Parker meeting, 228;
+    letters, 263, 274, 275;
+    Old South lecture, 294;
+    Unitarianism, 298;
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 307;
+    special train, 350;
+    Sons of Liberty, 369;
+    birthplace, 407;
+    Baptists, 413.
+
+  Boswell, James:
+    allusion, 138;
+    one lacking, 223;
+    Life of Johnson, 268.
+
+  Botany, 403.
+    (See _Science_.)
+
+  Bowen, Francis: literary rank, 34;
+    on Nature, 103, 104.
+
+  Brook Farm, 159, 164-166, 189, 191.
+    (See _Transcendentalism_, etc.)
+
+  Brown, Howard N., prayer, 355.
+
+  Brown, John, sympathy with, 211.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery, South_.)
+
+  Brownson, Orestes A., at a party, 149.
+
+  Bryant, William Cullen:
+    his literary rank, 33;
+    redundant syllable, 328;
+    his translation of Homer quoted, 378.
+
+  Buckminster, Joseph Stevens:
+    minister in Boston, 12, 26, 27, 52;
+    Memoir, 29;
+    destruction of Goldau, 31.
+
+  Buddhism:
+    like Transcendentalism, 151;
+    Buddhist nature, 188;
+    saints
+    298. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma,
+    --_India_, etc.)
+
+  Buffon, on style, 341.
+
+  Bulkeley Family, 4-7.
+
+  Bulkeley, Peter:
+    minister of Concord, 4-7, 71;
+    comparison of sermons, 57;
+    patriotism, 72;
+    landowner, 327.
+
+  Bunyan, John, quoted, 169.
+
+  Burke, Edmund:
+    essay, 73;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Burns, Robert:
+    festival, 224, 225;
+    rank, 281;
+    image referred to, 386;
+    religious position, 409. (See _Scotland_.)
+
+  Burroughs, John, view of English life, 335.
+
+  Burton, Robert, quotations, 109, 381.
+
+  Buttrick, Major, in the Revolution, 71, 72.
+
+  Byron, Lord:
+    allusion, 16;
+    rank, 281;
+    disdain, 321;
+    uncertain sky, 335;
+    parallelism, 399.
+
+
+  CABOT, J. ELLIOT:
+    on Emerson's literary habits, 27;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    prefaces, 283, 302;
+    Note, 295, 296;
+    Prefatory Note, 310, 311;
+    the last meetings, 347, 348.
+
+  Caesar, Julius, 184,197.
+
+  California, trip, 263-271, 359. (See _Thayer_.)
+
+  Calvin, John:
+    his Commentary, 103;
+    used by Cotton, 286.
+
+  Calvinism:
+    William Emerson's want of sympathy with, 11, 12;
+    outgrown, 51;
+    predestination, 230;
+    saints, 298;
+    spiritual influx, 412.
+    (See _God, Puritanism, Religion, Unitarianism.)_
+
+  Cambridge, Mass.:
+    Emerson teaching there, 50;
+    exclusive circles, 52.
+    (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+  Cant, disgust with, 156.
+
+  Carlyle, Thomas:
+    meeting Emerson, 63;
+    recollections of their relations, 78-80, 83;
+    Sartor Resartus, 81, 82, 91;
+    correspondence, 82, 83, 89, 90, 127, 176, 177, 192, 315, 317, 374,
+         380, 381, 406, 407;
+    Life of Schiller, 91;
+    on Nature, 104, 105;
+    Miscellanies, 130;
+    the Waterville Address, 136-138;
+    influence, 149, 150;
+    on Transcendentalism, 156-158;
+    The Dial, 160-163;
+    Brook Farm, 164;
+    friendship, 171;
+    Chelsea visit, 194;
+    bitter legacy, 196;
+    love of power, 197;
+    on Napoleon and Goethe, 208;
+    grumblings, 260;
+    tobacco, 270;
+    Sartor reprinted, 272;
+    paper on, 294;
+    Emerson's dying friendship, 349;
+    physique, 363;
+    Gallic fire, 386;
+    on Characteristics, 387;
+    personality traceable, 389.
+
+  Carpenter, William B., 230.
+
+  Century, The, essay in, 295.
+
+  Cerebration, unconscious, 112, 113.
+
+  Chalmers, Thomas, preaching, 65.
+
+  Channing, Walter, headache, 175, 390.
+
+  Channing, William Ellery:
+    allusion, 16;
+    directing Emerson's studies, 51;
+    preaching, 52;
+    Emerson in his pulpit, 66;
+    influence, 147, 149;
+    kept awake, 157.
+
+  Channing, William Ellery, the poet:
+    his Wanderer, 263;
+    Poems, 403.
+
+  Channing, William Henry:
+    allusions, 131, 149;
+    in The Dial, 159;
+    the Fuller Memoir, 209;
+    Ode inscribed to, 211, 212.
+
+  Charleston, S C, Emerson's preaching, 53. (See _South_.)
+
+  Charlestown, Mass., Edward Emerson's residence, 8.
+
+  Charles V., 197.
+
+  Charles XII., 197.
+
+  Chatelet, Parent du, a realist, 326.
+
+  Chatham, Lord, 255.
+
+  Chaucer, Geoffrey:
+    borrowings, 205;
+    rank, 281;
+    honest rhymes, 340;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Chelmsford, Mass., Emerson teaching there, 49, 50.
+
+  Chemistry, 403. (See _Science_.)
+
+  Cheshire, its "haughty hill," 323.
+
+  Choate, Rufus, oratory, 148.
+
+  Christ:
+    reserved expressions about, 13;
+    mediatorship, 59;
+    true office, 120-122;
+    worship, 412. (See _Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Christianity:
+    its essentials, 13;
+    primitive, 35;
+    a mythus, defects, 121;
+    the true, 122;
+    two benefits, 123;
+    authority, 124;
+    incarnation of, 176;
+    the essence, 306;
+    Fathers, 391.
+
+  Christian, Emerson a, 267.
+
+  Christian Examiner, The:
+    on William Emerson, 12;
+    its literary predecessor, 29;
+    on Nature, 103, 104;
+    repudiates Divinity School Address, 124.
+
+  Church:
+    activity in 1820, 147;
+    avoidance of, 153;
+    the true, 244;
+    music, 306. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Cicero, allusion, 111.
+  Cid, the, 184.
+
+  Clarke, James Freeman:
+    letters, 77-80, 128-131;
+    transcendentalism, 149;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    Fuller Memoir, 209;
+    Emerson's funeral, 351, 353-355.
+
+  Clarke, Samuel, allusion, 16.
+
+  Clarke, Sarah, sketches, 130.
+
+  Clarkson, Thomas, 220.
+
+  Clergy:
+    among Emerson's ancestry, 3-8;
+    gravestones, 9. (See _Cotton, Heredity_, etc.)
+
+  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:
+    allusion, 16;
+    Emerson's account, 63;
+    influence, 149, 150;
+    Carlyle's criticism, 196;
+    Ancient Mariner, 333;
+    Christabel, Abyssinian Maid, 334;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    an image quoted, 386;
+    William Tell, 387.
+
+  Collins, William:
+    poetry, 321;
+    Ode and Dirge, 332.
+
+  Commodity, essay, 94.
+
+  Concentration, 288.
+
+  Concord, Mass.:
+    Bulkeley's ministry, 4-7;
+    first association with the Emerson name, 7;
+    Joseph's descendants, 8;
+    the Fight, 9; Dr. Ripley, 10;
+    Social Club, 14;
+    Emerson's preaching, 54;
+    Goodwin's settlement, 56;
+    discord, 57;
+    Emerson's residence begun, 69, 70;
+    a typical town, 70;
+    settlement, 71;
+    a Delphi, 72;
+    Emerson home, 83;
+    Second Centennial, 84, 85, 303;
+    noted citizens, 86;
+    town government, the, monument, 87;
+    the Sage, 102;
+    letters, 125-131, 225;
+    supposition of Carlyle's life there, 171;
+    Emancipation Address, 181;
+    leaving, 192;
+    John Brown meeting, 211;
+    Samuel Hoar, 213;
+    wide-awake, 221;
+    Lincoln obsequies, 243, 307;
+    an _under_-Concord, 256;
+    fire, 271-279;
+    letters, 275-279;
+    return, 279;
+    Minute Man unveiled, 292;
+    Soldiers' Monument, 303;
+    land-owners, 327;
+    memorial stone, 333;
+    Conway's visits, 343, 344;
+    Whitman's, 344, 345;
+    Russell's, 345; funeral, 350-356;
+    founders, 352;
+    Sleepy Hollow, 356;
+    a strong attraction, 369;
+    neighbors, 373;
+    Prophet, 415.
+
+  Congdon, Charles, his Reminiscences,
+  66.
+
+  Conservatism, fairly treated, 156,
+  157. (See _Reformers, Religion,
+  Transcendentalism,_ etc.)
+
+  Conversation:
+    C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 258;
+    inspiration, 290.
+
+  Conway, Moncure D.:
+    account of Emerson, 55, 56, 66, 194;
+    two visits, 343, 344;
+    anecdote, 346;
+    error, 401;
+    on Stanley, 414.
+
+  Cooke, George Willis:
+    biography of Emerson, 43, 44, 66, 88;
+    on American Scholar, 107, 108;
+    on anti-slavery, 212;
+    on Parnassus, 280-282;
+    on pantheism, 411.
+
+  Cooper, James Fenimore, 33.
+
+  Corot, pearly mist, 335, 336. (See
+  _Pictures_, etc.)
+
+  Cotton, John:
+    service to scholarship, 34;
+    reading Calvin, 286.
+
+  Counterparts, the story, 226.
+
+  Cowper, William:
+    Mother's Picture, 178;
+    disinterested good, 304;
+    tenderness, 333;
+    verse, 338.
+
+  Cranch, Christopher P.:
+    The Dial, 159;
+    poetic prediction, 416, 417.
+
+  Cromwell, Oliver:
+    saying by a war saint, 252;
+    in poetry, 387.
+
+  Cudworth, Ralph, epithets, 200.
+
+  Cupples, George, on Emerson's lectures, 195.
+
+  Curtius, Quintus for Mettus, 388.
+
+  Cushing, Caleb:
+    rank, 33;
+    in college, 45.
+
+
+  Dana, Richard Henry, his literary place, 33, 223.
+
+  Dante:
+    allusion in Anthology, 31;
+    rank, 202, 320;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Dartmouth College, oration, 131-135.
+
+  Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, 105.
+
+  Dawes, Rufus, Boyhood Memories, 44.
+
+  Declaration of Independence, intellectual,
+  115. (See _American_, etc.)
+
+  Delirium, imaginative, easily produced,
+  238. (See _Intuition_.)
+
+  Delia Cruscans, allusion, 152. (See
+  _Transcendentalism_.)
+
+  Delos, allusion, 374.
+
+  Delphic Oracle:
+    of New England, 72;
+    illustration, 84.
+
+  Democratic Review, The, on Nature, 103.
+
+  De Profundis, illustrating Carlyle's spirit, 83.
+
+  De Quincey, Thomas:
+    Emerson's interview with, 63, 195;
+    on originality, 92.
+
+  De Staƫl, Mme., allusion, 16.
+
+  De Tocqueville, account of Unitarianism, 51.
+  Dewey, Orville, New Bedford ministry, 67.
+
+  Dexter, Lord Timothy, punctuation, 325, 326.
+
+  Dial, The:
+    established, 147, 158;
+    editors, 159;
+    influence, 160-163;
+    death, 164;
+    poems, 192;
+    old contributors, 221;
+    papers, 295;
+    intuitions, 394.
+
+  Dial, The (second), in Cincinnati, 239.
+
+  Dickens, Charles:
+    on Father Taylor, 56;
+    American Notes, 155.
+
+  Diderot, Denis, essay, 79.
+
+  Diogenes, story, 401. (See _Laertius_.)
+
+  Disinterestedness, 259.
+
+  Disraeli, Benjamin, the rectorship, 282.
+
+  Dramas, their limitations, 375. (See _Shakespeare_.)
+
+  Dress, illustration of poetry, 311, 312.
+
+  Dryden, John, quotation, 20, 21.
+
+  Dwight, John S.:
+    in The Dial, 159;
+    musical critic, 223.
+
+
+  East Lexington, Mass., the Unitarian pulpit, 88.
+
+  Economy, its meaning, 142.
+
+  Edinburgh, Scotland:
+    Emerson's visit and preaching, 64, 65;
+    lecture, 195.
+
+  Education:
+    through friendship, 97, 98;
+    public questions, 258, 259.
+
+  Edwards, Jonathan:
+    allusions, 16, 51;
+    the atmosphere changed, 414.
+    (See _Calvinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Egotism, a pest, 233.
+
+  Egypt:
+    poetic teaching, 121;
+    trip, 271, 272;
+    Sphinx, 330. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Sphinx.)
+
+  Election Sermon, illustration, 112.
+
+  Elizabeth, Queen, verbal heir-loom, 313. (See _Raleigh_, etc.)
+
+  Ellis, Rufus, minister of the First Church, Boston, 43.
+
+  Eloquence, defined, 285, 286.
+
+  Emerson Family, 3 _et seq_.
+
+  Emerson, Charles Chauncy, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+    feeling towards natural science, 18, 237;
+    memories, 19-25, 37, 43;
+    character, 77;
+    death, 89, 90;
+    influence, 98;
+    The Dial, 161;
+    "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+    nearness, 368;
+    poetry, 385;
+    Harvard Register, 401.
+
+  Emerson, Edith, daughter of Ralph Waldo, 263.
+
+  Emerson, Edward, of Newbury, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Edward Bliss, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+    allusions, 19, 20, 37, 38;
+    death, 89;
+    Last Farewell, poem, 161;
+    nearness, 368.
+
+  Emerson, Edward Waldo, son of Ralph Waldo:
+    in New York, 246;
+    on the Farming essay, 255;
+    father's last days, 346-349;
+    reminiscences, 359.
+
+  Emerson, Ellen, daughter of Ralph Waldo:
+    residence, 83;
+    trip to Europe, 271;
+    care of her father, 294;
+    correspondence, 347.
+
+  Emerson, Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tucker, first wife of Ralph Waldo, 55.
+
+  Emerson, Joseph, minister of Mendon, 4, 7, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Joseph, the second, minister of Malden, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Mrs. Lydia Jackson, second wife of Ralph Waldo:
+    marriage, 83;
+    _Asia_, 176.
+
+  Emerson, Mary Moody:
+    influence over her nephew, 16-18;
+    quoted, 385.
+
+  Emerson, Robert Bulkeley, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37.
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, His Life:
+    moulding influences, 1;
+    New England heredity, 2;
+    ancestry, 3-10;
+    parents, 10-16;
+    Aunt Mary, 16-19;
+    brothers, 19-25;
+    the nest, 25;
+    noted scholars, 26-36;
+    birthplace, 37, 38;
+    boyhood, 39, 40;
+    early efforts, 41, 42;
+    parsonages, 42;
+    father's death, 43;
+    boyish appearance, 44;
+    college days, 45-47;
+    letter, 48;
+    teaching, 49, 50;
+    studying theology, and preaching, 51-54;
+    ordination, marriage, 55;
+    benevolent efforts, wife's death, 56;
+    withdrawal from his church, 57-61;
+    first trip to Europe, 62-65;
+    preaching in America, 66, 67;
+    remembered conversations, 68, 69;
+    residence in the Old Manse, 69-72;
+    lecturing, essays in The North American, 73;
+    poems, 74;
+    portraying himself, 75;
+    comparison with Milton, 76, 77;
+    letters to Clarke, 78-80, 128-131;
+    interest in Sartor Resartus, 81;
+    first letter to Carlyle, 82;
+    second marriage and Concord home, 83;
+    Second Centennial, 84-87;
+    Boston lectures, Concord Fight; 87;
+    East Lexington church, War, 88;
+    death of brothers, 89, 90;
+    Nature published, 91;
+    parallel with Wordsworth, 92;
+    free utterance, 93;
+    Beauty, poems,
+    94;
+    Language, 95-97;
+    Discipline, 97, 98;
+    Idealism, 98, 99;
+    Illusions, 99, 100;
+    Spirit and Matter, 100;
+    Paradise regained, 101;
+    the Bible spirit, 102;
+    Revelations, 103;
+    Bowen's criticism, 104;
+    Evolution, 105, 106;
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 108;
+    fable of the One Man, 109;
+    man thinking, 110;
+    Books, 111;
+    unconscious cerebration, 112;
+    a scholar's duties, 113;
+    specialists, 114;
+    a declaration of intellectual independence, 115;
+    address at the Theological School, 116, 117;
+    effect on Unitarians, 118;
+    sentiment of duty, 119;
+    Intuition, 120;
+    Reason, 121;
+    the Traditional Jesus, 122;
+    Sabbath and Preaching, 123;
+    correspondence with Ware, 124-127;
+    ensuing controversy, 127;
+    Ten Lectures, 128;
+    Dartmouth Address, 131-136;
+    Waterville Address, 136-140;
+    reforms, 141-145;
+    new views, 146;
+    Past and Present, 147;
+    on Everett, 148;
+    assembly at Dr. Warren's, 149;
+    Boston _doctrinaires_, 150;
+    unwise followers, 151-156;
+    Conservatives, 156, 157;
+    two Transcendental products, 157-166;
+    first volume of Essays, 166;
+    History, 167, 168;
+    Self-reliance, 168, 169;
+    Compensation, 169;
+    other essays, 170;
+    Friendship, 170, 171;
+    Heroism, 172;
+    Over-Soul, 172-175;
+    house and income, 176;
+    son's death, 177, 178;
+    American and Oriental qualities, 179;
+    English virtues, 180;
+    Emancipation addresses in 1844, 181;
+    second series of Essays, 181-188;
+    Reformers, 188-191;
+    Carlyle's business, Poems published, 192;
+    a second trip to Europe, 193-196;
+    Representative Men, 196-209;
+    lectures again, 210;
+    Abolitionism, 211, 212;
+    Woman's Rights, 212, 213;
+    a New England Roman, 213, 214;
+    English Traits, 214-221;
+    a new magazine, 221;
+    clubs, 222, 223;
+    more poetry, 224;
+    Burns Festival, 224;
+    letter about various literary matters, 225-227;
+    Parker's death, Lincoln's Proclamation, 228;
+    Conduct of Life, 228-239;
+    Boston Hymn, 240;
+    "So nigh is grandeur to our dust," 241;
+    Atlantic contributions, 242;
+    Lincoln obsequies, 243;
+    Free Religion, 243, 244;
+    second Phi Beta Kappa oration, 244-246;
+    poem read to his son, 246-248;
+    Harvard Lectures, 249-255;
+    agriculture and science, 255, 256;
+    predictions, 257;
+    Books, 258;
+    Conversation, 258;
+    elements of Courage, 259;
+    Success, 260, 261;
+    on old men, 261, 262;
+    California trip, 263-268;
+    eating, 269;
+    smoking, 270;
+    conflagration, loss of memory, Froude banquet, third trip abroad, 272;
+    friendly gifts, 272-279;
+    editing Parnassus, 280-282;
+    failing powers, 283;
+    Hope everywhere, 284;
+    negations, 285;
+    Eloquence, Pessimism, 286;
+    Comedy, Plagiarism, 287;
+    lessons repeated, 288;
+    Sources of Inspiration, 289, 290;
+    Future Life, 290-292;
+    dissolving creed, 292;
+    Concord Bridge, 292, 293;
+    decline of faculties, Old South lecture, 294;
+    papers, 294, 295;
+    quiet pen, 295;
+    posthumous works, 295 _et seq.;_
+    the pedagogue, 297;
+    University of Virginia, 299;
+    indebtedness to Plutarch, 299-302;
+    slavery questions, 303-308;
+    Woman Question, 308;
+    patriotism, 308, 309;
+    nothing but a poet, 311;
+    antique words, 313;
+    self-revelation, 313, 314;
+    a great poet? 314-316;
+    humility, 317-319;
+    poetic favorites, 320, 321;
+    comparison with contemporaries, 321;
+    citizen of the universe, 322;
+    fascination of symbolism, 323;
+    realism, science, imaginative coloring, 324;
+    dangers of realistic poetry, 325;
+    range of subjects, 326;
+    bad rhymes, 327;
+    a trick of verse, 328;
+    one faultless poem, 332;
+    spell-bound readers, 333;
+    workshop, 334;
+    octosyllabic verse, atmosphere, 335, 336;
+    comparison with Wordsworth, 337;
+    and others, 338;
+    dissolving sentences, 339;
+    incompleteness, 339, 340;
+    personality, 341, 342;
+    last visits received, 343-345;
+    the red rose, 345;
+    forgetfulness, 346;
+    literary work of last years, 346, 347;
+    letters unanswered, 347;
+    hearing and sight, subjects that interested him, 348;
+    later hours, death, 349;
+    last rites, 350-356;
+    portrayal, 357-419;
+    atmosphere, 357;
+    books, distilled alcohol, 358;
+    physique, 359;
+    demeanor, 360;
+    hair and eyes, insensibility to music, 361;
+    daily habits, 362;
+    bodily infirmities, 362, 363;
+    voice, 363;
+    quiet laughter, want of manual dexterity, 364;
+    spade anecdote, memory,
+    ignorance of exact science, 305;
+    intuition and natural sagacity united, fastidiousness, 366;
+    impatience with small-minded worshippers, Frothingham's Biography, 367;
+    intimates, familiarity not invited, 368;
+    among fellow-townsmen, errand to earth, inherited traditions, 369;
+    sealed orders, 370, 371;
+    conscientious work, sacrifices for truth, essays instead of sermons,
+      372;
+    congregation at large, charm, optimism, 373;
+    financially straitened, 374;
+    lecture room limitations, 374, 375;
+    a Shakespeare parallel, 375, 376;
+    platform fascination, 376;
+    constructive power, 376, 377;
+    English experiences, lecture-peddling, 377;
+    a stove relinquished, utterance, an hour's weight, 378;
+    trumpet-sound, sweet seriousness, diamond drops, effect on Governor
+      Andrew, 379;
+    learning at second hand, 380;
+    the study of Goethe, 380;
+    a great quoter, no pedantry, 381;
+    list of authors referred to, 381, 382;
+    special indebtedness, 382;
+    penetration, borrowing, 383;
+    method of writing and its results, aided by others, 384;
+    sayings that seem family property, 385;
+    passages compared, 385-387;
+    the tributary streams, 388;
+    accuracy as to facts, 388;
+    personalities traceable in him, 389;
+    place as a thinker, 390;
+    Platonic anecdote, 391;
+    preƫxistence, 391, 392;
+    mind-moulds, 393;
+    relying on instinct, 394;
+    dangers of intuition, 395;
+    mysticism, 396;
+    Oriental side, 397;
+    transcendental mood, 398;
+    personal identity confused, 399;
+    a distorting mirror, 400;
+    distrust of science, 401-403;
+    style illustrated, 403, 404;
+    favorite words, 405;
+    royal imagery, 406;
+    comments on America, 406, 407;
+    common property of mankind, 407;
+    public spirit, solitary workshop, martyrdom from visitors, 408;
+    white shield invulnerable, 409;
+    religious attitude, 409-411;
+    spiritual influx, creed, 412;
+    clerical relations, 413;
+    Dr. Hague's criticism, 413, 414;
+    ameliorating religious influence, 414;
+    freedom, 415;
+    enduring verse and thought, 416, 417;
+    comparison with Jesus, 417;
+    sincere manhood, 418;
+    transparency, 419.
+
+  Emerson's Books:--
+    Conduct of Life, 229, 237.
+    English Traits:
+      the first European trip, 62;
+      published, 214;
+      analysis, 214-220;
+      penetration, 383;
+      Teutonic fire, 386.
+    Essays:
+      Dickens's allusion, 156;
+      collected, 166.
+    Essays, second series, 183.
+    Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 128, 295, 296, 347.
+    Letters and Social Aims, 210, 283, 284, 296.
+    May-day and Other Pieces, 161, 192, 224, 242, 257, 310, 318, 346.
+    Memoir of Margaret Fuller, 209.
+    Miscellanies, 302, 303.
+    Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 179.
+    Nature:
+      resemblance of extracts from Mary Moody Emerson, 17;
+      where written, 70;
+      the Many in One, 73;
+      first published, 91, 92, 373;
+      analysis, 93-107;
+      obscure, 108;
+      Beauty, 237.
+    Parnassus:
+      collected, 280;
+      Preface, 314;
+      allusion, 321.
+    Poems, 293, 310, 318, 339.
+    Representative Men, 196-209.
+    Selected Poems, 311, 347.
+    Society and Solitude, 250.
+
+  Emerson's Essays, Lectures, Sermons, Speeches, etc.:--
+    In general:
+      essays, 73, 88, 91, 92, 310;
+      income from lectures, 176, 191, 192;
+      lectures in England, 194-196;
+      long series, 372;
+      lecture-room, 374;
+      plays and lectures, 375;
+      double duty, 376, 377;
+      charm, 379.
+      (See _Emerson's Life, Lyceum_, etc.)
+    American Civilization, 307.
+    American Scholar, The, 107-115, 133, 188.
+    Anglo-Saxon Race, The, 210.
+    Anti-Slavery Address, New York, 210-212.
+    Anti-Slavery Lecture, Boston, 210, 211.
+    Aristocracy, 296.
+    Art, 166, 175, 253, 254.
+    Beauty, 235-237.
+    Behavior, 234.
+    Books, 257, 380.
+    Brown, John, 302, 305, 306.
+    Burke, Edmund, 73.
+    Burns, Robert, 224, 225, 307.
+    Carlyle, Thomas, 294, 302, 317.
+    Channing's Poem, preface, 262, 263, 403.
+    Character, 183, 295, 297.
+    Chardon Street and Bible Convention, 159, 302.
+    Circles, 166, 174, 175.
+    Civilization, 250-253.
+    Clubs, 258.
+    Comedy. 128.
+    Comic, The, 286, 287.
+    Commodity, 94.
+    Compensation, 166, 169.
+    Concord Fight, the anniversary speech, 292, 293.
+    Concord, Second Centennial Discourse, 84-86.
+    Conservative, The, 156, 157, 159.
+    Considerations by the Way, 235.
+    Courage, 259.
+    Culture, 232, 233.
+    Demonology, 128, 296.
+    Discipline, 97, 98.
+    Divinity School Address, 116-127, 131.
+    Doctrine of the Soul, 127.
+    Domestic Life, 254, 255.
+    Duty, 128.
+    Editorial Address, Mass. Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307.
+    Education, 296, 297.
+    Eloquence, 254;
+      second essay, 285, 286.
+    Emancipation in the British West Indies, 181, 303.
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 228, 307.
+    Emerson, Mary Moody, 295, 296, 302.
+    English Literature, 87.
+    Experience, 182.
+    Farming, 255, 256.
+    Fate, 228-330.
+    Fortune of the Republic, 294, 302, 307-309.
+    Fox, George, 73.
+    France, 196.
+    Free Religious Association, 243, 302, 307.
+    Friendship, 166, 170.
+    Froude, James Anthony, after-dinner speech, 271.
+    Fugitive Slave Law, 303, 304.
+    Genius, 127.
+    Gifts, 184, 185.
+    Goethe, or the Writer, 208, 209.
+    Greatness, 288, 346.
+    Harvard Commemoration, 307.
+    Heroism, 166, 172.
+    Historical Discourse, at Concord, 303.
+    Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England, 147, 165, 296, 302.
+    History, 166, 167.
+    Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214, 295, 302.
+    Home, 127.
+    Hope, 284, 285.
+    Howard University, speech, 263.
+    Human Culture, 87.
+    Idealism, 98-100.
+    Illusions, 235, 239.
+    Immortality, 266, 290-292, 354.
+    Inspiration, 289.
+    Intellect, 166, 175.
+    Kansas Affairs, 305.
+    Kossuth, 307.
+    Language, 95-97.
+    Lincoln, Abraham, funeral remarks, 242, 243, 307.
+    Literary Ethics, 131-136.
+    Lord's Supper, 57-60, 303.
+    Love, 127,128,166,170. (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+    Luther, 73.
+    Manners, 183, 234.
+    Man of Letters, The, 296, 298.
+    Man the Reformer, 142, 143.
+    Method of Nature, The, 136-141.
+    Michael Angelo, 73, 75.
+    Milton, 73, 75.
+    Montaigne, or the Skeptic, 202-204.
+    Napoleon, or the Man of the World, 206-209.
+    Natural History of the Intellect, 249, 268, 347.
+    Nature (the essay), 185, 186, 398.
+    New England Reformers, 188-191, 385.
+    Nominalism and Realism, 188.
+    Old Age, 261, 262.
+    Over-Soul, The, 166, 172-175, 398, 411.
+    Parker, Theodore, 228, 306.
+    Perpetual Forces, 297.
+    Persian Poetry, 224.
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 347.
+    Philosophy of History, 87.
+    Plato, 198-200;
+      New Readings, 200.
+    Plutarch, 295, 299-302.
+    Plutarch's Morals, introduction, 262.
+    Poet, The, 181, 182.
+    Poetry, 210.
+    Poetry and Imagination, 283;
+      subdivisions: Bards and Trouveurs,
+      Creation, Form, Imagination,
+      Melody, Morals, Rhythm, Poetry,
+      Transcendency, Veracity, 283, 284;
+      quoted, 325.
+    Politics, 186, 187.
+    Power, 230, 231.
+    Preacher, The, 294, 298.
+    Professions of Divinity, Law, and Medicine, 41.
+    Progress of Culture, The, 244, 288.
+    Prospects, 101-103.
+    Protest, The, 127.
+    Providence Sermon, 130.
+    Prudence, 166, 171, 172.
+    Quotation and Originality, 287, 288.
+    Relation of Man to the Globe, 73.
+    Resources, 286.
+    Right Hand of Fellowship, The, at Concord, 56.
+    Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 295, 302.
+    Scholar, The, 296, 299.
+    School, The, 127.
+    Scott, speech, 302, 307.
+    Self-Reliance, 166, 168, 411.
+    Shakespeare, or the Poet, 204-206.
+    Social Aims, 285.
+    Soldiers' Monument, at Concord, 303.
+    Sovereignty of Ethics, The, 295, 297, 298.
+    Spirit, 100, 101.
+    Spiritual Laws, 166, 168.
+    Success, 260, 261.
+    Sumner Assault, 304.
+    Superlatives, 295, 297.
+    Swedenborg, or the Mystic, 201, 202, 206.
+    Thoreau, Henry D., 228, 295, 302.
+    Times, The, 142-145.
+    Tragedy, 127.
+    Transcendentalist, The, 145-155, 159.
+    Universality of the Moral Sentiment, 66.
+    University of Virginia, address, 347.
+    War, 88, 303.
+    Water, 73.
+    Wealth, 231, 232.
+    What is Beauty? 74, 94, 95.
+    Woman, 307, 308.
+    Woman's Rights, 212, 213.
+    Work and Days, 256, 312, 406, 407.
+    Worship, 235.
+    Young American, The, 166, 180, 181.
+
+  Emerson's Poems:--
+    In general: inspiration from nature, 22, 96;
+      poetic rank in college, 45, 46;
+      prose-poetry and philosophy, 91, 93;
+      annual _afflatus_, in America, 136, 137;
+      first volume, 192;
+      five immortal poets, 202;
+      ideas repeated, 239;
+      true position, 311 _et seq.; in carmine veritas_, 313;
+      litanies, 314;
+      arithmetic, 321, 322;
+      fascination, 323;
+      celestial imagery, 324;
+      tin pans, 325;
+      realism, 326;
+      metrical difficulties, 327, 335;
+      blemishes, 328;
+      careless rhymes, 329;
+      delicate descriptions, 331;
+      pathos, 332;
+      fascination, 333;
+      unfinished, 334, 339, 340;
+      atmosphere, 335;
+      subjectivity, 336;
+      sympathetic illusion, 337;
+      resemblances, 337, 338;
+      rhythms, 340;
+      own order, 341, 342;
+      always a poet, 346.
+      (See _Emerson's Life, Milton, Poets_, etc.)
+    Adirondacs, The, 242, 309, 327.
+    Blight, 402.
+    Boston, 346, 407, 408.
+    Boston Hymn, 211, 221, 241, 242.
+    Brahma, 221, 242, 396, 397.
+    Celestial Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+    Class Day Poem, 45-47.
+    Concord Hymn, 87, 332.
+    Daemonic Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+    Days, 221, 242, 257, 312;
+      _pleachƩd_, 313.
+    Destiny, 332.
+    Each and All, 73, 74, 94, 331.
+    Earth-Song, 327.
+    Elements, 242.
+    Fate, 159, 387.
+    Flute, The, 399.
+    Good-by, Proud World, 129, 130, 338.
+    Hamatreya, 327.
+    Harp, The, 320, 321, 329, 330. (See _Aeolian Harp_.)
+    Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214.
+    Humble Bee, 46, 74, 75, 128, 272, 326, 331, 338.
+    Initial Love, 170, 387. (Three Loves.)
+    In Memoriam, 19, 89.
+    Latin Translations, 43.
+    May Day, 242;
+      changes, 311, 333.
+    Merlin, 318, 319. (Merlin's Song.)
+    Mithridates, 331.
+    Monadnoc, 322, 331;
+      alterations, 366.
+    My Garden, 242.
+    Nature and Life, 242.
+    Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces, 242.
+    Ode inscribed to W.H. Channing, 211, 212.
+    Poet, The, 317-320, 333.
+    Preface to Nature, 105.
+    Problem, The, 159, 161, 253, 284, 326, 337, 380.
+    Quatrains, 223, 242.
+    Rhodora, The, 74, 94, 95, 129.
+    Romany Girl, The, 221.
+    Saadi, 221, 242.
+    Sea-Shore, 333, 339.
+    Snow-Storm, 331, 338, 339.
+    Solution, 320.
+    Song for Knights of Square Table, 42.
+    Sphinx, The, 113, 159, 243, 330, 398.
+    Terminus, 221, 242;
+      read to his son, 246-248, 363.
+    Test, The, 201, 202, 320.
+    Threnody, 178, 333.
+    Titmouse, The, 221, 326.
+    Translations, 242, 399.
+    Uriel, 326, 331, 398.
+    Voluntaries, 241.
+    Waldeinsamkeit, 221.
+    Walk, The, 402.
+    Woodnotes, 46, 159, 331, 338.
+    World-Soul, The, 331.
+
+  Emersoniana, 358.
+
+  Emerson, Thomas, of Ipswich, 38.
+
+  Emerson, Waldo, child of Ralph Waldo:
+    death, 177, 178;
+    anecdote, 265.
+
+  Emerson, William, grandfather of Ralph Waldo:
+    minister of Concord, 8-10, 14;
+    building the Manse, 70;
+    patriotism, 72.
+
+  Emerson, William, father of Ralph Waldo:
+    minister, in Harvard and Boston, 10-14;
+    editorship, 26, 32, 33;
+    the parsonage, 37, 42;
+    death, 43.
+
+  Emerson, William, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37, 39, 49, 53.
+
+  England:
+    first visit, 62-65;
+    Lake Windermere, 70;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    the virtues of the people, 179, 180;
+    a second visit, 192 _et seq.;_
+    notabilities 195;
+    the lectures, 196;
+    Stonehenge, 215;
+    the aristocracy, 215;
+    matters wrong, 260;
+    Anglo-Saxon race, trade and liberty, 304;
+    lustier life, 335;
+    language, 352;
+    lecturing, a key, 377;
+    smouldering fire, 385. (See _America, Europe_, etc.)
+
+  Enthusiasm:
+    need of, 143;
+    weakness, 154.
+
+  Epicurus, agreement with, 301.
+
+  Episcopacy:
+    in Boston, 28, 34, 52;
+    church in Newton, 68;
+    at Hanover, 132;
+    quotation from liturgy, 354;
+    burial service, 356. (See _Calvinism, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Esquimau, allusion, 167.
+
+  Establishment, party of the, 147. (See _Puritanism, Religion,
+    Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Eternal, relations to the, 297. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Europe:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62-65;
+    return, 72;
+    the Muses, 114;
+    debt to the East, 120;
+    famous gentlemen, 184;
+    second visit, 193-196;
+    weary of Napoleon, 207;
+    return, 210;
+    conflict possible, 218;
+    third visit, 271-279;
+    cast-out passion for, 308. (See _America, England, France_, etc.)
+
+  Everett, Edward:
+    on Tudor, 28;
+    literary rank, 33;
+    preaching, 52;
+    influence, 148.
+
+  Evolution, taught in "Nature," 105, 106.
+
+  Eyeball, transparent, 398.
+
+
+  Faith:
+    lacking in America, 143,
+    building cathedrals, 253. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Fine, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Fire, illustration, 386. (See _England, France_, etc.)
+
+  Forbes, John M., connected with the Emerson family, 263-265;
+    his letter, 263.
+
+  Foster, John, minister of Brighton, 15.
+
+  Fourth-of-July, orations, 386. (See _America_, etc.)
+
+  Fox, George, essay on, 73.
+
+  France:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    Revolution, 80;
+    tired of Napoleon, 207, 208;
+    realism, 326;
+    wrath, 385, 386. (See _Carlyle, England, Europe_, etc.)
+
+  Francis, Convers, at a party, 149.
+
+  Franklin, Benjamin:
+    birthplace, 37;
+    allusion, 184;
+    characteristics, 189;
+    Poor Richard, 231;
+    quoted, 236;
+    maxims, 261;
+    fondness for Plutarch, 382;
+    bequest, 407.
+
+  Fraunhofer, Joseph, optician, 230, 324.
+
+  Frazer's Magazine:
+    "The Mud," 79;
+    Sartor Resartus, 81. (See _Carlyle_.)
+
+  Freeman, James, minister of King's Chapel, 11, 12, 52.
+  Free Trade, Athenaeum banquet, 220.
+
+  Friendship, C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 23, 77.
+
+  Frothingham, Nathaniel L., account of Emerson's mother, 13.
+
+  Frothingham, Octavius Brooks: Life of Ripley, 165;
+    an unpublished manuscript, 365-367.
+
+  Fuller, Margaret:
+    borrowed sermon, 130;
+    at a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159, 160, 162;
+    Memoir, 209;
+    causing laughter, 364;
+    mosaic Biography, 368.
+
+  Furness, William Henry:
+    on the Emerson family, 14;
+    Emerson's funeral, 350, 353.
+
+  Future, party of the, 147.
+
+
+  Galton, Francis, composite portraits, 232.
+
+  Gardiner, John Sylvester John:
+    allusion, 26;
+    leadership in Boston, 28;
+    Anthology Society, 32.
+    (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+  Gardner, John Lowell, recollections of Emerson's boyhood, 38-42.
+
+  Gardner, S.P., garden, 38.
+
+  Genealogy, survival of the fittest, 3.
+    (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Gentleman's Magazine, 30.
+
+  Gentleman, the, 183.
+
+  Geography, illustration, 391.
+
+  German:
+    study of, 48, 49, 78, 380;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    scholarship, 148;
+    oracles, 206;
+    writers unread, 208;
+    philosophers, 380;
+    professors, 391.
+
+  Germany, a visit, 225, 226.
+    (See _Europe, France, Goethe_, etc.)
+
+  Gifts, 185.
+
+  Gilfillan, George:
+    on Emerson's preaching, 65;
+    Emerson's physique, 360.
+
+  Gilman, Arthur, on the Concord home, 83.
+
+  Glasgow, the rectorship, 280.
+
+  God:
+    the universal spirit, 68, 69, 94;
+    face to face, 92, 93;
+    teaching the human mind, 98, 99;
+    aliens from, 101;
+    in us, 139-141;
+    his thought, 146;
+    belief, 170;
+    seen by man, 174;
+    divine offer, 176;
+    writing by grace, 182;
+    presence, 243;
+    tribute to Great First Cause, 267;
+    perplexity about, 410;
+    ever-blessed One, 411;
+    mirrored, 412.
+    (See _Christianity, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Goethe:
+    called _Mr_., 31;
+    dead, 63;
+    Clarke's essay, 79;
+    generalizations, 148;
+    influence, 150;
+    on Spinoza, 174, 175;
+    rank as a poet, 202, 320;
+    lovers, 226;
+    rare union, 324;
+    his books read, 380, 381;
+    times quoted, 382.
+    (See _German_, etc.)
+
+  Goldsmith, Oliver, his Vicar of Wakefield, 9, 10, 15.
+
+  Good, the study of, 301.
+
+  Goodwin, H.B., Concord minister, 56.
+
+  Gould, Master of Latin School, 39.
+
+  Gould, Thomas R., sculptor, 68.
+
+  Gourdin, John Gaillard Keith and Robert, in college, 47.
+
+  Government, abolition of, 141.
+
+  Grandmother's Review, 30.
+
+  Gray, Thomas, Elegy often quoted, 316, 317, 416.
+
+  Greece:
+    poetic teaching, 121;
+    allusion, 108.
+
+  Greek:
+    Emerson's love for, 43, 44;
+    in Harvard, 49;
+    poets, 253;
+    moralist, 299;
+    Bryant's translation, 378;
+    philosophers, 391.
+    (See _Homer_, etc.)
+
+  Greenough, Horatio, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+  Grimm, Hermann, 226.
+
+  Guelfs and Ghibellines, illustration, 47.
+
+
+  Hafiz, times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Persia_.)
+
+  Hague, William, essay, 413.
+
+  Haller, Albert von, rare union, 324.
+
+  Harvard, Mass., William Emerson's settlement, 10, 11.
+
+  Harvard University:
+    the Bulkeley gift, 6;
+    William Emerson's graduation, 10;
+    list of graduates, 12;
+    Emerson's brothers, 19, 21;
+    Register, 21, 24, 385, 401;
+    Hillard, 24, 25;
+    Kirkland's presidency, 26, 27;
+    Gardner, 39-41;
+    Emerson's connection, 44-49;
+    the Boylston prizes, 46;
+    Southern students, 47;
+    graduates at Andover, 48;
+    Divinity School, 51, 53;
+    a New England centre, 52;
+    Bowen's professorship, 103;
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 115, 133, 188, 244;
+    Divinity School address, 116-132;
+    degree conferred, 246;
+    lectures, 249;
+    library, 257;
+    last Divinity address, 294;
+    Commemoration, 307;
+    singing class, 361;
+    graduates, 411.
+    (See _Cambridge_.)
+
+  Haskins, David Green, at Emerson's funeral, 356.
+
+  Haskins, Ruth (Emerson's mother), 10, 13, 14.
+  Haughty, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Hawthorne, Nathaniel:
+    his Mosses, 70;
+    "dream-peopled solitude," 86;
+    at the club, 223;
+    view of English life, 335;
+    grave, 356;
+    biography, 368.
+
+  Hazlitt, William:
+    British Poets, 21.
+
+  Health, inspiration, 289.
+
+  Hebrew Language, study, 48. (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Hedge, Frederic Henry:
+    at a party, 149;
+    quoted, 383.
+
+  Henry VII., tombs, 415.
+
+  Herbert, George:
+    Poem on Man, 102;
+    parallel, 170;
+    poetry, 281;
+    a line quoted, 345.
+
+  Herder, Johann Gottfried, allusion, 16.
+
+  Heredity:
+    Emerson's belief, 1, 2;
+    in Emerson family, 4, 19;
+    Whipple on, 389;
+    Jonson, 393.
+
+  Herrick, Robert, poetry, 281.
+
+  Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. (See _Emerson's Books_,--Nature.)
+
+  Hilali, The Flute, 399.
+
+  Hillard, George Stillman:
+    in college, 24, 25;
+    his literary place, 33;
+    aid, 276.
+
+  Hindoo Scriptures, 199, 200. (See _Bible, India_, etc.)
+
+  History, how it should be written, 168.
+
+  Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood:
+    reference to, 223;
+    on the Burns speech, 225;
+    kindness, 273, 274, 276-279;
+    at Emerson's death-bed, 349;
+    funeral address, 351-353.
+
+  Hoar, Samuel:
+    statesman, 72;
+    tribute, 213, 214.
+
+  Holland, description of the Dutch, 217.
+
+  Holley, Horace, prayer, 267.
+
+  Holmes, John, a pupil of Emerson, 50.
+
+  Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
+    memories of Dr. Ripley, 15;
+    of C.C. Emerson, 20, 21;
+    familiarity with Cambridge and its college, 45;
+    erroneous quotation from, 251, 252;
+    jest erroneously attributed to, 400, 401.
+
+  Holy Ghost, "a new born bard of the," 123. (See _Christ, God,
+    Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Homer:
+    poetic rank, 202, 320;
+    plagiarism, 205;
+    Iliad, 253;
+    allusion, 315;
+    tin pans, 325;
+    times quoted, 382. (See _Greek_, etc.)
+
+  Homer, Jonathan, minister of Newton, 15.
+
+  Hooper, Mrs. Ellen, The Dial, 159, 160.
+
+  Hope:
+    lacking in America, 143;
+    in every essay, 284.
+
+  Horace:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Ars Poetica, 316.
+
+  Horses, Flora Temple's time, 388.
+
+  Howard University, speech, 263.
+
+  Howe, Samuel Gridley, the philanthropist, 223.
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, meeting Emerson, 195.
+
+  Hunt, William, the painter, 223.
+
+
+  Idealism, 98-100, 146, 150.
+
+  Idealists:
+    Ark full, 191;
+    Platonic sense, 391.
+
+  Imagination:
+    the faculty, 141;
+    defined, 237, 238;
+    essay, 283;
+    coloring life, 324.
+
+  Imbecility, 231.
+
+  Immortality, 262. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Incompleteness, in poetry, 339.
+
+  India:
+    poetic models, 338;
+    idea of preƫxistence, 391;
+    Brahmanism, 397. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma.)
+
+  Indians:
+    in history of Concord, 71;
+    Algonquins, 72.
+
+  Inebriation, subject in Monthly Anthology, 30.
+
+  Insects, defended, 190.
+
+  Inspiration:
+    of Nature, 22, 96, 141;
+    urged, 146.
+
+  Instinct, from God or Devil, 393.
+
+  Intellect, confidence in, 134.
+
+  Intuition, 394.
+
+  Ipswich, Mass., 3, 4, 8.
+
+  Ireland, Alexander:
+    glimpses of Emerson, 44, 64, 65:
+    reception, 193,194;
+    on Carlyle, 196;
+    letter from Miss Peabody, 317;
+    quoting Whitman, 344;
+    quoted, 350.
+
+  Irving, Washington, 33.
+
+  Italy:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+    Naples, 113.
+
+
+  Jackson, Charles, garden, 38.
+
+  Jackson, Dr. Charles Thomas, anaesthesia, 403.
+
+  Jackson, Miss Lydia, reading Carlyle, 81. (See _Mrs. Emerson_.)
+
+  Jahn, Johann, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+  Jameson, Anna, new book, 131.
+
+  Jesus:
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    a divine manifestation, 411;
+    followers, 417;
+    and Emerson, 419. (See _Bible, Christ, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+  Joachim, the violinist, 225, 226.
+
+  Johnson, Samuel, literary style, 29.
+
+  Jonson, Ben:
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    a phrase, 300;
+    _traduction_, 393.
+    (See _Heredity_, etc.)
+
+  Journals, as a method of work, 384.
+
+  Jupiter Scapin, 207.
+
+  Jury Trial, and dinners, 216.
+
+  Justice, the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+
+  Juvenal:
+    allusion, 22;
+    precept from heaven, 252.
+
+
+  Kalamazoo, Mich., allusion, 388.
+
+  Kamschatka, allusion, 167.
+
+  Keats, John:
+    quoted, 92;
+    Ode to a Nightingale, 316;
+    _faint, swoon_, 405.
+
+  King, the, illustration, 74.
+
+  Kirkland, John Thornton:
+    Harvard presidency, 26, 52;
+    memories, 27.
+
+  Koran, allusion, 198.
+    (See _Bible, God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+
+  Labor:
+    reform, 141;
+    dignity, 142.
+
+  Lacenaire, evil instinct, 392.
+
+  Laertius, Diogenes, 390, 391.
+
+  La Harpe, Jean Francois, on Plutarch, 301.
+
+  Lamarck, theories, 166.
+
+  Lamb, Charles, Carlyle's criticism, 196.
+
+  Landor, Walter Savage, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+  Landscape, never painted, 339, 240.
+    (See _Pictures, etc_.)
+
+  Language:
+    its symbolism, 95-97;
+    an original, 394.
+
+  Latin:
+    Peter Bulkeley's scholarship, 7;
+    translation, 24, 25;
+    Emerson's Translations, 43, 44.
+
+  Laud, Archbishop, 6.
+
+  Law, William, mysticism, 396.
+
+  Lawrence, Mass., allusion, 44.
+
+  Lecturing, given up, 295.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays, Lectures_, etc.)
+
+  Leibnitz, 386.
+
+  Leroux, Pierre, preƫxistance, 391.
+
+  Letters, inspiration, 289.
+
+  Lincoln, Abraham, character, 307.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Linnaeus, illustration, 323, 324.
+
+  Litanies, in Emerson, 314.
+    (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+  Literature:
+    aptitude for, 2, 3;
+    activity in 1820, 147.
+
+  Little Classics, edition, 347.
+
+  Liverpool, Eng., a visit, 193, 194.
+    (See _England, Europe, Scotland_, etc.)
+
+  Locke, John, allusion, 16, 111.
+
+  London, England.:
+    Tower Stairs, 63;
+    readers, 194;
+    sights, 221;
+    travellers, 308;
+    wrath, 385.
+    (See _England_, etc.)
+
+  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
+    allusions, 31, 33;
+    Saturday Club, 222, 223;
+    burial, 346.
+
+  Lord, Nathan, President of Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+  Lord's Supper, Emerson's doubts, 57-61.
+
+  Lothrop & Co., publishers, 83.
+
+  Louisville, Ky., Dr. Clarke's residence, 78-80.
+
+  Lounsbury, Professor, Chaucer letter, 205.
+
+  Love:
+    in America, 143;
+    the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+
+  Lowell, Charles:
+    minister of the West Church, 11, 12, 52;
+    on Kirkland, 27.
+
+  Lowell, F.C., generosity, 276.
+
+  Lowell, James Russell:
+    an allusion, 33;
+    on The American Scholar, 107;
+    editorship, 221;
+    club, 223;
+    on the Burns speech, 225;
+    on Emerson's bearing, 360, 361;
+    Hawthorne biography, 368;
+    on lectures, 379.
+
+  Lowell, Mass., factories, 44.
+
+  Luther, Martin:
+    lecture, 73;
+    his conservatism, 298;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Lyceum, the:
+    a pulpit, 88;
+    New England, 192;
+    a sacrifice, 378.
+    (See _Lecturing, Emerson's Lectures_, etc.)
+
+  Lycurgus, 306. (See _Greece_.)
+
+
+  Mackintosh, Sir James, an allusion, 16.
+
+  Macmillan's Magazine, 414.
+
+  Malden, Mass.:
+    Joseph Emerson's ministry, 8;
+    diary, 17.
+
+  Man:
+    a fable about, 109, 110;
+    faith in, 122;
+    apostrophe, 140.
+
+  Manchester, Eng.:
+    visit, 194, 195;
+    banquet, 220.
+    (See _England_, etc.)
+
+  Marlowe, Christopher, expressions, 404.
+
+  Marvell, Andrew:
+    reading by C.C. Emerson, 21;
+    on the Dutch, 217;
+    verse, 338.
+
+  Mary, Queen, her martyrs, 418.
+
+  Massachusetts Historical Society:
+    tribute to C.C. Emerson, 21;
+    quality of its literature, 84;
+    on Carlyle, 294.
+
+  Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307, 411.
+  Materialism, 146, 391.
+    (See _Religion_.)
+
+  Mather, Cotton:
+    his Magnalia, 5-7;
+    on Concord discord, 57;
+    on New England Melancholy, 216;
+    a borrower, 381.
+
+  Mathew, Father, disciples, 368.
+
+  Mayhew, Jonathan, Boston minister, 51.
+
+  Melioration, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Mendon, Mass., Joseph Emerson's ministry, 4.
+
+  Mephistopheles, Goethe's creation, 208.
+
+  Merrimac River, 71.
+
+  Metaphysics, indifference to, 249.
+
+  Methodism, in Boston, 56.
+    (See _Father Taylor_.)
+
+  Michael Angelo:
+    allusions, 73, 75;
+    on external beauty, 99;
+    course, 260;
+    filled with God, 284;
+    on immortality, 290;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Middlesex Agricultural Association, 235.
+    (See _Agriculture, Emerson's Essays._)
+
+  Middlesex Association, Emerson admitted, 53.
+
+  Miller's Retrospect, 34.
+
+  Milton, John:
+    influence in New England, 16;
+    quotation, 24;
+    essay, 73, 75;
+    compared with Emerson, 76, 77;
+    Lycidas, 178;
+    supposed speech, 220;
+    diet, 270, 271;
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    Arnold's citation, Logic, Rhetoric, 315;
+    popularity, 316;
+    quoted, 324;
+    tin pans, 325;
+    inventor of harmonies, 328;
+    Lycidas, 333;
+    Comus, 338;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    precursor, quotation, 415.
+
+  Miracles:
+    false impression, 121, 122;
+    and idealism, 146;
+    theories, 191;
+    St. Januarius, 217;
+    objections, 244.
+    (See _Bible, Christ, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Modena, Italy, Emerson's visit, 63.
+
+  Monadnoc, Mount, 70.
+
+  Montaigne:
+    want of religion, 300;
+    great authority, 380;
+    times quoted, 382.
+
+  Montesquieu, on immortality, 291.
+
+  Monthly Anthology:
+    Wm. Emerson's connection, 13, 26;
+    precursor of North American Review, 28, 29;
+    character, 30, 31;
+    Quincy's tribute, 31;
+    Society formed, 32;
+    career, 33;
+    compared with The Dial, 160.
+
+  Moody Family, of York, Me., 8,10.
+
+  Morals, in Plutarch, 301.
+
+  Morison, John Hopkins, on Emerson's preaching, 67.
+
+  Mormons, 264, 268.
+
+  Mother-wit, a favorite expression, 404, 405.
+
+  Motley, John Lothrop, 33, 223.
+
+  Mount Auburn, strolls, 40.
+
+  Movement, party of the, 147.
+
+  Munroe & Co., publishers, 81.
+
+  Music:
+    church, 306;
+    inaptitude for, 361;
+    great composers, 401.
+
+  Musketaquid River, 22, 70, 71.
+
+  Mysticism:
+    unintelligible, 390;
+    Emerson's, 396.
+
+
+  Napoleon:
+    allusion, 197;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Napoleon III., 225.
+
+  Nation, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+  Native Bias, 288.
+
+  Nature:
+    in undress, 72;
+    solicitations, 110;
+    not truly studied, 135;
+    great men, 199;
+    tortured, 402.
+    (See _Emerson's Books, Emerson's Essays_, etc.)
+
+  Negations, to be shunned, 285.
+
+  New Bedford, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 52, 67.
+
+  Newbury, Mass., Edward Emerson's deaconship, 8.
+
+  New England:
+    families, 2, 3, 5;
+    Peter Bulkeley's coming, 6;
+    clerical virtues, 9;
+    Church, 14;
+    literary sky, 33;
+    domestic service, 34, 35;
+    two centres, 52;
+    an ideal town, 70, 71;
+    the Delphi, 72;
+    Carlyle invited, 83;
+    anniversaries, 84;
+    town records, 85;
+    Genesis, 102;
+    effect of Nature, 106;
+    boys and girls, 163;
+    Massachusetts, Connecticut River, 172;
+    lyceums, 192;
+    melancholy, 216;
+    New Englanders and Old, 220;
+    meaning of a word, 296, 297;
+    eyes, 325;
+    life, 325, 335;
+    birthright, 364;
+    a thorough New Englander, 406;
+    Puritan, 409;
+    theologians, 410;
+    Jesus wandering in, 419.
+    (See _America, England_, etc.)
+
+  Newspapers:
+    defaming the noble, 145;
+    in Shakespeare's day, 204.
+
+  Newton, Mass.:
+    its minister, 15;
+    Episcopal Church, 68.
+    (See _Rice_.)
+
+  Newton, Sir Isaac, times quoted, 382.
+
+  Newton, Stuart, sketches, 130.
+
+  New World, gospel, 371. (See _America_.)
+
+  New York:
+    Brevoort House, 246;
+    Genealogical Society, 413.
+
+  Niagara, visit, 263.
+
+  Nidiver, George, ballad, 259.
+
+  Nightingale, Florence, 220.
+
+  Nithsdale, Eng., mountains, 78.
+
+  Non-Resistance, 141.
+
+  North American Review:
+    its predecessor, 28, 29, 33;
+    the writers, 34;
+    Emerson's contributions, 73;
+    Ethics, 294, 295;
+    Bryant's article, 328.
+
+  Northampton, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 53.
+
+  Norton, Andrews:
+    literary rank, 34;
+    professorship, 52.
+
+  Norton, Charles Eliot:
+    editor of Correspondence, 82;
+    on Emerson's genius, 373.
+
+
+  Old Manse, The:
+    allusion, 70;
+    fire, 271-279.
+    (See _Concord_.)
+
+  Oliver, Daniel, in Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+  Optimism:
+    in philosophy, 136;
+    "innocent luxuriance," 211;
+    wanted by the young, 373.
+
+  Oriental:
+    genius, 120;
+    spirit in Emerson, 179.
+
+  Orpheus, allusion, 319.
+
+
+  Paine, R.T., JR., quoted, 31.
+
+  Palfrey, John Gorham:
+    literary rank, 34;
+    professorship, 52.
+
+  Pan, the deity, 140.
+
+  Pantheism:
+    in Wordsworth and Nature, 103;
+    dreaded, 141;
+    Emerson's, 410, 411.
+
+  Paris, Trance:
+    as a residence, 78;
+    allusion, 167;
+    salons, 184;
+    visit, 196, 308.
+
+  Parker, Theodore:
+    a right arm of freedom, 127;
+    at a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159, 160;
+    editorship, 193;
+    death, 228;
+    essence of Christianity, 306;
+    biography, 368;
+    on Emerson's position, 411.
+
+  Parkhurst, John, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+  Parr, Samuel, allusion, 28.
+
+  Past, party of the, 147.
+
+  Peabody, Andrew Preston, literary rank, 34.
+
+  Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer:
+    her Aesthetic Papers, 88;
+    letter to Mr. Ireland, 317.
+
+  Peirce, Benjamin, mathematician, 223.
+
+  Pelagianisin, 51.
+    (See _Religion_.)
+
+  Pepys, Samuel, allusion, 12.
+
+  Pericles, 184, 253.
+
+  Persia, poetic models, 338.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems, Saadi_).
+
+  Pessimism, 286.
+    (See _Optimism_).
+
+  Philadelphia, Pa., society, 184.
+
+  Philanthropy, activity in 1820, 147.
+
+  Philolaus, 199.
+
+  Pie, fondness for, 269.
+
+  Pierce, John:
+    the minister of Brookline, 11;
+    "our clerical Pepys," 12.
+
+  Pindar, odes, 253.
+    (See _Greek, Homer_, etc.)
+
+  Plagiarism, 205, 206, 287, 288, 384.
+    (See _Quotations, Mather_, etc.)
+
+  Plato:
+    influence on Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+    over Emerson, 22, 52, 173, 188, 299, 301;
+    youthful essay, 74;
+    Alcott's study, 150;
+    reading, 197;
+    borrowed thought, 205, 206;
+    Platonic idea, 222;
+    a Platonist, 267;
+    saints of Platonism, 298;
+    academy inscription, 365;
+    great authority, 380;
+    times quoted, 382;
+    Symposium and Phaedrus quoted, 387;
+    _tableity_, preƫxistence, 391;
+    Diogenes dialogue, 401;
+    a Platonist, 411.
+    (See _Emerson's Books_, and _Essays, Greek_, etc.)
+
+  Plotinus:
+    influence over Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+    ashamed of his body, 99;
+    motto, 105;
+    opinions, 173, 174;
+    studied, 380.
+
+  Plutarch:
+    allusion, 22;
+    his Lives, 50;
+    study, 197;
+    on immortality, 291;
+    influence over Emerson, 299 _et seq_.;
+    his great authority, 380;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    Emerson on, 383;
+    imagery quoted, 385;
+    style, 405.
+
+  Plymouth, Mass.:
+    letters written, 78, 79;
+    marriage, 83.
+
+  Poetry:
+    as an inspirer, 290;
+    Milton on, 315.
+    (See _Shakespeare_, etc.)
+
+  Poets:
+    list in Parnassus, 281;
+    comparative popularity, 316, 317;
+    consulting Emerson, 408.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_).
+
+  Politics:
+    activity in 1820, 147;
+    in Saturday Club, 259.
+
+  Pomeroy, Jesse, allusion, 393.
+
+  Pope, Alexander, familiar lines, 316
+
+  Porphyry:
+    opinions, 173, 174;
+    studied, 380.
+
+  Porto Rico, E.B. Emerson's death, 19.
+
+  Power, practical, 259.
+
+  Prayer:
+    not enough, 138, 139;
+    anecdotes, 267.
+    (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Preaching, a Christian blessing, 123.
+  Preƫxistence, 391.
+
+  Presbyterianism, in Scotland, 409.
+
+  Prescott, William, the Judge's mansion, 38.
+
+  Prescott, William Hickling:
+    rank, 33;
+    Conquest of Mexico, 38.
+
+  Prior, Matthew, 30.
+
+  Proclus, influence, 173, 380.
+
+  Prometheus, 209.
+
+  Prospects, for man, 101-103.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Protestantism, its idols, 28.
+    (See _Channing, Religion, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Psammetichus, an original language, 394.
+    (See _Heredity, Language_, etc.)
+
+  Punch, London, 204.
+
+  Puritans, rear guard, 15.
+    (See _Calvinism_, etc.)
+
+  Puritanism:
+    relaxation from, 30;
+    after-clap, 268;
+    in New England, 409.
+    (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+  Putnam's Magazine, on Samuel Hoar, 213, 214.
+
+  Pythagoras:
+    imagery quoted, 385;
+    preƫxistence, 391.
+
+
+  Quakers, seeing only broad-brims, 218.
+
+  Quincy, Josiah:
+    History of Boston Athenaeum, 31;
+    tribute to the Anthology, 32, 33;
+    memories of Emerson, 45-47;
+    old age, 261.
+
+  Quotations, 381-383.
+    (See _Plagiarism_, etc.)
+
+
+  Raleigh, Sir Walter, verse, 338.
+
+  Raphael, his Transfiguration, 134.
+    (See _Allston, Painters_, etc.)
+
+  Rats, illustration, 167, 168.
+
+  Reed, Sampson, his Growth of the Mind, 80.
+
+  Reforms, in America, 141-145.
+
+  Reformers, fairness towards, 156, 157, 188-192.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery, John Brown_.)
+
+  Religion:
+    opinions of Wm. Emerson and others, 11-13;
+    nature the symbol of spirit, 95;
+    pleas for independence, 117;
+    universal sentiment, 118-120;
+    public rites, 152;
+    Church of England, 219;
+    of the future, 235;
+    relative positions towards, 409, 410;
+    Trinity, 411;
+    Emerson's belief, 412-415;
+    bigotry modified, 414.
+    (See _Calvinism, Channing, Christ, Emerson's Life, Essays_,
+    and _Poems, Episcopacy, God, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Republicanism, spiritual, 36.
+
+  Revolutionary War:
+    Wm. Emerson's service, 8, 9;
+    subsequent confusion, 25, 32;
+    Concord's part, 71, 72, 292, 293.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 228.
+
+  Rhythm, 328, 329, 340.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_, etc.)
+
+  Rice, Alexander H., anecdote, 68, 69, 346.
+    (See _Newton_.)
+
+  Richard Plantagenet, 197.
+
+  Ripley, Ezra:
+    minister of Concord, 10;
+    Emerson's sketch, 14-16;
+    garden, 42;
+    colleague, 56;
+    residence, 70.
+
+  Ripley, George:
+    a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    Brook Farm, 164-166;
+    on Emerson's limitations, 380.
+
+  Robinson, Edward, literary rank, 34.
+
+  Rochester, N.Y., speech, 168.
+
+  Rome:
+    allusions, 167, 168;
+    growth, 222;
+    amphora, 321.
+    (See _Latin_.)
+
+  Romilly, Samuel, allusion, 220.
+
+  Rose, anecdote, 345.
+    (See _Flowers_.)
+
+  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, his Savoyard Vicar, 51, 52.
+
+  Ruskin, John:
+    on metaphysics, 250;
+    certain chapters, 336;
+    pathetic fallacy, 337;
+    plagiarism, 384.
+
+  Russell, Ben., quoted, 267.
+
+  Russell, Le Baron:
+    on Sartor Resartus, 81, 82;
+    groomsman, 83;
+    aid in rebuilding the Old Manse, 272-279;
+    Concord visit, 345.
+
+
+  Saadi: a borrower, 205;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Persia_.)
+
+  Sabbath: a blessing of Christianity, 123, 298.
+
+  Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, on poetry, 339.
+
+  Saint Paul, times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Saladin, 184.
+
+  Sallust, on Catiline, 207.
+
+  Sanborn, Frank B.:
+    facts about Emerson, 42, 43, 66;
+    Thoreau memoir, 368;
+    old neighbor, 373.
+
+  Sapor, 184.
+
+  Satan, safety from, 306.
+    (See _Mephistopheles, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Saturday Club:
+    establishment, 221-223, 258;
+    last visits, 346, 347;
+    familiarity at, 368.
+
+  Scaliger, quotation, 109, 110.
+
+  Schelling, idealism, 148;
+    influence 173.
+
+  Schiller, on immortality, 290.
+
+  Scholarship:
+    a priesthood, 137;
+    docility of, 289.
+
+  School-teaching, 297.
+    (See _Chelmsford_.)
+
+  Schopenhauer, Arthur:
+    his pessimism, 286;
+    idea of a philosopher, 359.
+
+  Science:
+    growth of, 148;
+    Emerson inaccurate in, 256;
+    attitude toward, 401, 402.
+    (See _C.C. Emerson_.)
+
+  Scipio, 184.
+
+  Scotland:
+    Carlyle's haunts, 79;
+    notabilities, 195, 196;
+    Presbyterian, 409.
+
+  Scott, Sir Walter:
+    allusion, 22;
+    quotations, 23, 77;
+    dead, 63;
+    "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+    as a poet, 281;
+    popularity, 316;
+    poetic rank, 321.
+
+  Self:
+    the highest, 113;
+    respect for, 288, 289.
+
+  Seneca, Montaigne's study, 382.
+
+  Shakespeare:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Hamlet, 90, 94;
+    Benedick and love, 106;
+    disputed line, 128, 129;
+    an idol, 197;
+    poetic rank, 202, 281, 320, 321;
+    plagiarism, 204-206;
+    on studies, 257, 258;
+    supremacy, 328;
+    a comparison, 374;
+    a playwright, 375, 376;
+    punctiliousness of Portia, 378;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    lunatic, lover, poet, 387;
+    Polonius, 389;
+    _mother-wit_, 404;
+    _fine_ Ariel, 405;
+    adamant, 418.
+
+  Shattuck, Lemuel, History of Concord, 382.
+
+  Shaw, Lemuel, boarding-place, 43.
+
+  Shelley, Percy Bysshe:
+    Ode to the West Wind, 316, 399;
+    redundant syllable, 328;
+    Adonais, 333.
+
+  Shenandoah Mountain, 306.
+
+  Shingle, Emerson's jest, 364.
+
+  Ships:
+    illustration of longitude, 154;
+    erroneous quotation, 251, 252;
+    building illustration, 376, 377.
+
+  Sicily:
+    Emerson's visit, 62;
+    Etna, 113.
+
+  Sidney, Sir Philip, Chevy Chace, 379.
+
+  Silsbee, William, aid in publishing Carlyle, 81.
+
+  Simonides, prudence, 410.
+
+  Sisyphus, illustration, 334.
+
+  Sleight-of-hand, illustration, 332.
+
+  Smith, James and Horace, Rejected Addresses, 387, 397.
+
+  Smith, Sydney, on bishops, 219.
+
+  Socrates:
+    allusion, 203;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Solitude, sought, 135.
+
+  Solomon, epigrammatic, 405.
+    (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Solon, 199.
+
+  Sophron, 199.
+
+  South, the:
+    Emerson's preaching tour, 53;
+    Rebellion, 305, 407.
+    (See _America, Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+  Southerners, in college, 47.
+
+  Sparks, Jared, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Spenser, Edmund:
+    stanza, 335, 338;
+    soul making body, 391;
+    _mother-wit_, 404.
+
+  Spinoza, influence, 173, 380.
+
+  Spirit and matter, 100, 101.
+    (See _God, Religion, Spenser_, etc.)
+
+  Spiritualism, 296.
+
+  Sprague, William Buel, Annals of the American Pulpit, 10-12.
+
+  Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, on American religion, 414.
+
+  Star:
+    "hitch your wagon to a star," 252, 253;
+    stars in poetry, 324.
+
+  Sterling, J. Hutchinson, letter to, 282, 283.
+
+  Stewart, Dugald, allusion, 16.
+
+  Story, Joseph, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Stuart, Moses, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Studio, illustration, 20.
+
+  Summer, description, 117.
+
+  Sumner, Charles:
+    literary rank, 33:
+    the outrage on, 211;
+    Saturday Club, 223.
+
+  Swedenborg, Emanuel:
+    poetic rank, 202, 320;
+    dreams, 306;
+    Rosetta-Stone, 322;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Swedenborgians:
+    liking for a paper of Carlyle's, 78;
+    Reed's essay, 80;
+    spiritual influx, 412.
+
+  Swift, Jonathan:
+    allusion, 30;
+    the Houyhnhnms, 163;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Synagogue, illustration, 169.
+
+
+  Tappan, Mrs. Caroline, The Dial, 159.
+
+  Tartuffe, allusion, 312.
+
+  Taylor, Father, relation to Emerson, 55, 56, 413.
+
+  Taylor, Jeremy:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Emerson's study, 52;
+    "the Shakespeare of divines," 94;
+    praise for, 306.
+
+  Teague, Irish name, 143.
+
+  Te Deum:
+    the hymn, 68;
+    illustration, 82.
+
+  Temperance, the reform, 141, 152.
+    (See _Reforms_.)
+
+  Tennyson, Alfred:
+    readers, 256;
+    tobacco, 270;
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    In Memoriam, 333;
+    on plagiarism, 384.
+
+  Thacher, Samuel Cooper:
+    allusion, 26;
+    death, 29.
+
+  Thayer, James B.:
+    Western Journey with Emerson, 249, 263, 265-271, 359;
+    _ground swell_, 364.
+    (See _California_.)
+
+  Thinkers, let loose, 175.
+
+  Thomson, James, descriptions, 338.
+
+  Thoreau, Henry D.:
+    allusion, 22;
+    a Crusoe, 72;
+    "nullifier of civilization," 86;
+    one-apartment house, 142, 143;
+    The Dial, 159, 160;
+    death, 228;
+    Emerson's burial-place, 356;
+    biography, 368;
+    personality traceable, 389;
+    woodcraft, 403.
+
+  Ticknor, George:
+    on William Emerson, 12;
+    on Kirkland, 27;
+    literary rank, 33.
+
+  Traduction, 393.
+    (See _Heredity, Jonson_, etc.)
+
+  Transcendentalism:
+    Bowen's paper, 103, 104;
+    idealism, 146;
+    adherents, 150-152;
+    dilettanteism, 152-155;
+    a terror, 161.
+
+  Transcendentalist, The, 157-159.
+
+  Truth:
+    as an end, 99;
+    sought, 135.
+
+  Tudor, William:
+    allusion, 26;
+    connecting literary link, 28, 29.
+
+  Turgot, quoted, 98, 99.
+
+  Tyburn, allusion, 183.
+
+
+  Unitarianism:
+    Dr. Freeman's, 11, 12;
+    nature of Jesus, 13;
+    its sunshine, 28;
+    white-handed, 34;
+    headquarters, 35;
+    lingual studies, 48, 49;
+    transition, 51;
+    domination, 52;
+    pulpits, 53, 54;
+    chapel in Edinburgh, 65;
+    file-leaders, 118;
+    its organ, 124;
+    "pale negations," 298.
+    (See _Religion, Trinity_, etc.)
+
+  United States, intellectual history, 32.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Unity, in diversity, 73, 106, 284.
+
+  Upham, Charles W., his History, 45.
+
+
+  Verne, Jules, _onditologie_, 186.
+
+  Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Virginia, University of, 299.
+
+  Volcano, illustration, 113.
+
+  Voltaire, 409.
+
+  Voting, done reluctantly, 152, 153.
+
+
+  Wachusett, Mount, 70.
+
+  Walden Pond:
+    allusion, 22, 70, 72;
+    cabin, 142, 143.
+    (See _Concord_.)
+
+  War:
+    outgrown, 88, 89;
+    ennobling, 298.
+
+  Ware, Henry, professorship, 52.
+    (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+  Ware, Henry, Jr.:
+    Boston ministry, 55;
+    correspondence, 124-127.
+    (See _Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Warren, John Collins, Transcendentalism and Temperance, 149.
+
+  Warren, Judge, of New Bedford, 67.
+
+  Warwick Castle, fire, 275.
+
+  Washington City, addresses, 307.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+  Waterville College, Adelphi Society, 135-142.
+
+  Webster, Daniel:
+    E.B. Emerson's association with, 19;
+    on Tudor, 28, 29;
+    literary rank, 33;
+    Seventh-of-March Speech, 303;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Weiss, John, Parker biography, 368.
+
+  Wellington, Lord, seen by Emerson, 63, 64.
+
+  Wesley, John, praise of, 306.
+    (See _Methodism_.)
+
+  Western Messenger, poems in, 128.
+
+  West India Islands, Edward B. Emerson's death, 89.
+
+  Westminster Abbey, Emerson's visit, 63, 64.
+    (See _Emerson's Books_,--English Traits,--_England_, etc.)
+
+  Westminster Catechism, 298.
+    (See _Calvinism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Whipple, Edwin Percy:
+    literary rank, 33;
+    club, 223;
+    on heredity, 389.
+
+  White of Selborne, 228.
+
+  Whitman, Walt:
+    his enumerations, 325, 326;
+    journal, 344, 346.
+
+  Wilberforce, William, funeral, 64.
+
+  Will:
+    inspiration of, 289;
+    power of, 290.
+
+  Windermere, Lake, 70.
+    (See _England_.)
+
+  Winthrop, Francis William, in college, 45.
+
+  Wolfe, Charles, Burial of Moore, 416.
+
+  Woman:
+    her position, 212, 213, 251;
+    crossing a street, 364.
+
+  Woman's Club, 16.
+
+  Words, Emerson's favorite, 404, 405.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Days.)
+
+  Wordsworth, William:
+    Emerson's account, 63;
+    early reception, Excursion, 92, 95;
+    quoted, 96, 97;
+    Tintern Abbey, 103;
+    influence, 148, 150;
+    poetic rank, 281, 321;
+    on Immortality, 293, 392;
+    popularity, 316;
+    serenity, 335;
+    study of nature, 337;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    We are Seven, 393;
+    prejudice against science, 401.
+
+  Wotton, Sir Henry, quoted, 259.
+
+
+  Yankee:
+    a spouting, 136;
+    _improve_, 176;
+    whittling, 364.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Yoga, Hindoo idea, 397.
+
+  Young, Brigham:
+    Utah, 264, 268;
+    on preƫxistence, 391.
+
+  Young, Edward, influence in New England, 16, 17.
+
+
+  Zola, Ɖmile, offensive realism, 326.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12700 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12700 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12700)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+Release Date: June 24, 2004 [EBook #12700]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RALPH WALDO EMERSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+American Men of Letters
+
+EDITED BY
+
+CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
+
+
+  "_Thou wert the morning star among the living,
+    Ere thy fair light had fled:
+  Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
+    New splendor to the dead._"
+
+
+American Men of Letters
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
+
+BY
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+1891
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+My thanks are due to the members of Mr. Emerson's family, and the other
+friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and
+furnishing valuable information.
+
+The Index, carefully made by Mr. J.H. Wiggin, was revised and somewhat
+abridged by myself.
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+BOSTON, November 25, 1884.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+1803-1823. To AET. 20.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section I. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.--Publication of the
+Second Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.
+--Character.--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist
+and Realist.--New England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second
+Visit to England
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review."--Visit to
+Europe.--England.--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published.
+I. Lives of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli"
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1853-1858. AET. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club"
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+1858-1863. AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival.--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of President Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus".
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication of
+"Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and Originality.
+--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--Greatness.
+--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies"
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+Emerson's Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.---A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+"I have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense. He
+furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography
+is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be
+known and believed."
+
+So writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is
+certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. He delineates
+himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader
+sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little
+more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him
+in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and
+pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were
+the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social
+influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature
+added to make him Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+He himself believes in the hereditary transmission of certain
+characteristics. Though Nature appears capricious, he says, "Some
+qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the
+finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to
+perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fixed and permanent
+in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until
+at last Nature adopts them and bakes them in her porcelain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what
+may be called the Academic Races. Their names have been on college
+catalogues for generation after generation. They have filled the learned
+professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to
+our own time. If aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be
+bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are
+developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a
+descendant of one of the Academic Races. Other things being equal, he
+will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. His features will
+be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more
+plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. The
+gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than
+a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a
+surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which
+it springs has been long under cultivation.
+
+These thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record
+of the family made historic by the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was
+remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and
+for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls.
+
+A genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the "survival of the
+fittest,"--in the estimate of the descendants. It is inclined to
+remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living
+heirs of the family name and traditions. As every man may count two
+grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers,
+and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection. If
+he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of
+personages to choose from. The great-grandfathers of Mr. Emerson at the
+sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by
+intermarriage of relatives. One of these, from whom the name descended,
+was Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the
+people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood.
+
+His son, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, minister of the town of Mendon,
+Massachusetts, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Edward
+Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, as
+Minister of Concord, Massachusetts.
+
+Peter Bulkeley was therefore one of Emerson's sixty-four grandfathers
+at the seventh remove. We know the tenacity of certain family
+characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible
+that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the
+full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted
+his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover
+more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities
+move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of
+chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that
+of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one
+square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows
+in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white
+bishop sweeps the board on his own color. Sometimes the distinguishing
+characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle
+strides over the black and white squares. Sometimes an uncle or aunt
+lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight's move were
+repeated on the squares of human individuality. It is not impossible,
+then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from
+the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early
+history of New England.
+
+The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies
+consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of
+fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or
+second hand, the _Magnolia Christi Americana_, of the Reverend Cotton
+Mather. The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one
+can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a
+few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies
+from the London-printed, folio of 1702.
+
+    "He was descended of an Honourable Family in _Bedfordshire_.--He was
+    born at _Woodhil_ (or _Odel_) in _Bedfordshire_, _January_ 31st,
+    1582.
+
+    "His _Education_ was answerable unto his _Original_; it was
+    _Learned_, it was _Genteel_, and, which was the top of all, it was
+    very _Pious_: At length it made him a _Batchellor_ of _Divinity_,
+    and a Fellow of Saint _John's_ Colledge in Cambridge.--
+
+    "When he came abroad into the World, a good benefice befel him,
+    added unto the estate of a Gentleman, left him by his Father; whom
+    he succeeded in his Ministry, at the place of his Nativity: Which
+    one would imagine _Temptations_ enough to keep him out of a
+    _Wilderness_."
+
+But he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the
+English Church, and so,--
+
+    "When Sir _Nathaniel Brent_ was Arch-Bishop _Laud's_ General, as
+    Arch-Bishop _Laud_ was _another's_, Complaints were made against Mr.
+    _Bulkly_, for his Non-Conformity, and he was therefore Silenced.
+
+    "To _New-England_ he therefore came, in the Year 1635; and there
+    having been for a while, at _Cambridge_, he carried a good Number of
+    Planters with him, up further into the _Woods_, where they gathered
+    the _Twelfth Church_, then formed in the Colony, and call'd the Town
+    by the Name of _Concord_.
+
+    "Here he _buried_ a great Estate, while he _raised_ one still,
+    for almost every Person whom he employed in the Affairs of his
+    Husbandry.--
+
+    "He was a most excellent _Scholar_, a very-_well read_ Person, and
+    one, who in his advice to young Students, gave Demonstrations, that
+    he knew what would go to make a _Scholar_. But it being essential
+    unto a _Scholar_ to love a _Scholar_, so did he; and in Token
+    thereof, endowed the Library of _Harvard_-Colledge with no small
+    part of his own.
+
+    "And he was therewithal a most exalted _Christian_--In his Ministry
+    he was another _Farel, Quo nemo tonuit fortius_--And the observance
+    which his own People had for him, was also paid him from all sorts
+    of People throughout the Land; but especially from the Ministers of
+    the Country, who would still address him as a _Father_, a _Prophet_,
+    a _Counsellor_, on all occasions."
+
+These extracts may not quite satisfy the exacting reader, who must be
+referred to the old folio from which they were taken, where he will
+receive the following counsel:--
+
+"If then any Person would know what Mr. _Peter Bulkly_ was, let him read
+his Judicious and Savory Treatise of the _Gospel Covenant_, which has
+passed through several Editions, with much Acceptance among the People
+of God." It must be added that "he had a competently good Stroke at
+Latin Poetry; and even in his Old Age, affected sometimes to improve it.
+Many of his Composure are yet in our Hands."
+
+It is pleasant to believe that some of the qualities of this
+distinguished scholar and Christian were reproduced in the descendant
+whose life we are studying. At his death in 1659 he was succeeded, as
+was mentioned, by his son Edward, whose daughter became the wife of the
+Reverend Joseph Emerson, the minister of Mendon who, when that village
+was destroyed by the Indians, removed to Concord, where he died in the
+year 1680. This is the first connection of the name of Emerson with
+Concord, with which it has since been so long associated.
+
+Edward Emerson, son of the first and father of the second Reverend
+Joseph Emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one,
+for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: "Mr. Edward Emerson, sometime
+Deacon of the first church in Newbury." He was noted for the virtue of
+patience, and it is a family tradition that he never complained but
+once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her dumplings were
+somewhat harder than needful,--"_but not often_." This same Edward was
+the only break in the line of ministers who descended from Thomas of
+Ipswich. He is remembered in the family as having been "a merchant in
+Charlestown."
+
+Their son, the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, Minister of Malden for
+nearly half a century, married Mary, the daughter of the Reverend Samuel
+Moody,--Father Moody,--of York, Maine. Three of his sons were ministers,
+and one of these, William, was pastor of the church at Concord at the
+period of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
+
+As the successive generations narrow down towards the individual whose
+life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes more and
+more important and interesting to the biographer. The Reverend William
+Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was an excellent and popular
+preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. He preached resistance to
+tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his townsmen and their allies to
+make a stand against the soldiers who had marched upon their peaceful
+village, and would have taken a part in the Fight at the Bridge, which
+he saw from his own house, had not the friends around him prevented
+his quitting his doorstep. He left Concord in 1776 to join the army at
+Ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was advised to return to Concord and
+set out on the journey, but died on his way. His wife was the daughter
+of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord.
+This was another very noticeable personage in the line of Emerson's
+ancestors. His merits and abilities are described at great length on his
+tombstone in the Concord burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that
+his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs
+which record the excellences of our New England clergymen of the past
+generations are so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help
+inquiring whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter,
+like that which the good Vicar of Wakefield arranged with the
+portrait-painter. He was to represent Sophia as a shepherdess, it will
+be remembered, with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for
+nothing.
+
+William Emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and
+three daughters, one of whom, Mary Moody Emerson, is well remembered as
+pictured for us by her nephew, Ralph Waldo. His widow became the wife
+of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, Doctor of Divinity, and his successor as
+Minister at Concord.
+
+The Reverend William Emerson, the second of that name and profession,
+and the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in the year 1769, and
+graduated at Harvard College in 1789. He was settled as Minister in the
+town of Harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became Minister of the
+First Church in Boston. In 1796 he married Ruth Haskins of Boston. He
+died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom Ralph Waldo was the second.
+
+The interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man
+like Emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics
+of the Reverend William Emerson so far as we can learn them from his own
+writings and from the record of his contemporaries.
+
+The Reverend Dr. Sprague's valuable and well-known work, "Annals of the
+American Pulpit," contains three letters from which we learn some of
+his leading characteristics. Dr. Pierce of Brookline, the faithful
+chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary,
+but thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people
+of the quiet little town of Harvard, while he was highly acceptable in
+the pulpits of the metropolis. In personal appearance he was attractive;
+his voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable.
+"He was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an
+enemy.--In his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal
+side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated.--He was,
+however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most
+widely."
+
+Dr. Charles Lowell, another brother minister, says of him, "Mr. Emerson
+was a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his cheeks
+slightly tinted, his motions easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike, his
+manners bland and pleasant. He was an honest man, and expressed himself
+decidedly and emphatically, but never bluntly or vulgarly.--Mr. Emerson
+was a man of good sense. His conversation was edifying and useful; never
+foolish or undignified.--In his theological opinions he was, to say the
+least, far from having any sympathy with Calvinism. I have not supposed
+that he was, like Dr. Freeman, a Humanitarian, though he may have been
+so."
+
+There was no honester chronicler than our clerical Pepys, good, hearty,
+sweet-souled, fact-loving Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, who knew the
+dates of birth and death of the graduates of Harvard, starred and
+unstarred, better, one is tempted to say (_Hibernice_), than they did
+themselves. There was not a nobler gentleman in charge of any Boston
+parish than Dr. Charles Lowell. But after the pulpit has said what it
+thinks of the pulpit, it is well to listen to what the pews have to say
+about it.
+
+This is what the late Mr. George Ticknor said in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner" for September, 1849.
+
+"Mr. Emerson, transplanted to the First Church in Boston six years
+before Mr. Buckminster's settlement, possessed, on the contrary, a
+graceful and dignified style of speaking, which was by no means without
+its attraction, but he lacked the fervor that could rouse the masses,
+and the original resources that could command the few."
+
+As to his religious beliefs, Emerson writes to Dr. Sprague as follows:
+"I did not find in any manuscript or printed sermons that I looked
+at, any very explicit statement of opinion on the question between
+Calvinists and Socinians. He inclines obviously to what is ethical
+and universal in Christianity; very little to the personal and
+historical.--I think I observe in his writings, as in the writings of
+Unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of
+the nature and offices of Jesus. They had not made up their own minds on
+it. It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so."
+
+Mr. William Emerson left, published, fifteen Sermons and Discourses, an
+Oration pronounced at Boston on the Fourth of July, 1802, a Collection
+of Psalms and Hymns, an Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston,
+besides his contributions to the "Monthly Anthology," of which he was
+the Editor.
+
+Ruth Haskins, the wife of William and the mother of Ralph Waldo
+Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner," as a woman "of great patience and fortitude, of
+the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous
+bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long
+as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew
+how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that
+authority was resigned. Both her mind and her character were of a
+superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar
+softness and natural grace and quiet dignity. Her sensible and kindly
+speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it
+was ever ready, was a reward."
+
+The Reverend Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, who grew up with her son,
+says, "Waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children
+resembled their mother."
+
+Such was the descent of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If the ideas of parents
+survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had
+a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this
+representative of a long line of ministers. The same trains of thought
+and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of
+near family relationship, though not of blood. After the death of the
+first William Emerson, the Concord minister, his widow, Mr. Emerson's
+grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, Dr. Ezra
+Ripley. The grandson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ripley, whose
+character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before
+The Social Circle of Concord, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly"
+for November, 1883. Mr. Emerson says of him: "He was identified with the
+ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same
+time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the
+great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days
+declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and
+liberated America.... The same faith made what was strong and what was
+weak in Dr. Ripley." It would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of
+character than Mr. Emerson's living picture of Dr. Ripley. I myself
+remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so
+communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling
+John Foster of Brighton and chatty Jonathan Homer of Newton. Mr. Emerson
+says, "He was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable,
+manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all
+men.--His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and
+he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His
+friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his
+tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was
+no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous.
+Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his
+compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the
+beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door." How
+like Goldsmith's good Dr. Primrose! I do not know any writing of
+Mr. Emerson which brings out more fully his sense of humor,--of the
+picturesque in character,--and as a piece of composition, continuous,
+fluid, transparent, with a playful ripple here and there, it is
+admirable and delightful.
+
+Another of his early companionships must have exercised a still more
+powerful influence on his character,--that of his aunt, Mary Moody
+Emerson. He gave an account of her in a paper read before the Woman's
+Club several years ago, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for
+December, 1883. Far more of Mr. Emerson is to be found in this aunt of
+his than in any other of his relations in the ascending series, with
+whose history we are acquainted. Her story is an interesting one, but
+for that I must refer the reader to the article mentioned. Her character
+and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. "Her early
+reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards,
+and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart,
+Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madam De Staėl, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron.
+Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of
+old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious
+authority in their minds, and nowise the slight merely entertaining
+quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,--how venerable
+and organic as Nature they are in her mind!"
+
+There are many sentences cited by Mr. Emerson which remind us very
+strongly of his own writings. Such a passage as the following might have
+come from his Essay, "Nature," but it was written when her nephew was
+only four years old.
+
+    "Malden, 1807, September.--The rapture of feeling I would part from
+    for days devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with
+    such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its
+    Author,--feels it is related to Him more than by any ties of
+    creation,--it exults, too fondly, perhaps, for a state of trial. But
+    in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow, or
+    appear to glow, with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which
+    penetrates the spirits with wonder and curiosity,--then, however
+    awed, who can fear?"--"A few pulsations of created beings, a few
+    successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable
+    us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories,--to do more,--to
+    date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to
+    measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history
+    of God's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It
+    is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying,
+    acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting,
+    dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity.
+    Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished,
+    and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the
+    activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of
+    virtue, the approval of God."
+
+Miss Mary Emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural
+science which may be noted in her nephews Waldo and Charles. After
+speaking of "the poor old earth's chaotic state, brought so near in its
+long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist," she says:--
+
+    "Yet its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of Moses'
+    Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to
+    science."--"And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give
+    the idea of the Infinite, far, far better than when dignified with
+    arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless
+    ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. How
+    grand its preparation for souls, souls who were to feel the
+    Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions and applied its
+    steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither
+    psychology nor element."--"Usefulness, if it requires action, seems
+    less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God,
+    retaining consciousness.... Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do
+    what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from
+    sublimity of motive."
+
+So far as hereditary and family influences can account for the character
+and intellect of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we could hardly ask for a better
+inborn inheritance, or better counsels and examples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having traced some of the distinguishing traits which belong by descent
+to Mr. Emerson to those who were before him, it is interesting to note
+how far they showed themselves in those of his own generation, his
+brothers. Of these I will mention two, one of whom I knew personally.
+
+Edward Bliss Emerson, who graduated at Harvard College in 1824, three
+years after Ralph Waldo, held the first place in his class. He began
+the study of the law with Daniel Webster, but overworked himself and
+suffered a temporary disturbance of his reason. After this he made
+another attempt, but found his health unequal to the task and exiled
+himself to Porto Rico, where, in 1834, he died. Two poems preserve his
+memory, one that of Ralph Waldo, in which he addresses his memory,--
+
+  "Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star,"
+
+the other his own "Last Farewell," written in 1832, whilst sailing out
+of Boston Harbor. The lines are unaffected and very touching, full of
+that deep affection which united the brothers in the closest intimacy,
+and of the tenderest love for the mother whom he was leaving to see no
+more.
+
+I had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits
+which were in due time to develop themselves in Emerson's character and
+intelligence. As on the wall of some great artist's studio one may find
+unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions
+of pictures painted in after years, so we see that Nature often
+sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its
+rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors
+which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The
+sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life
+is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea.
+
+Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which I find in the
+long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy
+Emerson. Save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my
+life's early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes
+ever beheld. Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the
+veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in
+life might well say with Dryden,--
+
+  "If by traduction came thy mind
+  Our wonder is the less to find
+  A soul so charming from a stock so good."
+
+His image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years
+ago, I spoke of him in these lines, which I may venture to quote from
+myself, since others have quoted them before me.
+
+  Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,
+  The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,
+  O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down
+  In graceful folds the academic gown,
+  On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught
+  How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,
+  And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,
+  Too bright to live,--but O, too fair to die.
+
+Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much
+of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands.
+I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles
+Emerson's coming into my study,--this was probably in 1826 or
+1827,--taking up Hazlitt's "British Poets" and turning at once to a poem
+of Marvell's, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. The
+influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson's
+poems, and Charles' liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo.
+When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called "The
+Harvard Register" was published by students and recent graduates. Three
+articles were contributed by him to this periodical. Two of them have
+the titles "Conversation," "Friendship." His quotations are from Horace
+and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and
+Scott. There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of
+his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. Take
+this as an example:--
+
+    "Men and mind are my studies. I need no observatory high in air to
+    aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. I do not want a costly
+    apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility.
+    I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all
+    knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my
+    employment. I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at
+    home at my chambers, and I shall have enough to do and enjoy."
+
+The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson's poems.
+He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which
+he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons
+made famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness
+in the bitter cold winter's day; the mountain that rose in the horizon;
+the lofty pines; the lowly flowers. All talked with him as brothers and
+sisters, and he with them as of his own household.
+
+The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his
+maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.
+
+    "All men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says Charles Emerson,
+    "must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are
+    constrained to yield where it is due,--to rank, merit, talents. But
+    our affections we give not thus easily.
+
+      'The hand of Douglas is his own.'"
+
+    --"I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good
+    men hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent
+    conventions of polite life. But my friends I must know, and,
+    knowing, I must love. There must be a daily beauty in their life
+    that shall secure my constant attachment. I cannot stand upon the
+    footing of ordinary acquaintance. Friendship is aristocratical--the
+    affections which are prostituted to every suitor I will not accept."
+
+Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long
+outlived him became. Here is the dignity which commands reverence,--a
+dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson's sweetness of manner and
+expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence. There was
+something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was with into
+a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. A vulgar soul stood
+abashed in his presence. I could never think of him in the presence
+of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action
+without recalling Milton's line,
+
+  "Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed,"
+
+and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial
+messenger.
+
+No doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences,
+and of that exaggeration which belongs to the _laudator temporis acti_.
+But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and
+out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and neck
+they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the
+class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part
+assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some
+extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the
+result of a Presidential election,--or the Winner of the Derby. But
+Hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. "Who has a part with ****
+at this next exhibition?" I asked him one day, as I met him in the
+college yard. "***** the Post," answered Hillard. "Why call him _the
+Post_?" said I. "He is a wooden creature," said Hillard. "Hear him and
+Charles Emerson translating from the Latin _Domus tota inflammata erat_.
+The Post will render the words, 'The whole house was on fire.' Charles
+Emerson will translate the sentence 'The entire edifice was wrapped in
+flames.'" It was natural enough that a young admirer should prefer the
+Bernini drapery of Charles Emerson's version to the simple nudity of
+"the Post's" rendering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred
+in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a
+scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental
+life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly.
+
+When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion
+by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange
+themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had
+found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of
+political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was
+as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and
+there, waiting to form centres of condensation.
+
+Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a
+number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became
+visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries:
+John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards President of Harvard University;
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster; John Sylvester John Gardiner; William Tudor;
+Samuel Cooper Thacher; William Emerson. These were the chief stars of
+the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of
+it, as reflected from the pages of "The Monthly Anthology," which very
+soon came under the editorship of the Reverend William Emerson.
+
+The father of Ralph Waldo Emerson may be judged of in good measure by
+the associates with whom he was thus connected. A brief sketch of these
+friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these
+men made the local sphere of thought into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was
+born.
+
+John Thornton Kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is
+remembered by old graduates of Harvard, sitting in the ancient
+Presidential Chair, on Commencement Day, and calling in his penetrating
+but musical accents: "_Expectatur Oratio in Lingua Latina_" or
+"_Vernacula_," if the "First Scholar" was about to deliver the English
+oration. It was a presence not to be forgotten. His "shining morning
+face" was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did,
+with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. Mr. Ticknor speaks
+of his sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom,
+with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor." It was of him
+that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of
+printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to
+pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished
+out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the
+leaves together as he best might. The Reverend Dr. Lowell says: "He
+always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of
+his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the
+labor." Mr. Cabot, who knew all Emerson's literary habits, says he used
+to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the
+same way. Emerson's father, however, was very methodical, according
+to Dr. Lowell, and had "a place for everything, and everything in its
+place." Dr. Kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of
+the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very
+thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries.
+
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in Boston.
+The beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of
+his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of
+those living idols which seem to be as necessary to Protestantism as
+images and pictures are to Romanism.
+
+John Sylvester John Gardiner, once a pupil of the famous Dr. Parr, was
+then the leading Episcopal clergyman of Boston. Him I reconstruct from
+scattered hints I have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a
+sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome English
+parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice. Mild
+Orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of
+Christianity, and none was readier than Dr. Gardiner, if the voice of
+tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal
+persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to
+the interests of learning.
+
+William Tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the
+"Monthly Anthology," and that of the "North American Review," for he was
+a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the
+founder of the second. Edward Everett characterizes him, in speaking of
+his "Letters on the Eastern States," as a scholar and a gentleman, an
+impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a
+correct writer. Daniel Webster bore similar testimony to his talents and
+character.
+
+Samuel Cooper Thacher was hardly twenty years old when the "Anthology"
+was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty. He
+contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various
+controversial sermons, and writing the "Memoir of Buckminster."
+
+There was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities.
+There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much
+scholarship. The "Anthology" was the literary precursor of the "North
+American Review," and the theological herald of the "Christian
+Examiner." Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity.
+It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine,
+with all manner of literary chips and shavings. It had Magazine
+ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced
+paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations
+that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to
+Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and
+languid trickle of Laura Matilda's sentimentalities. It talked about
+"the London Reviewers" with a kind of provincial deference. It printed
+articles with quite too much of the license of Swift and Prior for the
+Magazines of to-day. But it had opinions of its own, and would compare
+well enough with the "Gentleman's Magazine," to say nothing of "My
+Grandmother's Review, the British." A writer in the third volume (1806)
+says: "A taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our
+country. I believe that, fifty years ago, England had never seen a
+Miscellany or a Review so well conducted as our 'Anthology,' however
+superior such publications may now be in that kingdom."
+
+It is well worth one's while to look over the volumes of the "Anthology"
+to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how
+they expressed themselves. The stiffness of Puritanism was pretty well
+relaxed when a Magazine conducted by clergymen could say that "The
+child,"--meaning the new periodical,--"shall not be destitute of the
+manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. He shall
+attend Theatres, Museums, Balls, and whatever polite diversions the town
+shall furnish." The reader of the "Anthology" will find for his reward
+an improving discourse on "Ambition," and a commendable schoolboy's
+"theme" on "Inebriation." He will learn something which may be for his
+advantage about the "Anjou Cabbage," and may profit by a "Remedy for
+Asthma." A controversy respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore
+may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for
+relief to the epistle "Studiosus" addresses to "Alcander." If the lines
+of "The Minstrel" who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from "The
+District of Main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "R.T. Paine,
+Jr., Esq.," of tameness when he exclaims:--
+
+  "Rise Columbia, brave and free,
+  Poise the globe and bound the sea!"
+
+But the writers did not confine themselves to native or even to English
+literature, for there is a distinct mention of "Mr. Goethe's new novel,"
+and an explicit reference to "Dante Aligheri, an Italian bard." But
+let the smiling reader go a little farther and he will find Mr.
+Buckminster's most interesting account of the destruction of Goldau.
+And in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by Dr. Jacob
+Bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries,
+and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is
+sweetening our atmospheric existence.
+
+The late President Josiah Quincy, in his "History of the Boston
+Athenaeum," pays a high tribute of respect to the memory and the
+labors of the gentlemen who founded that institution and conducted the
+"Anthology." A literary journal had already been published in Boston,
+but very soon failed for want of patronage. An enterprising firm of
+publishers, "being desirous that the work should be continued, applied
+to the Reverend William Emerson, a clergyman of the place, distinguished
+for energy and literary taste; and by his exertions several gentlemen
+of Boston and its vicinity, conspicuous for talent and zealous for
+literature, were induced to engage in conducting the work, and for this
+purpose they formed themselves into a Society. This Society was not
+completely organized until the year 1805, when Dr. Gardiner was elected
+President, and William Emerson Vice-President. The Society thus formed
+maintained its existence with reputation for about six years, and issued
+ten octavo volumes from the press, constituting one of the most lasting
+and honorable monuments of the literature of the period, and may be
+considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country after
+that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the
+Revolutionary War, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history
+of the United States. Its records yet remain, an evidence that it was a
+pleasant, active, high-principled association of literary men, laboring
+harmoniously to elevate the literary standard of the time, and with a
+success which may well be regarded as remarkable, considering the little
+sympathy they received from the community, and the many difficulties
+with which they had to struggle."
+
+The publication of the "Anthology" began in 1804, when Mr. William
+Emerson was thirty-four years of age, and it ceased to be published in
+the year of his death, 1811. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight years old at
+that time. His intellectual life began, we may say, while the somewhat
+obscure afterglow of the "Anthology" was in the western horizon of the
+New England sky.
+
+The nebula which was to form a cluster about the "North American Review"
+did not take definite shape until 1815. There is no such memorial of
+the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first half
+century of that periodical. It is easy to find fault with it for uniform
+respectability and occasional dulness. But take the names of its
+contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of
+that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved
+from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like Irving
+and Cooper. Strike out the names of Webster, Everett, Story, Sumner, and
+Cushing; of Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor,
+Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of
+Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and,
+lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic
+literature would be left for a new edition of "Miller's Retrospect"?
+
+These were the writers who helped to make the "North American Review"
+what it was during the period of Emerson's youth and early manhood.
+These, and men like them, gave Boston its intellectual character. We
+may count as symbols the three hills of "this darling town of ours,"
+as Emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon. Civil liberty
+lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and
+shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily
+on the third from the days when John Cotton preached his first sermon to
+those in which we are living.
+
+The social religious influences of the first part of the century
+must not be forgotten. The two high-caste religions of that day were
+white-handed Unitarianism and ruffled-shirt Episcopalianism. What called
+itself "society" was chiefly distributed between them. Within less than
+fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat
+changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies. This
+movement is the general withdrawal of the native New Englanders of both
+sexes from domestic service. A large part of the "hired help,"--for
+the word servant was commonly repudiated,--worshipped, not with their
+employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages
+stood at the doors. The congregations that went chiefly from the
+drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the
+culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of
+social cleavage. A certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not
+reminding us exactly of primitive Christianity, was the inevitable
+result. This must always be remembered in judging the men and women
+of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving
+prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of King George in
+the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue. The line of social
+separation was more marked, probably, in Boston, the headquarters of
+Unitarianism, than in the other large cities; and even at the present
+day our Jerusalem and Samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing
+with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and
+dollars. The exodus of those children of Israel from the house of
+bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of
+independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even
+in the sanctuary. True religious equality is harder to establish than
+civil liberty. No man has done more for spiritual republicanism than
+Emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time
+in the whole country.
+
+Such were Emerson's intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and
+environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to
+manhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+1803-1823. To _AET_. 20.
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of
+May, 1803.
+
+He was the second of five sons; William, R.W., Edward Bliss, Robert
+Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy.
+
+His birthplace and that of our other illustrious Bostonian, Benjamin
+Franklin, were within a kite-string's distance of each other. When
+the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from Milk Street
+through the narrow passage long known as Bishop's Alley, now Hawley
+Street, he came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite the spot
+where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the
+First Church, the home of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and
+the birthplace of his son, Ralph Waldo. The oblong quadrangle between
+Newbury, now Washington Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street,
+and the open space called Church Green, where the New South Church was
+afterwards erected, is represented on Bonner's maps of 1722 and 1769 as
+an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway.
+
+Even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a
+most attractive little _rus in urbe_. The sunny gardens of the late
+Judge Charles Jackson and the late Mr. S.P. Gardner opened their flowers
+and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses
+and other massive edifices. The most aristocratic pears, the "Saint
+Michael," the "Brown Bury," found their natural homes in these sheltered
+enclosures. The fine old mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out
+upon these gardens. Some of us can well remember the window of his
+son's, the historian's, study, the light from which used every evening
+to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while "The Conquest of
+Mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable
+than those encountered by Cortes. It was a charmed region in which
+Emerson first drew his breath, and I am fortunate in having a
+communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other
+living person.
+
+Mr. John Lowell Gardner, a college classmate and life-long friend of Mr.
+Emerson, has favored me with a letter which contains matters of
+interest concerning him never before given to the public. With his kind
+permission I have made some extracts and borrowed such facts as seemed
+especially worthy of note from his letter.
+
+    "I may be said to have known Emerson from the very beginning. A very
+    low fence divided my father's estate in Summer Street from the field
+    in which I remember the old wooden parsonage to have existed,--but
+    this field, when we were very young, was to be covered by Chauncy
+    Place Church and by the brick houses on Summer Street. Where the
+    family removed to I do not remember, but I always knew the boys,
+    William, Ralph, and perhaps Edward, and I again associated with
+    Ralph at the Latin School, where we were instructed by Master Gould
+    from 1815 to 1817, entering College in the latter year.
+
+    "... I have no recollection of his relative rank as a scholar, but it
+    was undoubtedly high, though not the highest. He never was idle or a
+    lounger, nor did he ever engage in frivolous pursuits. I should say
+    that his conduct was absolutely faultless. It was impossible that
+    there should be any feeling about him but of regard and affection.
+    He had then the same manner and courtly hesitation in addressing you
+    that you have known in him since. Still, he was not prominent in the
+    class, and, but for what all the world has since known of him,
+    his would not have been a conspicuous figure to his classmates in
+    recalling College days.
+
+    "The fact that we were almost the only Latin School fellows in the
+    class, and the circumstance that he was slow during the Freshman
+    year to form new acquaintances, brought us much together, and an
+    intimacy arose which continued through our College life. We were in
+    the habit of taking long strolls together, often stopping for repose
+    at distant points, as at Mount Auburn, etc.... Emerson was not
+    talkative; he never spoke for effect; his utterances were well
+    weighed and very deliberately made, but there was a certain flash
+    when he uttered anything that was more than usually worthy to be
+    remembered. He was so universally amiable and complying that my
+    evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his
+    gentleness and forbearance, but nothing could disturb his
+    equanimity. All that was wanting to render him an almost perfect
+    character was a few harsher traits and perhaps more masculine vigor.
+
+    "On leaving College our paths in life were so remote from each other
+    that we met very infrequently. He soon became, as it were, public
+    property, and I was engrossed for many years in my commercial
+    undertakings. All his course of life is known to many survivors. I
+    am inclined to believe he had a most liberal spirit. I remember that
+    some years since, when it was known that our classmate ---- was
+    reduced almost to absolute want by the war, in which he lost his two
+    sons, Emerson exerted himself to raise a fund among his classmates
+    for his relief, and, there being very few possible subscribers, made
+    what I considered a noble contribution, and this you may be sure was
+    not from any Southern sentiment on the part of Emerson. I send you
+    herewith the two youthful productions of Emerson of which I spoke to
+    you some time since."
+
+The first of these is a prose Essay of four pages, written for a
+discussion in which the Professions of Divinity, Medicine, and Law were
+to be weighed against each other. Emerson had the Lawyer's side to
+advocate. It is a fair and sensible paper, not of special originality or
+brilliancy. His opening paragraph is worth citing, as showing the same
+instinct for truth which displayed itself in all his after writings and
+the conduct of his life.
+
+    "It is usual in advocating a favorite subject to appropriate all
+    possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful
+    auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our
+    attention. Such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far
+    as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments
+    being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for
+    the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the merits of the
+    subject."
+
+From many boys this might sound like well-meaning commonplace, but in
+the history of Mr. Emerson's life that "bold appeal to the heart," that
+"tribute of honest conviction," were made eloquent and real. The
+boy meant it when he said it. To carry out his law of sincerity and
+self-trust the man had to sacrifice much that was dear to him, but he
+did not flinch from his early principles.
+
+It must not be supposed that the blameless youth was an ascetic in his
+College days. The other old manuscript Mr. Gardner sends me is marked
+"'Song for Knights of Square Table,' R.W.E."
+
+There are twelve verses of this song, with a chorus of two lines. The
+Muses and all the deities, not forgetting Bacchus, were duly invited to
+the festival.
+
+  "Let the doors of Olympus be open for all
+  To descend and make merry in Chivalry's hall."
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Sanborn has kindly related to me several circumstances told him by
+Emerson about his early years.
+
+The parsonage was situated at the corner of Summer and what is now
+Chauncy streets. It had a yard, and an orchard which Emerson said was as
+large as Dr. Ripley's, which might have been some two or three acres.
+Afterwards there was a brick house looking on Summer Street, in which
+Emerson the father lived. It was separated, Emerson said, by a brick
+wall from a garden in which _pears grew_ (a fact a boy is likely to
+remember). Master Ralph Waldo used to _sit on this wall_,--but we cannot
+believe he ever got off it on the wrong side, unless politely asked to
+do so. On the occasion of some alarm the little boy was carried in his
+nightgown to a neighboring house.
+
+After Reverend William Emerson's death Mrs. Emerson removed to a house
+in Beacon Street, where the Athenaeum Building now stands. She kept some
+boarders,--among them Lemuel Shaw, afterwards Chief Justice of the State
+of Massachusetts. It was but a short distance to the Common, and Waldo
+and Charles used to drive their mother's cow there to pasture.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Reverend Doctor Rufus Ellis, the much respected living successor of
+William Emerson as Minister of the First Church, says that R.W. Emerson
+must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died
+when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in "the new
+parsonage," which was, doubtless, the "brick house" above referred to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources. Mr. Cooke tells us
+that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and
+soon afterwards the Latin School. At the age of eleven he was turning
+Virgil into very readable English heroics. He loved the study of Greek;
+was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses.
+But he thinks "the idle books under the bench at the Latin School" were
+as profitable to him as his regular studies.
+
+Another glimpse of him is that given us by Mr. Ireland from the "Boyhood
+Memories" of Rufus Dawes. His old schoolmate speaks of him as "a
+spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years
+old,--whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my
+mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him
+so angelic and remarkable." That "blue nankeen" sounds strangely, it may
+be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter
+of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from China were a
+common summer clothing of children. The places where the factories and
+streets of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence were to rise were then open
+fields and farms. My recollection is that we did not think very highly
+of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen,--a dull-colored fabric, too
+nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering.
+
+Emerson was not particularly distinguished in College. Having a near
+connection in the same class as he, and being, as a Cambridge boy,
+generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in College
+from the year when George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, and Francis William
+Winthrop graduated until after I myself left College, I might have
+expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of
+the great writers of his time. I do not recollect hearing of him except
+as keeping school for a short time in Cambridge, before he settled as a
+minister. His classmate, Mr. Josiah Quincy, writes thus of his college
+days:--
+
+    "Two only of my classmates can be fairly said to have got into
+    history, although one of them, Charles W. Upham [the connection of
+    mine referred to above] has written history very acceptably. Ralph
+    Waldo Emerson and Robert W. Barnwell, for widely different reasons,
+    have caused their names to be known to well-informed Americans. Of
+    Emerson, I regret to say, there are few notices in my journals. Here
+    is the sort of way in which I speak of the man who was to make so
+    profound an impression upon the thought of his time. 'I went to the
+    chapel to hear Emerson's dissertation: a very good one, but rather
+    too long to give much pleasure to the hearers.' The fault, I
+    suspect, was in the hearers; and another fact which I have mentioned
+    goes to confirm this belief. It seems that Emerson accepted the duty
+    of delivering the Poem on Class Day, after seven others had been
+    asked who positively, refused. So it appears that, in the opinion of
+    this critical class, the author of the 'Woodnotes' and the 'Humble
+    Bee' ranked about eighth in poetical ability. It can only be because
+    the works of the other five [seven] have been 'heroically unwritten'
+    that a different impression has come to prevail in the outside
+    world. But if, according to the measurement of undergraduates,
+    Emerson's ability as a poet was not conspicuous, it must also be
+    admitted that, in the judgment of persons old enough to know better,
+    he was not credited with that mastery of weighty prose which the
+    world has since accorded him. In our senior year the higher classes
+    competed for the Boylston prizes for English composition. Emerson
+    and I sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to
+    take the two prizes; but--Alas for the infallibility of academic
+    decisions! Emerson received the second prize. I was of course much
+    pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should
+    have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who
+    was to be the most original and influential writer born in America
+    was my unsuccessful competitor. But Emerson, incubating over deeper
+    matters than were dreamt of in the established philosophy of
+    elegant letters, seems to have given no sign of the power that was
+    fashioning itself for leadership in a new time. He was quiet,
+    unobtrusive, and only a fair scholar according to the standard of
+    the College authorities. And this is really all I have to say about
+    my most distinguished classmate."
+
+Barnwell, the first scholar in the class, delivered the Valedictory
+Oration, and Emerson the Poem. Neither of these performances was highly
+spoken of by Mr. Quincy.
+
+I was surprised to find by one of the old Catalogues that Emerson
+roomed during a part of his College course with a young man whom I well
+remember, J.G.K. Gourdin. The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard
+Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to
+Charleston, South Carolina. The "Southerners" were the reigning College
+_elegans_ of that time, the _merveilleux_, the _mirliflores_, of their
+day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the
+prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects
+of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help
+wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin
+together as room-mates.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+We get a few brief glimpses of Emerson during the years following his
+graduation. He writes in 1823 to a classmate who had gone from Harvard
+to Andover:--
+
+    "I am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of German
+    and Hebrew, Parkhurst and Jahn, and such other names as the memory
+    aches to think of, on foot at Andover. Meantime, Unitarianism will
+    not hide her honors; as many hard names are taken, and as much
+    theological mischief is planned, at Cambridge as at Andover. By the
+    time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will
+    not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly
+    he able to speak to one another, and there will be a Guelf and
+    Ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie."
+
+    "You can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city
+    needs the excitement and impulse of literary example. The sight of
+    broad vellum-bound quartos, the very mention of Greek and German
+    names, the glimpse of a dusty, tugging scholar, will wake you up to
+    emulation for a month."
+
+After leaving College, and while studying Divinity, Emerson employed a
+part of his time in giving instruction in several places successively.
+
+Emerson's older brother William was teaching in Boston, and Ralph Waldo,
+after graduating, joined him in that occupation. In the year 1825 or
+1826, he taught school also in Chelmsford, a town of Middlesex County,
+Massachusetts, a part of which helped to constitute the city of Lowell.
+One of his pupils in that school, the Honorable Josiah Gardiner Abbott,
+has favored me with the following account of his recollections:--
+
+The school of which Mr. Emerson had the charge was an old-fashioned
+country "Academy." Mr. Emerson was probably studying for the ministry
+while teaching there. Judge Abbott remembers the impression he made
+on the boys. He was very grave, quiet, and very impressive in his
+appearance. There was something engaging, almost fascinating, about him;
+he was never harsh or severe, always perfectly self-controlled, never
+punished except with words, but exercised complete command over the
+boys. His old pupil recalls the stately, measured way in which, for some
+offence the little boy had committed, he turned on him, saying only
+these two words: "Oh, sad!" That was enough, for he had the faculty of
+making the boys love him. One of his modes of instruction was to give
+the boys a piece of reading to carry home with them,--from some book
+like Plutarch's Lives,--and the next day to examine them and find out
+how much they retained from their reading. Judge Abbott remembers a
+peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to
+be in the field of vision. The whole impression left on this pupil's
+mind was such as no other teacher had ever produced upon him.
+
+Mr. Emerson also kept a school for a short time at Cambridge, and among
+his pupils was Mr. John Holmes. His impressions seem to be very much
+like those of Judge Abbott.
+
+My brother speaks of Mr. Emerson thus:--
+
+    "Calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre. Rather
+    stern in his very infrequent rebukes. Not inclined to win boys by a
+    surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice. Every inch
+    a king in his dominion. Looking back, he seems to me rather like a
+    captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny,
+    but not amused with its incongruities. He once recommended the use
+    of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items."
+
+In 1823, two years after graduating, Emerson began studying for the
+ministry. He studied under the direction of Dr. Charming, attending some
+of the lectures in the Divinity School at Cambridge, though not enrolled
+as one of its regular students.
+
+The teachings of that day were such as would now be called
+"old-fashioned Unitarianism." But no creed can be held to be a finality.
+From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to
+Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of
+a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain
+permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism. If the gates are
+not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill
+the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on
+the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to
+Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer,
+and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian
+Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the
+evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church.
+
+There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches. If De
+Tocqueville's account of Unitarian preaching in Boston at the time of
+his visit is true, the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau would have preached
+acceptably in some of our pulpits. In fact, the good Vicar might have
+been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians.
+
+At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism was the
+dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of
+the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University
+at Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry
+Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature,
+followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James
+Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in
+Boston. I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that
+the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly
+connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches. A Cambridge
+graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable
+in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose
+by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant
+talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which
+their light could shine before men.
+
+Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a
+reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his
+fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of
+a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from
+the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. It is
+hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned
+professions. His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling
+about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. His
+brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found
+his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the
+profession of Law. It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less
+exercised with the same questionings. He has said, speaking of his
+instructors: "If they had examined me, they probably would not have let
+me preach at all." His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not
+taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which
+accounted for his being excused from examination. In 1826, after three
+years' study, he was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association
+of Ministers. His health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he
+went in the following winter to South Carolina and Florida. During this
+absence he preached several times in Charleston and other places. On his
+return from the South he preached in New Bedford, in Northampton, in
+Concord, and in Boston. His attractiveness as a preacher, of which we
+shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his
+being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city
+clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a
+settled Minister in Boston.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+On the 11th of March, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague with
+the Reverend Henry Ware, Minister of the Second Church in Boston. In
+September of the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker.
+The resignation of his colleague soon after his settlement threw all the
+pastoral duties upon the young minister, who seems to have performed
+them diligently and acceptably. Mr. Conway gives the following brief
+account of his labors, and tells in the same connection a story of
+Father Taylor too good not to be repeated:--
+
+    "Emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of Boston.
+    He was on its School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State
+    Senate. He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and
+    helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. Father
+    Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave
+    an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when
+    establishing the Seaman's Mission in Boston. This was told me by
+    Father Taylor himself in his old age. I happened to be in his
+    company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the
+    Methodist Church; but when I spoke of the part Emerson had in it, he
+    softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend. I have
+    no doubt that if the good Father of Boston Seamen was proud of any
+    personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have
+    given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson.
+    Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to"--[the place
+    which a divine of Charles the Second's day said it was not good
+    manners to mention in church].--"'It does look so,' said Father
+    Taylor, 'but I am sure of one thing: if Emerson goes to'"--[that
+    place]--"'he will change the climate there, and emigration will set
+    that way.'"
+
+In 1830, Emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the
+Reverend H.B. Goodwin as Dr. Ripley's colleague. His address on giving
+the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his
+collected works.
+
+The fair prospects with which Emerson began his life as a settled
+minister were too soon darkened. In February, 1832, the wife of
+his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of
+consumption.
+
+He had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties,
+and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people. On
+the 9th of September, 1832, he preached a sermon on the Lord's Supper,
+in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against
+administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples
+were founded. This discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one
+which heralded a movement in New England theology which has never
+stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice. The sermon
+is in no sense "Emersonian" except in its directness, its sweet temper,
+and outspoken honesty. He argues from his comparison of texts in a
+perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor Peter Bulkeley might
+have done. It happened to that worthy forefather of Emerson that upon
+his "pressing a piece of _Charity_ disagreeable to the will of the
+_Ruling Elder_, there was occasioned an unhappy _Discord_ in the Church
+of _Concord_; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help
+of a _Council_ and the _Ruling Elder's_ Abdication." So says Cotton
+Mather. Whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in
+Emerson's days we need not try to determine. The sermon was only a more
+formal declaration of views respecting the Lord's Supper, which he had
+previously made known in a conference with some of the most active
+members of his church. As a committee of the parish reported resolutions
+radically differing from his opinion on the subject, he preached this
+sermon and at the same time resigned his office. There was no "discord,"
+there was no need of a "council." Nothing could be more friendly, more
+truly Christian, than the manner in which Mr. Emerson expressed himself
+in this parting discourse. All the kindness of his nature warms it
+throughout. He details the differences of opinion which have existed
+in the church with regard to the ordinance. He then argues from the
+language of the Evangelists that it was not intended to be a permanent
+institution. He takes up the statement of Paul in the Epistle to the
+Corinthians, which he thinks, all things considered, ought not to alter
+our opinion derived from the Evangelists. He does not think that we are
+to rely upon the opinions and practices of the primitive church. If that
+church believed the institution to be permanent, their belief does not
+settle the question for us. On every other subject, succeeding times
+have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of
+Christianity than was the practice of the early ages.
+
+"But, it is said, 'Admit that the rite was not designed to be
+perpetual.' What harm doth it?"
+
+He proceeds to give reasons which show it to be inexpedient to continue
+the observance of the rite. It was treating that as authoritative which,
+as he believed that he had shown from Scripture, was not so. It confused
+the idea of God by transferring the worship of Him to Christ. Christ is
+the Mediator only as the instructor of man. In the least petition to God
+"the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your
+mind than your brother or child." Again:--
+
+    "The use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the
+    modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and
+    unsuited to affect us. The day of formal religion is past, and we
+    are to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The Jewish
+    was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the
+    Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach
+    men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was
+    religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and
+    forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to that purpose;
+    and with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must
+    contend that it is a matter of vital importance,--really a duty to
+    commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be acceptable
+    to their understanding or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of
+    God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial?"
+
+To these objections he adds the practical consideration that it brings
+those who do not partake of the communion service into an unfavorable
+relation with those who do.
+
+The beautiful spirit of the man shows itself in all its noble sincerity
+in these words at the close of his argument:--
+
+    "Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this
+    institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither
+    should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I
+    not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of
+    my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it
+    stand to the end of the world if it please men and please Heaven,
+    and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces."
+
+He then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling
+in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor's duties to
+administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been
+confided to him.
+
+This is the only sermon of Mr. Emerson's ever published. It was
+impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his
+truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning.
+It was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations
+over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up
+entirely. And thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on
+both sides, Mr. Emerson left the pulpit of the Second Church and found
+himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section 1. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
+
+
+Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first
+time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief
+which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford
+him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled
+"English Traits." He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily,
+Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower
+Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning
+visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom
+he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the
+rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that
+one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together,
+or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was
+explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief
+persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he
+reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions
+incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his
+microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." Emerson
+hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look
+through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson
+says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the
+wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with
+these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further
+abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon,
+were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of
+Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom
+he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which,
+follows:--
+
+    "The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people
+    who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that
+    they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply
+    themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost
+    destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that
+    frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best
+    terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or
+    in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you
+    crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I
+    have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to
+    my first belief that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these
+    impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of
+    having been met, and a larger horizon."
+
+Emerson carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in Edinburgh,
+who, being unable to pay him all the desired attention, handed him over
+to Mr. Alexander Ireland, who has given a most interesting account of
+him as he appeared during that first visit to Europe. Mr. Ireland's
+presentation of Emerson as he heard him in the Scotch pulpit shows
+that he was not less impressive and attractive before an audience of
+strangers than among his own countrymen and countrywomen:--
+
+"On Sunday, the 18th of August, 1833, I heard him deliver a discourse in
+the Unitarian Chapel, Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly
+the effect which it produced on his hearers. It is almost needless to
+say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of
+them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts,
+the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the
+calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
+the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the
+least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not
+long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers,
+whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence
+carried, for the moment, all before them,--his audience becoming like
+clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant
+thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a
+greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of Chalmers. His
+voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever
+heard; nothing like it have I listened to since.
+
+  'That music in our hearts we bore
+  Long after it was heard no more.'"
+
+Mr. George Gilfillan speaks of "the solemnity of his manner, and the
+earnest thought pervading his discourse."
+
+As to the effect of his preaching on his American audiences, I find the
+following evidence in Mr. Cooke's diligently gathered collections. Mr.
+Sanborn says:--
+
+    "His pulpit eloquence was singularly attractive, though by no means
+    equally so to all persons. In 1829, before the two friends had met,
+    Bronson Alcott heard him preach in Dr. Channing's church on 'The
+    Universality of the Moral Sentiment,' and was struck, as he said,
+    with the youth of the preacher, the beauty of his elocution and the
+    direct and sincere manner in which he addressed his hearers."
+
+Mr. Charles Congdon, of New Bedford, well known as a popular
+writer, gives the following account of Emerson's preaching in his
+"Reminiscences." I borrow the quotation from Mr. Conway:--
+
+    "One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals,
+    with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the
+    first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was
+    a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after
+    Emerson's voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an
+    indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional
+    illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and
+    dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard. I could understand
+    them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse."
+
+Everywhere Emerson seems to have pleased his audiences. The Reverend Dr.
+Morison, formerly the much respected Unitarian minister of New Bedford,
+writes to me as follows:--
+
+    "After Dr. Dewey left New Bedford, Mr. Emerson preached there
+    several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who
+    heard him. The Society would have been glad to settle him as their
+    minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for
+    some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion
+    service. Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at
+    that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration
+    for Mr. Emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a
+    Christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his
+    friend, without any action by the Society."
+
+All this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable.
+But every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must
+have been as a preacher. In fact, we have all listened, probably, to
+many a passage from old sermons of his,--for he tells us he borrowed
+from those old sermons for his lectures,--without ever thinking of the
+pulpit from which they were first heard.
+
+Among the stray glimpses we get of Emerson between the time when he
+quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public
+as a lecturer is this, which I owe to the kindness of Hon. Alexander H.
+Rice. In 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with
+another boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being
+at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in
+the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice
+to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along,
+Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of
+thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and
+spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which
+had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after
+generation.
+
+When they parted at the house of young Rice's father, Emerson invited
+the boys to come and see him at the Allen farm, in the afternoon. They
+came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off.
+"Boys," said Emerson, "here we recognize the presence of the Universal
+Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d' ye do? How d'
+ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with
+our own How d' ye do? How d' ye do? And all the waving branches of
+the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the
+singing brook, and the insect and the bird,--every living thing and
+things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while
+they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the
+salutation of the Universal Spirit."
+
+We perceive the same feeling which pervades many of Emerson's earlier
+Essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences
+of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus
+unexpectedly favored. Governor Rice continues:--
+
+    "You know what a captivating charm there always was in Emerson's
+    presence, but I can never tell you how this line of thought then
+    impressed a country boy. I do not remember anything about the
+    remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day,--I
+    only remember that I went home wondering about that mystical dream
+    of the Universal Spirit, and about what manner of man he was under
+    whose influence I had for the first time come....
+
+    "The interview left impressions that led me into new channels of
+    thought which have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, I doubt
+    not, taught me somewhat how to distinguish between mere theological
+    dogma and genuine religion in the soul."
+
+In the summer of 1834 Emerson became a resident of Concord,
+Massachusetts, the town of his forefathers, and the place destined to
+be his home for life. He first lived with his venerable connection, Dr.
+Ripley, in the dwelling made famous by Hawthorne as the "Old Manse." It
+is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene
+of the Fight on the banks of the river. It was built for the Reverend
+William Emerson, his grandfather. In one of the rooms of this house
+Emerson wrote "Nature," and in the same room, some years later,
+Hawthorne wrote "Mosses from an Old Manse."
+
+The place in which Emerson passed the greater part of his life well
+deserves a special notice. Concord might sit for its portrait as an
+ideal New England town. If wanting in the variety of surface which
+many other towns can boast of, it has at least a vision of the distant
+summits of Monadnock and Wachusett. It has fine old woods, and noble
+elms to give dignity to its open spaces. Beautiful ponds, as they
+modestly call themselves,--one of which, Walden, is as well known in our
+literature as Windermere in that of Old England,--lie quietly in their
+clean basins. And through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges,
+a gentle, unsalted stream, like an English river, licking its grassy
+margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. This is the
+Musketaquid, or Meadow River, which, after being joined by the more
+restless Assabet, still keeps its temper and flows peacefully along by
+and through other towns, to lose itself in the broad Merrimac. The names
+of these rivers tell us that Concord has an Indian history, and there is
+evidence that it was a favorite residence of the race which preceded our
+own. The native tribes knew as well as the white settlers where were
+pleasant streams and sweet springs, where corn grew tall in the meadows
+and fish bred fast in the unpolluted waters.
+
+The place thus favored by nature can show a record worthy of its
+physical attractions. Its settlement under the lead of Emerson's
+ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, was effected in the midst of many
+difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble
+leader were successful in overcoming. On the banks of the Musketaquid
+was fired the first fatal shot of the "rebel" farmers. Emerson appeals
+to the Records of the town for two hundred years as illustrating the
+working of our American institutions and the character of the men of
+Concord:--
+
+    "If the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to
+    be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+    fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+    much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+What names that plain New England town reckons in the roll of its
+inhabitants! Stout Major Buttrick and his fellow-soldiers in the war of
+Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers
+and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter
+Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as
+the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as
+the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our
+stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and
+half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a
+school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in
+undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I
+need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning
+the women whose names have added to its distinction. It has long been an
+intellectual centre such as no other country town of our own land, if of
+any other, could boast. Its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted
+by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows are made holy by the
+dust that is covered by their turf.
+
+Such was the place which the advent of Emerson made the Delphi of New
+England and the resort of many pilgrims from far-off regions.
+
+On his return from Europe in the winter of 1833-4, Mr. Emerson began to
+appear before the public as a lecturer. His first subjects, "Water," and
+the "Relation of Man to the Globe," were hardly such as we should have
+expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical
+and physiological science. They were probably chosen as of a popular
+character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and
+entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him
+pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. These lectures are
+not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so
+far as I know. He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating
+the experiences of his recent tour in Europe. Having made himself at
+home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his
+taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics. In 1834
+he lectured on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund
+Burke. The first two of these lectures, though not included in his
+collected works, may be found in the "North American Review" for 1837
+and 1838. The germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in
+prose and verse may be found in these Essays.
+
+The _Cosmos_ of the Ancient Greeks, the _piu nel' uno_, "The Many in
+One," appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his
+"Nature." The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little
+poem entitled "Each and All." The "Rhodora," another brief poem, finds
+itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, "What is Beauty?" and its answer,
+"This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt.
+It may be produced. But it cannot be defined." And throughout this Essay
+the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is
+the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment.
+_Noscitur a sociis_ applies as well to a man's dead as to his living
+companions. A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on
+Plato. When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution,
+long remembered, "When you strike at a _King_, you must kill him."
+He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own
+intelligence. What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character
+chiefly interested him. He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble.
+Like his "Humble Bee," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," whom he speaks
+of as
+
+  "Wiser far than human seer,"
+
+and says of him,
+
+  "Aught unsavory or unclean
+  Hath my insect never seen,"
+
+he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is
+repulsive to dwell upon,
+
+  "Seeing only what is fair,
+  Sipping only what is sweet."
+
+Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his
+earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as
+printed in the Essay.
+
+    "He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race;
+    he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty
+    that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and
+    self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness."
+
+Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters
+they draw. One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will
+not take the color of his subject. He may force himself to picture that
+which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he
+delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he
+feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself. Let us
+try Emerson by this test in his "Essay on Milton:"--
+
+    "It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour
+    foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?)
+    of all men, in the power to _inspire_. Virtue goes out of him into
+    others." ... "He is identified in the mind with all select and holy
+    images, with the supreme interests of the human race."--"Better than
+    any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely,
+    to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of
+    posterity,--to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a
+    composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not
+    described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to
+    him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France, and
+    Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and
+    we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who
+    communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of
+    piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes."
+
+Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, "To raise the idea of man;"
+he had "the power _to inspire_" in a preėminent degree. If ever a man
+communicated those _vibrations_ he speaks of as characteristic of
+Milton, it was Emerson. In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is
+worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a
+school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for
+its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The
+similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into
+their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a
+revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost
+very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them
+in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many
+parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any
+man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer
+of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of
+audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as "an expert swordsman"
+like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive
+controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But
+though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have
+been conscious, like Milton, of "a certain niceness of nature, an honest
+haughtiness," which was as a shield about his inner nature. Charles
+Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the
+feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in
+the line he quotes:--
+
+  "The hand of Douglas is his own."
+
+It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was
+listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that
+of the divine singer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My friend, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a life-long friend of Emerson,
+who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the
+movement of which Emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has
+kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters:--
+
+    TO REV. JAMES F. CLARKE, LOUISVILLE, KY.
+
+    PLYMOUTH, MASS., March 12, 1834.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--As the day approaches when Mr. Lewis should leave
+    Boston, I seize a few moments in a friendly house in the first of
+    towns, to thank you heartily for your kindness in lending me the
+    valued manuscripts which I return. The translations excited me much,
+    and who can estimate the value of a good thought? I trust I am to
+    learn much more from you hereafter of your German studies, and much
+    I hope of your own. You asked in your note concerning Carlyle. My
+    recollections of him are most pleasant, and I feel great confidence
+    in his character. He understands and recognizes his mission. He is
+    perfectly simple and affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he
+    can well afford to be, in his communications. He expressed some
+    impatience of his total solitude, and talked of Paris as a
+    residence. I told him I hoped not; for I should always remember
+    him with respect, meditating in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was
+    cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read
+    with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and
+    when I specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from
+    the New Jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way;
+    whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears of
+    two or three years afterward.--He has many, many tokens of Goethe's
+    regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. If you should go to
+    Scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your
+    visit to Craigenputtock, in the parish of Dunscore, near Dumfries.
+    He told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in
+    the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for "Fraser's
+    Magazine." I therefore subscribed for that book, which he calls the
+    "Mud Magazine," but have seen nothing of his workmanship in the two
+    last numbers. The mail is going, so I shall finish my letter another
+    time.
+
+    Your obliged friend and servant,
+
+    R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+    CONCORD, MASS., November 25, 1834.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--Miss Peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece
+    on Goethe and Carlyle. I have read it with great pleasure and a
+    feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it
+    was not published. I have forgotten what reason you assigned for not
+    printing it; I cannot think of any sufficient one. Is it too late
+    now? Why not change its form a little and annex to it some account
+    of Carlyle's later pieces, to wit: "Diderot," and "Sartor Resartus."
+    The last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched
+    pamphlet. Whilst I see its vices (relatively to the reading public)
+    of style, I cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem,
+    reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour. And it
+    seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as
+    must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that
+    of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. If you still
+    retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid,
+    having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be
+    glad to know that he values his American readers very highly;
+    that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it
+    questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about
+    publishing a historical piece called "The Diamond Necklace," as a
+    part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French
+    Revolution. He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry,
+    could we tell it right. He adds, moreover, in a letter I have
+    recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he
+    might end in the western woods. Shall we not bid him come, and be
+    Poet and Teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd? Or,
+    as I sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to
+    become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to
+    spiritual influences of the higher kind? Have you read Sampson
+    Reed's "Growth of the Mind"? I rejoice to be contemporary with that
+    man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives;
+    there must be some oxygen yet, and La Fayette is only just dead.
+
+    Your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+    It occurs to me that 't is unfit to send any white paper so far as
+    to your house, so you shall have a sentence from Carlyle's letter.
+
+[This may be found in Carlyle's first letter, dated 12th August, 1834.]
+Dr. Le Baron Russell, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part
+of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication
+of "Sartor Resartus," which I will repeat in his own words:--
+
+    "It was just before the time of which I am speaking [that of
+    Emerson's marriage] that the 'Sartor Resartus' appeared in 'Fraser.'
+    Emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of 'Fraser,' to
+    Miss Jackson, and we all had the reading of them. The excitement
+    which the book caused among young persons interested in the
+    literature of the day at that time you probably remember. I was
+    quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that I
+    determined to publish an American edition. I consulted James Munroe
+    & Co. on the subject. Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to
+    a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication.
+    This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate,
+    William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing. When this was
+    accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no
+    part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (This is the
+    Preface which appears in the American edition, James Munroe & Co.,
+    1836. It was omitted in the third American from the second London
+    edition,[1] by the same publishers, 1840.) Before the first edition
+    appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, Munroe & Co.
+    offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and
+    to this I assented.
+
+    [Footnote 1: Revised and corrected by the author.]
+
+    "This American edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the
+    'Sartor' in either country, as a distinct edition. Some copies of
+    the sheets from 'Fraser,' it appears, were stitched together and sent
+    to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing
+    to take the responsibility of printing the book. This shows, I think,
+    how much more interest was taken in Carlyle's writings in this country
+    than in England."
+
+On the 14th of May, 1834, Emerson wrote to Carlyle the first letter of
+that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the
+careful editorship of Mr. Charles Norton. This correspondence lasted
+from the date mentioned to the 2d of April, 1872, when Carlyle wrote his
+last letter to Emerson. The two writers reveal themselves as being in
+strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of
+temperament and entirely opposite views of life. The hatred of unreality
+was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with
+Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers,
+find their counterparts in every thinking community. Carlyle did not
+weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments
+there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. The
+Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon; a _De_
+_Profundis_ answered by a _Sursum Corda_. "The ground of my existence
+is black as death," says Carlyle. "Come and live with me a year," says
+Emerson, "and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of
+these years; (when the 'History' has passed its ten editions, and been
+translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you."
+
+
+Section 2. In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia
+Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in the fine
+old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his
+sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. After their
+marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which
+he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their
+daughter still reside. This is the "plain, square, wooden house," with
+horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which
+has been so often described and figured. It is without pretensions, but
+not without an air of quiet dignity. A full and well-illustrated account
+of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in "Poets' Homes,"
+by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879.
+
+On the 12th of September, 1835, Emerson delivered an "Historical
+Discourse, at Concord, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of
+the Incorporation of the Town." There is no "mysticism," no
+"transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts
+are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became
+the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful,
+very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative
+Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson
+ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix.
+One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with
+a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with
+annotations, and trailing a supplement after it. Oracles are brief and
+final in their utterances. Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain
+what they say.
+
+It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies
+and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of
+rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation. The discourses delivered
+on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a
+clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and
+heroines. Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland
+towns of New England. Emerson has told its story in as painstaking,
+faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist. But with this
+fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque
+touches which reveal the poetic philosopher.
+
+    "I have read with care," he says, "the town records themselves.
+    They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively
+    agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search
+    after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of
+    a manifest love of justice. I find our annals marked with a uniform
+    good sense.--The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the
+    event. These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric
+    within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but
+    they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just
+    community." ... "The matters there debated (in town meetings) are
+    such as to invite very small consideration. The ill-spelled pages
+    of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for
+    confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and
+    private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as
+    proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are
+    approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the
+    good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be
+    suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+    fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+    much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+There was nothing in this Address which the plainest of Concord's
+citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure. In fact Mr.
+Emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a
+plain Concord citizen. His son tells me that he was a faithful attendant
+upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and
+careful listener to the debates on town matters. That respect for
+"mother-wit" and for all the wholesome human qualities which reveals
+itself all through his writings was bred from this kind of intercourse
+with men of sense who had no pretensions to learning, and in whom, for
+that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in
+their expression. He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their
+idiosyncrasies; Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the
+fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into
+a dream--peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who
+insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of
+idolaters and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. It would
+be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of
+self-government in a small community than is contained in this simple
+discourse, patient in detail, large in treatment, more effective than
+any unsupported generalities about the natural rights of man, which
+amount to very little unless men earn the right of asserting them by
+attending fairly to their natural duties. So admirably is the working of
+a town government, as it goes on in a well-disposed community, displayed
+in the history of Concord's two hundred years of village life, that
+one of its wisest citizens had portions of the address printed
+for distribution, as an illustration of the American principle of
+self-government.
+
+After settling in Concord, Emerson delivered courses of Lectures in
+Boston during several successive winters; in 1835, ten Lectures on
+English Literature; in 1836, twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of
+History; in 1837, ten Lectures on Human Culture. Some of these lectures
+may have appeared in print under their original titles; all of them
+probably contributed to the Essays and Discourses which we find in his
+published volumes.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1836, a meeting was held to celebrate the
+completion of the monument raised in commemoration of the Concord Fight.
+For this occasion Emerson wrote the hymn made ever memorable by the
+lines:--
+
+  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
+  And fired the shot heard round the world.
+
+The last line of this hymn quickens the heartbeats of every American,
+and the whole hymn is admirable in thought and expression. Until the
+autumn of 1838, Emerson preached twice on Sundays to the church at East
+Lexington, which desired him to become its pastor. Mr. Cooke says that
+when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of
+Emerson's whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied:
+"We are a very simple people, and can understand no one but Mr.
+Emerson." He said of himself: "My pulpit is the Lyceum platform."
+Knowing that he made his Sermons contribute to his Lectures, we need not
+mourn over their not being reported.
+
+In March, 1837, Emerson delivered in Boston a Lecture on War, afterwards
+published in Miss Peabody's "Aesthetic Papers." He recognizes war as one
+of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, to disappear
+with the advance of mankind:--
+
+    "At a certain stage of his progress the man fights, if he be of a
+    sound body and mind. At a certain high stage he makes no offensive
+    demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable
+    heart. At a still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness;
+    passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all
+    converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself,
+    and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity;
+    but being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one
+    engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an
+    individual, but to the common good of all men."
+
+In 1834 Emerson's brother Edward died, as already mentioned, in the West
+India island where he had gone for his health. In his letter to Carlyle,
+of November 12th of the same year, Emerson says: "Your letter, which
+I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened
+place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother
+in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong
+sorrow." It was of him that Emerson wrote the lines "In Memoriam," in
+which he says,--
+
+  "There is no record left on earth
+  Save on tablets of the heart,
+  Of the rich, inherent worth,
+  Of the grace that on him shone
+  Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit;
+  He could not frame a word unfit,
+  An act unworthy to be done."
+
+Another bereavement was too soon to be recorded. On the 7th of October,
+1835, he says in a letter to Carlyle:--
+
+    "I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one
+    too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles
+    Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I
+    believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on
+    all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure
+    pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two
+    gentlemen know each other."
+
+Alas for human hopes and prospects! In less than a year from the date of
+that letter, on the 17th of September, 1836, he writes to Carlyle:--
+
+    "Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your
+    first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I
+    have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the
+    inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well,
+    and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave
+    question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so
+    much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for
+    I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better
+    than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time
+    of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my
+    house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have
+    known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation.
+    He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of
+    man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He
+    postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so
+    that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But
+    some time I shall see you and speak of him."
+
+
+Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book
+of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no
+name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author,
+Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay
+with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. For it has
+proved for many,--I will not say a _pons asinorum_,--but a very narrow
+bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they
+must cross it, or one domain of Emerson's intellect will not be reached.
+
+It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. It
+talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning
+simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until,
+as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of
+his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words
+which "a certain poet sang" to him.
+
+This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was
+peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's
+"Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was
+vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves
+common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to
+travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very
+long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell
+five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats's
+
+          "doubtful tale from fairy-land
+  Hard for the non-elect to understand."
+
+The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.
+
+    "Whatever is too original," says De Quincey, "will be hated at the
+    first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance
+    of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a
+    counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering
+    against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William
+    Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was
+    the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since
+    then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the
+    echo of his name."
+
+No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than
+Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of "Nature," his
+first thoroughly characteristic Essay. There is the same thought in the
+Preface to "The Excursion" that we find in the Introduction to "Nature."
+
+    "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
+    we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
+    relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
+    philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
+    revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"
+
+                            "Paradise and groves
+      Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old
+      Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
+      A history only of departed things,
+      Or a mere fiction of what never was?"
+
+"Nature" is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters,
+which might almost as well have been called cantos.
+
+Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with
+which the aspects of nature inspired him. He had recently for the first
+time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the
+planetary influences above, beneath, around him. The air of the country
+intoxicated him. There are sentences in "Nature" which are as exalted
+as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been
+etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of
+his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. Yet underlying these
+excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured
+the anxious. The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and
+the stars shone again in quiet reflection.
+
+After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses
+himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes "part or particle of
+God," he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled _Commodity_, the
+ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing
+and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of
+Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," as he has
+called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural
+conveniences.
+
+But "a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love
+of _Beauty_" which is his next subject. There are some touches of
+description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and
+impressions for pictures.
+
+Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be
+found here. Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature. "What is
+common to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."--"Nothing
+is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."--"No
+reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." How easily
+these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems,
+"Each and All," and "The Rhodora." A good deal of his philosophy comes
+out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:--
+
+    "Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for
+    the universe; God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty are
+    but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not
+    ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not
+    alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a
+    part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of
+    Nature.".
+
+In the "Rhodora" the flower is made to answer that
+
+  "Beauty is its own excuse for being."
+
+In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse
+itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper
+than itself.
+
+He passes next to a consideration of _Language_. Words are signs of
+natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular
+spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very
+profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in
+which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become
+transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature.
+
+    "A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual
+    processes, will find that always a material image, more or less
+    luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought,
+    which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and
+    brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories."
+
+From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful
+mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material
+images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves
+when great exigencies call for them.
+
+    "The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been
+    nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year,
+    without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson
+    altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long
+    hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in
+    the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their
+    morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the
+    passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again
+    the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and
+    the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
+    infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of
+    power, are put into his hands."
+
+It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say
+that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of
+Wordsworth:--
+
+               "These beauteous forms,
+  Through a long absence, have not been to me
+  As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
+  But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
+  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
+  In hours of weariness sensations sweet
+  Felt in the blood and felt along the heart."
+
+It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may
+have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the
+comparison.
+
+In _Discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence
+of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will.
+Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp,
+because
+
+    "Time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"The moral
+    law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the
+    circumference."--"All things with which we deal preach to us.
+    What is a farm but a mute gospel?"--"From the child's successive
+    possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'Thy
+    will be done!' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under
+    his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the
+    whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character."
+
+The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to.
+He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. When a
+friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with
+sweet and solid wisdom "it is a sign to us that his office is closing,
+and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time." This
+thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles,
+which occurred a few months before "Nature" was published. He had
+already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some
+recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "To a man
+laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
+Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has
+just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down
+over less worth in the population." This was the first effect of the
+loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders
+events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first.
+
+The chapter on _Idealism_ must be read by all who believe themselves
+capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment
+of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the
+existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical
+inquiries." The most essential statement is this:--
+
+    "It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World,
+    that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a
+    certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon,
+    man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test
+    the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the
+    impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what
+    difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or
+    some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?"
+
+We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like
+that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which
+cheat the senses by false appearances.
+
+The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities
+between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The
+philosopher pursues Truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones
+the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought."
+Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature
+and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts
+Nature."--"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"Michael Angelo said of
+external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses
+the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not
+undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed
+understanding." "I have no hostility to Nature," he says, "but a
+child's love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and
+melons."--But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is
+phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the
+world in God,"--as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant
+eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
+
+The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the
+next chapter, which has for its title _Spirit_.
+
+Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the
+demands of the spirit. "It leaves God out of me."--Of these three
+questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory
+answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a
+substance.
+
+    "But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many
+    truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn
+    that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread
+    universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or
+    power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all
+    things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that
+    behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is
+    one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from
+    without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through
+    ourselves."--"As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the
+    bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at
+    his need, inexhaustible power."
+
+Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a
+"creator in the finite."
+
+    "As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more
+    evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from
+    God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer
+    run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us."
+
+All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next
+chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.
+
+This next and last chapter is entitled _Prospects_. He begins with
+a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction,
+undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught
+sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the
+"imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In
+a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for
+the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all--or most of us,
+certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more
+of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and
+to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the
+realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert's
+"Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air
+of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature
+which a certain poet sang to me."--"A man is a god in ruins."--"Man is
+the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He
+filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the
+sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--But he no longer
+fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop."
+Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct."
+Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England
+Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the
+Mount: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect."
+The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us,
+"Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to
+the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." The
+seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, "There
+shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." The sage of
+Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "A correspondent revolution in
+things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable
+appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons,
+enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New
+Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the "Revelation." He
+found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. Yet,
+considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble
+imagery and wonderful beauty. "Nature" is the Book of Revelation of our
+Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a
+poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its
+pantheistic character, as Wordsworth's "Lines composed near Tintern
+Abbey" had been long before. But here and there it found devout readers
+who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical
+beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the "Democratic Review" in
+terms of enthusiastic admiration.
+
+Mr. Bowen, the Professor of Natural Theology and Moral Philosophy
+in Harvard University, treated this singular semi-philosophical,
+semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "Christian Examiner,"
+headed "Transcendentalism," and published in the January number for
+1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his
+subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the
+acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations
+between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article.
+The professor turns the book over and over,--inspects it from plastron
+to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes
+successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound
+philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by
+obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more
+than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after
+some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily
+agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:--
+
+    "On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the
+    criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only
+    allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in
+    itself."
+
+Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837:--
+
+    "Your little azure-colored 'Nature' gave me true satisfaction. I
+    read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a
+    sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back.
+    You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it
+    rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build
+    whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the
+    true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a
+    man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look
+    out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear
+    for the _Ewigen Melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and
+    utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to
+    be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a
+    kind of attempt to write down."
+
+The first edition of "Nature" had prefixed to it the following words
+from Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last
+thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not
+know." This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:--
+
+  "A subtle chain of countless rings
+  The next unto the farthest brings;
+  The eye reads omens where it goes,
+  And speaks all languages the rose;
+  And striving to be man, the worm
+  Mounts through all the spires of form."
+
+The copy of "Nature" from which I take these lines, his own, of course,
+like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was
+printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin's
+"Origin of Species," twenty years and more before the publication of
+"The Descent of Man." But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844,
+had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems
+as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does
+not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to
+catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in
+the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than
+the naturalist's theory that the progenitor of the human race was an
+acephalous mollusk. "I will not be sworn," says Benedick, "but love may
+transform me to an oyster." For "love" read science.
+
+Unity in variety, "_il piu nell uno_" symbolism of Nature and its
+teachings, generation of phenomena,--appearances,--from spirit, to
+which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and
+elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may
+be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an
+aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome,--a
+stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of New England
+scholastic intelligence. But here and there it found a reader to whom it
+was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation,--
+
+                   "The golden key
+  Which opes the palace of eternity,"
+
+inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth,
+because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through
+the purification of their own souls.
+
+Next to "Nature" in the series of his collected publications comes "The
+American Scholar. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+at Cambridge, August 31, 1837."
+
+The Society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the
+uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that
+philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the
+annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many
+distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual
+addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest.
+Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any
+former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured
+in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded
+and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what
+enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"
+
+Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas
+found expression in it. This was to be expected in an address delivered
+before such an audience. Every real thinker's world of thought has its
+centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle
+round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and
+then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through
+those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture;
+for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become
+atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It
+begins with a note like a trumpet call.
+
+    "Thus far," he says, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign
+    of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to
+    give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
+    indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when
+    it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard
+    intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and
+    fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better
+    than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our
+    long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
+    close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot
+    always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events,
+    actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can
+    doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in
+    the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers
+    announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?"
+
+Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was
+in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into
+fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. The fable covers the
+doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial
+manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole
+man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many
+faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is
+one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and
+strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach,
+an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing,
+into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute
+book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship."
+
+This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted
+by omnivorous old Burton: "_Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes
+hominis_." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making.
+It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing
+the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled
+in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a
+fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's
+time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found
+cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when
+in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special
+acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of
+men's thoughts and working faculties.
+
+    "In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
+    intellect. In the right state he is _Man thinking_. In the
+    degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a
+    mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
+    In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is
+    continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory
+    pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites."
+
+Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature
+upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his
+previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of
+the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence.
+"Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is
+hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is
+just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to
+give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel.
+
+    "Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation
+    for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
+    this."
+
+When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to
+become an object of idolatrous regard.
+
+    "Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The
+    sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the
+    incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this
+    book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged.
+    Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not
+    by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set
+    out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle.
+    Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to
+    accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given;
+    forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in
+    libraries when they wrote these books.--One must he an inventor to
+    read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth
+    of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'--When the
+    mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book
+    we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is
+    doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the
+    world."
+
+It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of
+books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him.
+
+    "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.
+    Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen
+    into truth.--The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action
+    past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the
+    intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this
+    by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is
+    converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours."
+
+Emerson does not use the words "unconscious cerebration," but these
+last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. The beautiful
+paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration
+of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so
+Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were
+his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with
+him, at least through the pages of this discourse. The reader shall have
+the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to.
+
+    "There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not,
+    sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by
+    soaring from our body into the empyrean.
+
+    "Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and
+    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;
+he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is
+to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of
+humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather
+confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:--
+
+    "The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
+    ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the
+    hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We
+    have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of
+    the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative,
+    tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of
+    this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There
+    is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant."
+
+The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted.
+
+    "What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young
+    men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not
+    yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his
+    instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."
+
+Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was
+created to bear.
+
+   "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
+    we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first
+    time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the
+    Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
+
+This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence.
+Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel
+Adams supported the affirmative of the question, "Whether it be lawful
+to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be
+preserved." It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there.
+The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was
+startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the
+firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts
+suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic
+illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the
+grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so
+stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet
+had been proclaiming to them "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever
+forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker
+it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more
+like that of immediate inspiration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody.
+
+
+Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an
+Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,
+which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a
+controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus
+when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest
+and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual
+consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for
+the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.
+
+He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the
+change of an expression:--
+
+    "In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath
+    of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with
+    fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and
+    sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new
+    hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
+    Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost
+    spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge
+    globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and
+    prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn."
+
+How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear,
+and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased
+attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed
+the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and
+milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the
+smell of Lebanon." And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when
+it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did
+not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from
+the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of
+Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But "when
+Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and
+cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was
+consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." Such was probably the fate
+of many a copy of this famous discourse.
+
+It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of
+Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been
+applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this
+new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this
+alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the
+theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that
+it is read as calmly to-day as a common "Election Sermon," if such are
+ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the
+reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and
+its tendencies.
+
+The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty,
+deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws
+which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and
+illustration of this mind. What am I? What is?--are questions always
+asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.
+
+But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man
+is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and
+weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
+presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately
+stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in
+each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The
+intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of
+the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we
+associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,
+the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into
+hell."
+
+These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the
+world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one
+mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of
+the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks
+good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being
+shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute
+badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms
+him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then
+deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom."
+
+    "This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively
+    creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest
+    in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in
+    Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt,
+    in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental
+    genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men
+    found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
+    mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the
+    history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
+    infusion."
+
+But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition.
+What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject
+it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the
+church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the
+doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of
+voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul."
+
+The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity
+and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by
+the discourse:--
+
+    "Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with
+    open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,
+    ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
+    Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was
+    true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in
+    man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.
+    He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through
+    me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
+    thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion
+    did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
+    following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear
+    to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this
+    high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This
+    was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say
+    he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his
+    rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not
+    built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a
+    Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He
+    spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and
+    all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the
+    character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian
+    churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one
+    with the blowing clover and the falling rain."
+
+He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of
+historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive,
+the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the
+Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us.
+"To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The
+preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies;
+they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and
+peculiarity.
+
+Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of
+Christ is that the Moral Nature--the Law of Laws--is not explored as the
+fountain of the established teaching in society. "Men have come to speak
+of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were
+dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its
+fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the
+assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is
+closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing
+him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our
+theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not
+was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like
+Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost."
+
+When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the
+"practical application," some of his young hearers must have been
+startled at the style of his address.
+
+    "Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all
+    conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it
+    first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and
+    money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that
+    you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the
+    immeasurable mind."
+
+Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of
+Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and
+secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but
+with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed
+an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed
+as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was
+assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom
+generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity,
+rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same
+divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with
+whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words
+carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the
+spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must
+have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses
+they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one
+having authority, and not as the Scribes.'"
+
+Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its
+doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ
+of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed
+and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in
+which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson's
+discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of
+Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer:--
+
+    "What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I
+    might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known
+    opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time,
+    and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and
+    presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of
+    dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is
+    perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse,
+    and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very
+    important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the
+    nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my
+    opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would
+    rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise.
+    Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as
+    it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not,
+    be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished
+    by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the
+    'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I
+    heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and
+    love."
+
+Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of
+September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the
+idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson's philosophy, and
+sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of
+which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings
+of that most excellent and truly apostolic man.
+
+To this letter Emerson sent the following reply:--
+
+    CONCORD, October 8, 1838.
+
+    "MY DEAR SIR,--I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter
+    of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right
+    manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it
+    assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps I am not so quick to see it
+    as writers generally,--certainly I did not feel any disposition
+    to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your
+    thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think
+    of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men
+    at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of
+    criticism. I have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical
+    writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to
+    rail,--lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed
+    near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the
+    notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated
+    fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no
+    scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I
+    could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not
+    possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on
+    which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments
+    are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in
+    telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it
+    is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see
+    that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the
+    present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly
+    raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I
+    advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make
+    good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such
+    thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have
+    always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the
+    page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing
+    whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the
+    same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that
+    my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society,
+    loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my
+    conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in
+    motley,--and so I am your affectionate servant," etc.
+
+The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no
+part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his
+office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just
+given,--"Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see." But among his
+listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution,
+not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose
+voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the
+long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--Theodore
+Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the
+conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present
+day.
+
+In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course
+of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten
+Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV.
+Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty;
+X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false
+with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life."
+Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures
+or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in "Lectures
+and Biographical Sketches;" and "The Comic" in "Letters and Social
+Aims."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my
+kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke.
+
+The first letter was accompanied by the Poem "The Humble-bee," which
+was first published by Mr. Clarke in the "Western Messenger," from the
+autograph copy, which begins "Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has
+a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected
+works.
+
+    CONCORD, December 7, 1838.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my
+    friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me
+    in the spring if I hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. I
+    remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of
+    yours that the verses, "Take, O take those lips away," were not
+    Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both
+    together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that
+    stanza. I know it is in "Rollo," but it is in "Measure for Measure"
+    also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and
+    critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and
+    those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all
+    for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not,
+    and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we _who_
+    sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and
+    servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
+
+    CONCORD, February 27, 1839.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an
+    answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are
+    quite welcome to the lines "To the Rhodora;" but I think they need
+    the superscription ["Lines on being asked 'Whence is the Flower?'"].
+    Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world," etc] I send you a
+    corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them
+    that I think you must read them once again with your critical
+    spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years
+    ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury
+    called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper
+    than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and
+    am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic
+    date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry,
+    and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any
+    verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these
+    juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses,
+    that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up
+    old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely
+    as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to
+    music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe
+    I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than
+    _afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I
+    may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my
+    MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of
+    a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily
+    treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a
+    year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard
+    to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I
+    remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it;
+    but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall
+    have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself
+    of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle
+    Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent
+    spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he
+    writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring
+    lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind
+    enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done
+    by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to
+    betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any
+    line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the
+    universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the
+    old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you
+    will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every
+    possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I
+    heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year,
+    and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men
+    are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted
+    service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that
+    concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail,
+    of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to
+    trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad
+    to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson's
+    new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers,
+    aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along
+    the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but
+    I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.
+
+    Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery
+of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an
+Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor
+of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have
+been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to
+which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of
+Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious
+old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or
+questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which
+they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous
+repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy
+old dogmatists as dry as ever.
+
+Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling
+at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the
+speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his
+audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of
+the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen,
+provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of
+the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver.
+Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental
+conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place
+and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the
+sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony
+between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary
+colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side
+that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go
+anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief
+from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner,
+such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to
+quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.
+
+The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the
+same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence
+as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem
+misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these
+discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his
+complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned
+its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which
+freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and
+all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find
+some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative
+illustration.
+
+"Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a
+prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and
+earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet,
+he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled
+the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are
+indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery
+productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought."
+For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie
+all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his
+confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual
+independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history
+and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits
+a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:--
+
+    "An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
+    injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
+    possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything
+    that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that
+    he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a
+    grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny
+    to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is
+    piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_
+    annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him
+    talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved."
+
+But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of
+their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be
+forever blighted.
+
+From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his
+tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied.
+"Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of
+Nature to us is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I
+give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" And in the same way he would
+have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to
+the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution
+of things. "He must embrace solitude as a bride." Not superstitiously,
+but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all
+that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of
+the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst
+of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it:--
+
+    "You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear
+    that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What
+    is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask, with
+    derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore
+    truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say,
+    'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early
+    visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and
+    romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then
+    dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and
+    poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand
+    thousand men.--Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from
+    every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to
+    show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you
+    renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for
+    the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has
+    its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world,
+    and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as
+    shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all
+    men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."
+
+The next Address Emerson delivered was "The Method of Nature," before
+the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11,
+1841.
+
+In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: "As usual at this
+season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an
+oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges
+nine days hence.... My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches
+acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done,
+what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent,
+sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and
+stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted
+the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced
+in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.
+
+The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is
+"The Method of Nature." He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments
+and promises of this literary Anniversary.
+
+    "The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the
+    foundations of the castle."--"We hear too much of the results of
+    machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle
+    folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid
+    wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the
+    incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes
+    of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the
+    bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the
+    farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and
+    feature of man."--"While the multitude of men degrade each other,
+    and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a
+    bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself."
+
+I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than
+in any of those which preceded it.
+
+    "Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this
+    saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with
+    whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think
+    meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his
+    ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?"
+
+That there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true
+wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it,
+that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force,"
+that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into
+character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in
+this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how
+far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few
+broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn.
+We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this
+discourse on "The Method of Nature," as the pictorial beauty of
+their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson's
+speculations is well shown in this paragraph:--
+
+    "We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not
+    thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for
+    our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring
+    reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the
+    receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy."--"It is God
+    in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In
+    the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this
+    fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are
+    mine; and all mine are thine.'"
+
+We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same
+paragraph, "I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so
+sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his
+tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond
+explanation."
+
+    "We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency
+    appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is
+    growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else;
+    is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be
+    man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring,
+    a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit
+    and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that
+    it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends,
+    but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no
+    private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by
+    one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life
+    which in conscious beings we call ecstasy."
+
+Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for
+the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.
+
+    "The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify
+    the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of
+    stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!
+    thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning
+    and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry
+    of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of
+    right and wrong."
+
+His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the
+extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:--
+
+    "We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
+    that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
+    house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal
+    activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a
+    natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this
+    one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist,
+    cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that
+    they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they
+    were."
+
+It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity
+recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which
+is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many
+expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and
+vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history
+of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was
+only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold
+benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would
+feel that they lost by his counsels.
+
+    "The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
+    Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
+    generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
+    themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to
+    which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if
+    pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence
+    to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
+    objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible
+    to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never
+    touched; always giving health."
+
+Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses
+and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many
+organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their
+views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their
+special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in
+the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the
+Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he
+preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have
+a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--That he cannot give up
+labor without suffering some loss of power. "How can the man who has
+learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall
+we say all we think?--Perhaps with his own hands.--Let us learn the
+meaning of economy.--Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast
+fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house
+with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I
+may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and
+road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is
+frugality for gods and heroes."
+
+This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This "house with one
+apartment" was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April
+of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on
+intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him
+that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or
+whether this idea was working in Thoreau's mind and was suggested to
+Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed
+so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau
+entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the
+philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others
+carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common
+sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the
+conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to
+prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends
+"Teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more
+commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.
+
+"The Americans have many virtues," he says in this Address, "but they
+have not Faith and Hope." Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the
+burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by "a
+great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual
+and the actual world.
+
+In the "Lecture on the Times" he shows very clearly the effect which a
+nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves
+Reformers had upon him.
+
+    "The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice,
+    but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are
+    quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no
+    more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they
+    reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal
+    and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness
+    that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who
+    are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of
+    mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as
+    the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work
+    of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him;
+    but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done
+    in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management,
+    by tactics and clamor."
+
+All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by
+the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson
+had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser
+and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in
+view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination
+and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts
+that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes
+it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the
+dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who
+sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any
+rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of
+those daring images which defy the critics.
+
+    "As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain,
+    the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall
+    eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we
+    shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds."
+
+He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in
+his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get
+rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been
+accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence
+covers with its soothing tribute!
+
+    "All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame
+    what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but
+    of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment
+    man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised
+    and discredited angels."
+
+The Lecture called "The Transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at
+with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly
+applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples.
+It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and
+accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together
+very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this
+comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson
+explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of
+thoughts cast in a new mould.
+
+    "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism:
+    Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever
+    divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class
+    founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
+    beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class
+    perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us
+    representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they
+    cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the
+    force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on
+    the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
+    individual culture."
+
+    "The materialist takes his departure from the external world,
+    and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his
+    departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an
+    appearance.--His thought, that is the Universe."
+
+The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of
+"Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the
+periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were
+in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of
+it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these "same
+Transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "The Dial," which was
+their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than
+from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any
+other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and
+the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best
+witness.
+
+In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he sketches
+in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the
+development of the "new views" above mentioned. "There are always two
+parties," he says, "the party of the Past and the party of the Future;
+the Establishment and the Movement."
+
+About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity
+manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in
+literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the
+genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early
+causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance
+to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who
+returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward
+Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus
+Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great
+orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life
+in a few old men's memories. It is therefore with delight that one who
+remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his
+full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant,
+grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal
+vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the
+harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the
+glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is
+enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but
+many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great
+master of academic oratory.
+
+Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to
+the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of
+science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the
+influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate
+community, the writings of Channing,--he left it to others to say of
+Emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it
+so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the
+ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at
+organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came
+together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins
+Warren's,--Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full
+of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on
+smoothly enough with the usual small talk,--
+
+    "When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster
+    supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before
+    Dr. Warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to
+    establish aesthetic society in Boston.
+
+    "Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs.
+    Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies
+    and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.--Margaret Fuller,
+    George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr.
+    Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others
+    gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at
+    each other's houses in a serious conversation."
+
+With them was another, "a pure Idealist,--who read Plato as an
+equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were
+intellectual." He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to
+say:--
+
+    "I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston
+    that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain
+    opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy,
+    and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite
+    innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or
+    three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual
+    vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge
+    and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and
+    sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but
+    had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary.
+    I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or
+    sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody
+    knows by whom, or when it was applied."
+
+Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to
+suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.
+
+    "In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human
+    thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any
+    presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts
+    it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this
+    largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist, who thanks
+    no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his
+    conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its
+    reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has
+    done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
+
+    "These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no
+    compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one
+    compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
+    exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
+    in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
+    friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
+    what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
+    service to the race of man."
+
+The person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in
+nature," is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known
+colloquially as a "crank." The person who does not thank, by word or
+look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or
+water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a
+churl.
+
+Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or
+churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some
+of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing
+machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed
+more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that
+their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What
+forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What
+great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you
+performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little
+real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock
+and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled
+no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist"
+dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as
+that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.
+
+In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious
+persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader
+must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and
+not a scoffer:--
+
+    "They are not good citizens, not good members of society:
+    unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens;
+    they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public
+    religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions,
+    foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the
+    temperance society. They do not even like to vote."
+
+After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual
+beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this
+is what they have to say:--
+
+    "'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you
+    want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the
+    labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust:
+    but we do not like your work.'
+
+    'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'
+
+    'We have none.'
+
+    'What will you do, then?' cries the world.
+
+    'We will wait.'
+
+    'How long?'
+
+    'Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.'
+
+    'But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.'
+
+    'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but
+    I will not move until I have the highest command.'"
+
+And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his
+reasons for doing nothing.
+
+It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is
+easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the
+subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life
+and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of
+themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress
+for indolence than "the Everlasting No." The chimney-corner is the true
+arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their
+all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among
+his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a
+fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow.
+Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on
+the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was
+picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of
+themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of
+thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.
+
+Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that
+delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he
+makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.
+
+    "Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must
+    behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet
+    accrue from them to the state. Besides our coarse implements, there
+    must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and
+    telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers,
+    there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges
+    and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct,
+    who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the
+    by-stander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and
+    monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the
+    electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks
+    the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not
+    be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare
+    and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and
+    verify our bearings from superior chronometers."
+
+It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which
+Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were
+naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle,
+and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical
+judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew
+a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:--
+
+    "There has sprung up in Boston," says Dickens, in his "American
+    Notes," "a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On
+    inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I
+    was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be
+    certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this
+    elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the
+    Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I
+    should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+    This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much
+    that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying
+    so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold.
+    Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has
+    not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not
+    least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to
+    detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe.
+    And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a
+    Transcendentalist."
+
+In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The
+Conservative." It was a time of great excitement among the members of
+that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson
+show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more
+beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference
+to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the
+conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as
+well as that of the other. "Conservatism tends to universal seeming and
+treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers
+govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will
+fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a
+general law without a particular application,--law for all that does
+not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine
+resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated
+self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining
+and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so,
+whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed
+of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an
+impossible whole."
+
+He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair
+play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be
+unjust to the present or the past.
+
+We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that
+Dr. Charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because
+he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue
+a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a
+spiritual philosophy." Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in
+a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this
+country, Emerson says:--
+
+    "It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which
+    we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would
+    do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be
+    made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned
+    to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called 'The
+    Transcendentalist;' or, 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like....
+    Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous
+    contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured."
+
+The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to
+know as "The Dial!" A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry
+old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be
+content with Carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as
+thus:--
+
+    "'The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it
+    may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be
+    things not dreamt of over in that _Transoceanic_ parish! I shall
+    certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure
+    forerunner of things better."
+
+There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the
+Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the
+close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest
+which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more
+deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a
+possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm.
+They were to a certain extent synchronous,--the Magazine beginning in
+July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in
+1841, and breaking up in 1847.
+
+"The Dial" was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by
+Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse,
+among them "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "Chardon Street
+and Bible Convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "The
+Problem," "Woodnotes," "The Sphinx," "Fate." The other principal writers
+were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman
+Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot
+Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs.
+Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the
+contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest.
+It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and
+enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard
+a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and
+curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond
+the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number.
+Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her
+part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with
+his "trip-hammer" in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems
+in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others,
+whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are
+still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent
+contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to "The Dial," with all its
+crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the "Anthology."
+Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the
+pledge of a better season.
+
+We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence
+between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before
+the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge
+of our _young people_ than any he has had. It is true that unfledged
+writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more
+interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth
+of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that
+intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the
+inspiration of these "young people" to whom Emerson refers. He has to
+apologize for the first number. "It is not yet much," he says; "indeed,
+though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should
+be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake
+of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--The
+Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and
+whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know." They did
+print "The Problem." There were also some fragments of criticism from
+the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called "The Last
+Farewell," by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson's
+"May-day and other Pieces."
+
+On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple
+of months, Emerson writes:--
+
+    "Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism;
+    and the _Dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains
+    scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored
+    by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least
+    betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public."
+
+Carlyle finds the second number of "The Dial" better than the first, and
+tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with
+his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson's
+readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for
+the most part. "But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only
+a body, which want means a great deal." And again, "'The Dial,' too, it
+is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_
+body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man_, with color in the
+cheeks of him and a coat on his back?"
+
+Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the "dubious
+approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he
+found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object
+of tenderness and religion." So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the
+end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. "I
+cannot bid you quit 'The Dial,'" says Carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is
+Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge_, nevertheless."
+
+In the next letter he says:--
+
+    "I love your 'Dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem
+    to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present
+    Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage,
+    and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such
+    like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of
+    perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what
+    impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the
+    fore-hoof."
+
+A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not
+always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.
+
+To all Carlyle's complaints of "The Dial's" short-comings Emerson did
+not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty,
+with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.
+
+    "For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write
+    as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of
+    these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary
+    history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite
+    ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make
+    confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish
+    to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and
+    evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they
+    reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer
+    in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come,
+    who will easily do the unknown deed."
+
+"All the bright boys and girls in New England," and "'The Dial' dying of
+inanition!" In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:--
+
+    "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social
+    reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his
+    waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live
+    cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and
+    scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.
+    One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and
+    another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on
+    the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope."
+
+Mr. Ripley's project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better
+known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this
+undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would
+have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a
+moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "It was a noble and
+generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better
+living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without
+centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual
+sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our
+educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts."
+The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm
+experiment in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," its founder,
+and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential
+relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "Historic
+Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the
+ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the
+sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he
+says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and
+lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to
+the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in
+ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen
+without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward
+laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest
+humorists?
+
+This is his benevolent summing up:--
+
+    "The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made
+    what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All
+    comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of
+    residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine,
+    variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means
+    of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade,
+    did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine.
+    There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the
+    associates, education; to many, the most important period of their
+    life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with
+    the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of
+    letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were
+    always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room.
+    It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of
+    Reason in a patty-pan."
+
+The public edifice called the "Phalanstery" was destroyed by fire
+in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon
+afterwards it was dissolved.
+
+
+Section 2. Emerson's first volume of his collected Essays was published
+in 1841. In the reprint it contains the following Essays: History;
+Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence;
+Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. "The Young American,"
+which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844.
+
+Once accustomed to Emerson's larger formulae we can to a certain extent
+project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. But we
+cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious
+illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the
+Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by
+the teachable disciple. The reader must be prepared for occasional
+extravagances. Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays,
+for instance. "Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts,
+namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative,
+history is to be read and written." When we come to the application,
+in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such
+discourse as this? The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one
+upon the other, but their sense is continuous.
+
+    "I hold an actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall,
+    see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on
+    the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these
+    worlds of life?--How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and
+    Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are
+    Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?
+    Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau
+    seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the
+    stevedore, the porter?"
+
+The connection of ideas is not obvious. One can hardly help being
+reminded of a certain great man's Rochester speech as commonly reported
+by the story-teller. "Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall
+a hundred and fifty feet high! Greece in her palmiest days never had a
+waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on! No
+people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty
+feet high!"
+
+We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome
+and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux. But the underlying idea of the
+interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous.
+Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that "every history should
+be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and
+looked at facts as symbols."
+
+We have become familiar with his doctrine of "Self-Reliance," which is
+the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he
+always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks
+authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom.
+It is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme
+self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his
+proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.
+
+    "Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the
+    common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a
+    task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
+    that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
+    that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is
+    to others!"
+
+"Compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be
+praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from
+a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that
+judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful,
+and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John
+Bunyan's view:--
+
+  "A Christian man is never long at ease,
+  When one fright's gone, another doth him seize."
+
+Emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and
+trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble
+scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which
+would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.
+
+The Essay on "Spiritual Laws" is full of pithy sayings:--
+
+    "As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as
+    there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect
+    virtue.--A man passes for that he is worth.--The ancestor of every
+    action is a thought.--To think is to act.--Let a man believe in
+    God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul
+    incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some
+    Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour
+    floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and
+    scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top
+    and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms;
+    until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some
+    other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and
+    head of all living nature."
+
+This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud
+of George Herbert's. The Essay on "Love" is poetical, but the three
+poems, "Initial," "Daemonic," and "Celestial Love" are more nearly equal
+to his subject than his prose.
+
+There is a passage in the Lecture on "Friendship" which suggests
+some personal relation of Emerson's about which we cannot help being
+inquisitive:--
+
+    "It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
+    friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
+    other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
+    not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
+    wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
+    reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
+    companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of
+    treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness,
+    a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for
+    infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both."
+
+Was he thinking of his relations with Carlyle? It is a curious subject
+of speculation what would have been the issue if Carlyle had come to
+Concord and taken up his abode under Emerson's most hospitable roof.
+"You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house." How could
+they have got on together? Emerson was well-bred, and Carlyle was
+wanting in the social graces. "Come rest in this bosom" is a sweet air,
+heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season
+of close proximity, by that other strain,--
+
+  "No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole!
+  Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!"
+
+But Emerson may have been thinking of some very different person,
+perhaps some "crude and cold companion" among his disciples, who was not
+equal to the demands of friendly intercourse.
+
+He discourses wisely on "Prudence," a virtue which he does not claim for
+himself, and nobly on "Heroism," which was a shining part of his own
+moral and intellectual being.
+
+The points which will be most likely to draw the reader's attention are
+the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America,
+for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our
+love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all
+one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of
+sad sincerity painful to recognize.
+
+    "Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates
+    Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and
+    forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of
+    humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the
+    good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the
+    natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of
+    his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that
+    will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death
+    impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps
+    of absolute and inextinguishable being."
+
+In the following Essay, "The Over-Soul," Emerson has attempted the
+impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his
+rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his
+readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of
+reaching, he says,--
+
+    "Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to
+    those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare
+    not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall
+    short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
+    their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising
+    of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use
+    sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what
+    hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of
+    the Highest Law."
+
+"The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-_flow_ of a spiritual
+imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous,
+God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms
+borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute
+in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those
+applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols,
+varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual
+intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts
+and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to
+Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according
+to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words,
+and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving
+in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of
+consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea,
+which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision.
+Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon
+Him whom "no man can see and live."
+
+But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled
+"Circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against
+utterances which he will not defend. There can be no doubt that he would
+have confessed as much with reference to "The Over-Soul" as he has
+confessed with regard to "Circles," the Essay which follows "The
+Over-Soul."
+
+    "I am not careful to justify myself.... But lest I should mislead
+    any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the
+    reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value
+    on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
+    pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all
+    things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply
+    experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back."
+
+Perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of Emerson, we might
+borrow Goethe's language about Spinoza, as expressing the feeling with
+which we are left.
+
+    "I am reading Spinoza with Frau von Stein. I feel myself very near
+    to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine.
+
+    "I cannot say that I ever read Spinoza straight through, that at any
+    time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has
+    stood clear in view before me. But when I look into him I seem to
+    understand him,--that is, he always appears to me consistent with
+    himself, and I can always gather from him very salutary influences
+    for my own way of feeling and acting."
+
+Emerson would not have pretended that he was always "consistent with
+himself," but these "salutary influences," restoring, enkindling,
+vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess,
+like Dr. Walter Channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these,
+as he listened to them in a lecture, "made his head ache."
+
+The three essays which follow "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect,"
+"Art," would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we
+should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom.
+
+    "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
+    all things are at risk."
+
+    "God enters by a private door into every individual."
+
+    "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
+    which you please,--you can never have both."
+
+    "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must
+    carry it with us, or we find it not."
+
+But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from
+Babylon.
+
+Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to
+Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838.
+
+    "I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's
+    earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty
+    young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for
+    comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe,
+    $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no
+    other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which
+    was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a
+    rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have
+    food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich
+    no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise
+    man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend,
+    because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not
+    wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife
+    Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and
+    keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest,
+    most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal
+    preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and
+    sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and
+    three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my
+    household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system,
+    and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+    result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely
+    repellent particle."
+
+A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his
+life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: "My little boy
+is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love."
+
+Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once
+more:--
+
+    "My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages
+    by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little
+    boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You
+    can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such
+    a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a
+    very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to
+    tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace
+    and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a
+    perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever
+    child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by
+    scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one
+    girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I
+    shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I
+    should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so
+    gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible
+    and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet
+    sustain."
+
+This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic
+of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody,"--a lament not unworthy of comparison
+with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's
+well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the
+place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.[1]--Publication of the Second
+Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.--Character.
+--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist and Realist.--New
+England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second Visit to England.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: These two addresses are to be found in the first and
+eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of
+Emerson's works, namely, "Nature, Addresses, and Lectures," and
+"Miscellanies."]
+
+Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and
+feeling; American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism; American, so
+far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. He believed in
+American institutions, he trusted the future of the American race. In
+the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered
+February 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent
+patriot could ask. Not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the
+significance of the following contrast.
+
+    "The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest
+    history in the world; but they need all and more than all the
+    resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that
+    country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of
+    society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to
+    avoid it.... It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only
+    say, Let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal
+    institutions.... If only the men are employed in conspiring with the
+    designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we
+    shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others' censures,
+    out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social
+    state than history has recorded."
+
+Thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are
+taken was delivered. The "Young American" of that day is the more than
+middle-aged American of the present. The intellectual independence of
+our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was
+written. But the social alliance between certain classes of Americans
+and English is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the
+wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes
+of the old world. It is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly
+acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired
+fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which
+its representatives are unworthy. The plain and wholesome language of
+Emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. His
+words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following
+the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic,
+bracing, strengthening to the American, who requires to be reminded of
+his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties.
+
+On the first day of August, 1844, Emerson delivered in Concord an
+address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the
+British West India Islands. This discourse would not have satisfied the
+Abolitionists. It was too general in its propositions, full of humane
+and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate
+method of action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson's second series of Essays was published in 1844. There are
+many sayings in the Essay called "The Poet," which are meant for the
+initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read:--
+
+    "All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is
+    the principal event in chronology."
+
+Does this sound wild and extravagant? What were the political ups and
+downs of the Hebrews,--what were the squabbles of the tribes with each
+other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to
+whom we owe the Psalms,--the sweet singer whose voice is still the
+dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind?
+
+The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this
+eloquent apostrophe:--
+
+    "Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or
+    water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight,
+    wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
+    wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
+    into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is
+    Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st
+    walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition
+    inopportune or ignoble."
+
+"Experience" is, as he says himself, but a fragment. It bears marks of
+having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other
+essays. His most important confession is this:--
+
+    "All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I
+    would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly
+    love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my
+    heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in
+    success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from
+    the Eternal."
+
+The Essay on "Character" requires no difficult study, but is well worth
+the trouble of reading. A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone
+and doctrine.
+
+    "Character is Nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it,
+    or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance and of
+    persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all
+    emulation."
+
+    "There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long
+    intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they
+    have been unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an
+    accumulation of that power we consider.
+
+    "The history of those gods and saints which the world has written,
+    and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have
+    exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and
+    who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality
+    of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death
+    which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol
+    for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest
+    fact."
+
+In his Essay on "Manners," Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:--
+
+    "The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and
+    expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner
+    dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions.
+    Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes
+    good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then
+    gentleness.--Power first, or no leading class.--God knows that
+    all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in
+    strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point
+    at original energy.--The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of
+    this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio,
+    Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very
+    carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to
+    value any condition at a high rate.--I could better eat with one
+    who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and
+    unpresentable person.--The person who screams, or uses the
+    superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms
+    to flight.--I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it
+    excels in woman."
+
+So writes Emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which
+seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme.
+
+This essay is plain enough for the least "transcendental" reader.
+Franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of
+many of the qualities which go to the Emersonian ideal of good manners,
+a typical American, equal to his position, always as much so in the
+palaces and salons of Paris as in the Continental Congress, or the
+society of Philadelphia.
+
+"Gifts" is a dainty little Essay with some nice distinctions and some
+hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse:--
+
+    "The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.
+    Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the
+    farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the
+    painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing."
+
+    "Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because
+    they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the
+    utilities of the world.--Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they
+    are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being
+    attached to them."
+
+    "It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning
+    from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very
+    onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally
+    wishes to give you a slap."
+
+Emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the
+tingling effect of a witty over-statement.
+
+We have recognized most of the thoughts in the Essay entitled "Nature,"
+in the previous Essay by the same name, and others which we have passed
+in review. But there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure.
+
+    Here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar:--
+    "Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought
+    again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated,
+    and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of
+    free thought."
+
+And here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this
+Essay:--
+
+    "They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from
+    the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of
+    our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration
+    of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's
+    life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow."
+
+This is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the
+prediction, M. Jules Verne would be the best authority to consult. Poets
+are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative Frenchman
+gave it a name, he would probably call _Onditologie_.
+
+It is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be
+satisfied with the condition of the American political world at the
+present time, or when the Essay on "Politics" was written, some years
+before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many
+respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters
+of the old parties unchanged. This is Emerson's view of them as they
+then were:--
+
+    "Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share
+    the nation between them, I should say that one has the best
+    cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the
+    poet, or the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote
+    with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the
+    abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating
+    in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources
+    of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the
+    so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these
+    liberties. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of
+    democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
+    radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no
+    ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and
+    selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of
+    the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is
+    timid, and merely defensive of property. It indicates no right, it
+    aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous
+    policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor
+    foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor
+    emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the
+    immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any
+    benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate
+    with the resources of the nation."
+
+The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the
+famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find
+a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled "Nominalism and
+Realism." But there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering
+and considering. We have the complaint of the Cambridge "Phi Beta
+Kappa Oration," reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a
+collection of fragmentary men.
+
+As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side
+were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously.
+
+    "In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good
+    deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they
+    round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living.
+
+    "Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in
+    household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees
+    them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind
+    drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion.
+    Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and
+    insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
+    particulars."
+
+_New England Reformers_.--Would any one venture to guess how Emerson
+would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism,
+his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous,
+too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears,
+in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng
+of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites
+many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin?
+
+We must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on
+a Sunday in the year 1844. The Brook Farm experiment was an index of the
+state of mind among one section of the Reformers of whom he was writing.
+To remodel society and the world into a "happy family" was the aim
+of these enthusiasts. Some attacked one part of the old system, some
+another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old
+church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was
+for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was
+meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart
+in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had
+the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he
+was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the
+unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the
+lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and
+women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities.
+He describes these Reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical
+way:--
+
+    "They defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a
+    realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable.
+    What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One
+    apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no
+    man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil;
+    another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink
+    damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death
+    to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made
+    yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he
+    does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element
+    in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No,
+    they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment.
+    Stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us
+    scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of
+    agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny
+    of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox
+    must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the
+    hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk
+    wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect
+    world was to be defended,--that had been too long neglected, and a
+    society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes
+    was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts
+    of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and
+    their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles!"
+
+We have already seen the issue of the famous Brook Farm experiment,
+which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation.
+
+Emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he
+had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing
+impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of
+which he was in no sense responsible.
+
+He says in the lecture we are considering:--
+
+    "These new associations are composed of men and women of superior
+    talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such
+    a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the
+    good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of
+    superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the
+    association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an
+    asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the
+    strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of
+    men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some
+    compromise."
+
+His sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too
+well to believe in a Noah's ark full of idealists.
+
+All this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of
+lectures in Boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in
+and out of New England.
+
+His letters to Carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how
+punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. He
+was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to
+play the part of an accountant.
+
+He speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and
+that some of this company exacted much time and attention,--more than he
+could spare,--is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in
+his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered
+in prose.
+
+In 1846 Emerson's first volume of poems was published. Many of the poems
+had been long before the public--some of the best, as we have seen,
+having been printed in "The Dial." It is only their being brought
+together for the first time which belongs especially to this period,
+and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in
+connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the
+title, "May-Day and other Pieces."
+
+In October, 1847, he left Concord on a second visit to England, which
+will be spoken of in the following chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" Visit to Europe.--England.
+--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published. I. Uses
+of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli."
+
+
+A new periodical publication was begun in Boston in 1847, under the name
+of the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." Emerson wrote the "Editor's
+Address," but took no further active part in it, Theodore Parker being
+the real editor. The last line of this address is characteristic: "We
+rely on the truth for aid against ourselves."
+
+On the 5th of October, 1847, Emerson sailed for Europe on his second
+visit, reaching Liverpool on the 22d of that month. Many of his admirers
+were desirous that he should visit England and deliver some courses of
+lectures. Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions
+during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit
+have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. Mr. Conway
+quotes passages from a letter of Emerson's which show that he had some
+hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be
+heard by the English audiences favorably disposed towards him.
+
+"I feel no call," he said, "to make a visit of literary propagandism in
+England. All my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at
+home." He does not like the idea of "coaxing" or advertising to get
+him an audience. He would like to read lectures before institutions or
+friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. He has had a good many
+decisive tokens of interest from British men and women, but he doubts
+whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps
+in London. It proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire
+to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of
+the kingdom.
+
+From Liverpool he proceeded immediately to Manchester, where Mr. Ireland
+received him at the Victoria station. After spending a few hours with
+him, he went to Chelsea to visit Carlyle, and at the end of a week
+returned to Manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements
+which had been arranged for him. Mr. Ireland's account of Emerson's
+visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons
+is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons
+visited by Emerson. He lectured at Edinburgh, where his liberal way of
+thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. But he
+did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. A young student, Mr. George
+Cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by Mr.
+Ireland, I borrow a single sentence,--one only, but what could a critic
+say more?
+
+Speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he
+says: "In this respect, I take leave to think that Emerson is the most
+mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared."
+Emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never
+addicted. But what would youth be without its extravagances,--its
+preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and
+unstinted admiration?
+
+I need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other
+notabilities whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought "the
+two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and
+De Quincey." His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon
+him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe
+that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of
+his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy
+behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles
+Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous
+vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric
+rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never
+forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long
+endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter,"
+which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would
+have been discordant to Emerson's ears, which were offended by such
+noisy manifestations.
+
+During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished
+him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but
+never printed.
+
+From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for
+publication. These make up the volume entitled "Representative Men,"
+which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its
+contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and
+conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a
+good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical,
+and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men
+considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own
+affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography,
+no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of
+his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not
+Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest
+us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and
+Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we
+see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally,
+unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first
+to recognize.
+
+Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation.
+Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of
+all great men: "The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we
+are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to
+which also Plato was debtor."
+
+Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes "rough and
+smooth," "scourges of God," and "darlings of the human race." He likes
+Julius Caesar, Charles the Fifth, of Spain, Charles the Twelfth, of
+Sweden, Richard Plantagenet, and Bonaparte.
+
+    "I applaud," he says, "a sufficient man, an officer equal
+    to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master
+    standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome,
+    eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination
+    into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff,
+    or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the
+    world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and
+    all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of
+    persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our
+    thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the
+    potentate is nothing.--
+
+    "The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
+    qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less,
+    and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--All that
+    respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the
+    individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a
+    catholic existence."
+
+No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But
+Plato takes the first place in Emerson's gallery of six great personages
+whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says:--
+
+    "Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical
+    compliment to the Koran, when he said, 'Burn the libraries; for
+    their value is in this book.' Out of Plato come all things that are
+    still written and debated among men of thought."--
+
+    "In proportion to the culture of men they become his
+    scholars."--"How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up
+    out of night to be _his men_!--His contemporaries tax him with
+    plagiarism.--But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are
+    praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and
+    Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and
+    every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone
+    quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."
+
+The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when
+he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his
+storehouses.
+
+A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of
+the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples.
+
+The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest
+expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the
+Indian Scriptures. "'The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu,
+who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as
+not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor
+coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are
+others, others; nor am I, I.' As if he had said, 'All is for the soul,
+and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings;
+and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is
+imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" All of which we see
+reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."--"The country of unity, of
+immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in
+abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of
+a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith
+in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius
+of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its
+philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade,
+freedom."--"Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of
+each."
+
+But Emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of
+another,--"The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell
+what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides
+of every great question from him."
+
+The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of
+holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform
+soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,--are
+fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called
+"Plato: New Readings."
+
+Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or,
+the Mystic." The believers in his special communion as a revealer of
+divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The
+believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence
+at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching
+themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,
+which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in
+its bosom." The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims
+put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer.
+"Philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called
+them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will
+not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen
+with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the
+poets, they can take their choice of Emerson's poetical or prose
+estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In
+"The Test," the Muse says:--
+
+  "I hung my verses in the wind,
+  Time and tide their faults may find;
+  All were winnowed through and through,
+  Five lines lasted good and true ...
+  Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
+  Nor time unmake what poets know.
+  Have you eyes to find the five
+  Which five hundred did survive?"
+
+In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets
+referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, _Swedenborg_, and Goethe.
+
+And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that "his
+books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead
+prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird
+ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so
+transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a
+beautiful person, is a kind of warning." Yet Emerson says of him that
+"He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue
+to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature."
+
+Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer,
+he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.
+
+"Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned
+Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for
+Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other
+reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes
+him as being.
+
+    "There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never
+    a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never
+    insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that
+    he cares for.
+
+    "The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.
+    I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the
+    language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and
+    they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.--
+
+    "Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and
+    himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests,
+    or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish
+    to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or
+    time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes
+    pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we
+    pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he
+    rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones
+    underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration;
+    contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.
+    There is but one exception,--in his love for Socrates. In speaking
+    of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion."
+
+The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same
+characteristics. Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he
+must have found a great relief in getting into "the middle of the road"
+with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often
+led him round to the point from which he started.
+
+As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative
+and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the
+Essay itself.
+
+In writing of "Shakespeare; or, the Poet," Emerson naturally gives
+expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of
+poetry.
+
+"Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
+originality." A poet has "a heart in unison with his time and
+country."--"There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production,
+but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions,
+and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of
+in his times."
+
+When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of
+amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and
+library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd
+of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a
+great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time
+to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: "A great poet who
+appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which
+is anywhere radiating." Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was
+their wit. "Chaucer is a huge borrower." Emerson gives a list of authors
+from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have
+learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury's which I have had the
+privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us.
+
+The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing,
+especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough.
+He was arguing in his own cause,--not defending himself, as if there
+were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim
+of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their
+acquisitions.
+
+    "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
+    tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us."--"Shakespeare is as
+    much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the
+    crowd. A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and
+    think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of
+    doors."
+
+After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare,
+he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares "the
+halfness and imperfection of humanity."
+
+    "He converted the elements which waited on his command into
+    entertainment. He was master of the revels to mankind."
+
+And so, after this solemn verdict on Shakespeare, after looking at the
+forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet,
+Israelite, German, and Swede, he says: "It must be conceded that these
+are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet-priest, who
+shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves
+with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with
+equal inspiration."
+
+It is not to be expected that Emerson should have much that is new to
+say about "Napoleon; or, the Man of the World."
+
+The stepping-stones of this Essay are easy to find:--
+
+    "The instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle
+    class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate
+    democrat.--
+
+    "Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his
+    fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers." As Plato borrowed,
+    as Shakespeare borrowed, as Mirabeau "plagiarized every good
+    thought, every good word that was spoken in France," so Napoleon is
+    not merely "representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other
+    minds."
+
+He was "a man of stone and iron,"--equipped for his work by nature as
+Sallust describes Catiline as being. "He had a directness of action
+never before combined with such comprehension. Here was a man who in
+each moment and emergency knew what to do next. He saw only the object;
+the obstacle must give way."
+
+"When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and
+satisfied."--
+
+"I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern
+society.--He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the
+internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the
+opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse."
+
+But he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and
+finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson
+gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation
+superfluous:--
+
+    "In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power
+    and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but
+    with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
+    Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
+
+    "So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the
+    power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry
+    of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; '_Assez de
+    Bonaparte_.'"
+
+    It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death
+    we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible
+    satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by
+    her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks
+    and ruins.
+
+    But after all, Carlyle's "_carričre ouverte aux talens_" is the
+    expression for Napoleon's great message to mankind.
+
+"Goethe; or, the Writer," is the last of the Representative Men who
+are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the
+fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in
+the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that
+he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could
+hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found
+the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with
+side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds
+an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his
+author. "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"He has
+said the best things about nature that ever were said.--He flung into
+literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has
+been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the
+Prometheus.--He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and
+sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not
+spiritualist.--I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives
+of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of
+conventions,--two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have
+severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for
+this time and for all time."
+
+This must serve as an _ex pede_ guide to reconstruct the Essay which
+finishes the volume.
+
+In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which
+Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took
+a part. Emerson's account of her conversation and extracts from
+her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his
+interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid
+portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written
+of her than by anything she ever wrote herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1858-1858. AEt. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club."
+
+
+After Emerson's return from Europe he delivered lectures to different
+audiences,--one on Poetry, afterwards published in "Letters and Social
+Aims," a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of
+which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many
+others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of
+Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same
+year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York.
+His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the
+planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is
+the only practical course, and is innocent." It would cost two thousand
+millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there
+ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would
+be?"
+
+His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph
+from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could
+not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free
+Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project
+for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in
+1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in
+steel and not in gold:--
+
+  "Pay ransom to the owner,
+    And fill the bag to the brim.
+  Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
+    And ever was. Pay him."
+
+His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with
+indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at
+Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the
+front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode
+inscribed to W.H. Channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of
+the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the
+cause of all the trouble.
+
+  "The over-god
+  Who marries Right to Might,
+  Who peoples, unpeoples,--
+  He who exterminates
+  Races by stronger races,
+  Black by white faces,--
+  Knows to bring honey
+  Out of the lion."
+
+Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he
+refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where
+
+  "Things are of the snake."
+
+The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to
+borrow Mr. Cooke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men
+took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a
+heartier assent to the outward methods adopted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a
+lecture read to the "Woman's Rights Convention" in 1855, he takes bold,
+and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in
+the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way
+in which he expresses himself:
+
+    "I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in
+    public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it.
+    Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous
+    impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be
+    equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a
+    church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do
+    theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish
+    a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse
+    them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our
+    Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.--The new movement
+    is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may
+    proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to
+    desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish."
+
+Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor,
+that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord
+before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He
+afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for "Putnam's Magazine," from
+which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch
+concluded:--
+
+    "He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make
+    what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an
+    impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is
+    an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class
+    remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are
+    native."
+
+The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough
+for an Elizabethan monumental inscription.
+
+  "With beams December planets dart
+  His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
+  July was in his sunny heart,
+  October in his liberal hand."
+
+Emerson's "English Traits," forming one volume of his works, was
+published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not
+a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired
+the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the
+wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is
+indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic
+characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final;
+they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less
+sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded,
+sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence
+made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him
+well-disposed to all the world.
+
+A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which
+Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal
+portion of his record. Only one _place_ is given as the heading of a
+chapter,--_Stonehenge_. The other eighteen chapters have general titles,
+_Land, Race, Ability, Manners_, and others of similar character.
+
+He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the
+British Aristocracy:--
+
+    "Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the
+    House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy
+    and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything
+    they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and
+    killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin.
+    Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent
+    and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy
+    thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by
+    assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and
+    snake, which they severally resembled."
+
+The race preserves some of its better characteristics.
+
+    "They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age.
+    The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin,
+    a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the
+    island."
+
+English "Manners" are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck,
+vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself,
+safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly,
+and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and
+religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.
+
+    "They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and
+    mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the
+    cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They
+    hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use
+    a studied plainness."
+
+    "In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,
+    but the dinner is the capital institution."
+
+    "They confide in each other,--English believes in English."--"They
+    require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in
+    public men."
+
+    "As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented.
+    Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy."
+
+Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly
+two hundred years ago.
+
+    "_New England_, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing
+    and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless
+    instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those
+    _Melancholy Indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all
+    service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby
+    to lay _Violent Hands_ upon themselves at the last. These are among
+    the _unsearchable Judgments_ of God."
+
+If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the
+Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the
+likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.
+
+    "They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of
+    waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run
+    into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly
+    carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense;
+    leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew
+    hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock
+    in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every
+    secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic;
+    they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why
+    she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the
+    inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate
+    and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from
+    shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror
+    they cause."
+
+This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to
+Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.
+
+    "A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the
+    curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first
+    deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them
+    justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and
+    low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a
+    savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The
+    stability of England is the security of the modern world."
+
+Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than
+the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted,
+and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism
+and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English
+civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating
+castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their
+colonies."
+
+In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or
+the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain,
+or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust
+doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if
+they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a
+generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not
+grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson
+saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England.
+A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a
+field of mushrooms.
+
+The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and
+fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flashes of light
+that have not come through its stained windows.
+
+    "The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on
+    the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's
+    chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed
+    hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him,
+    and the religion of a gentleman.
+
+    "The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing
+    left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and
+    reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to
+    take wine with him."
+
+Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told
+a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from
+nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an
+archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but Sydney Smith
+would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch
+of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his
+little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose
+unwieldy bulk he is playing.
+
+Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established
+Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with
+soft-spoken words.
+
+    "Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake
+    the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde,
+    et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in
+    England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson,
+    and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame."
+
+"English Traits" closes with Emerson's speech at Manchester, at the
+annual banquet of the "Free Trade Athenaeum." This was merely an
+occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had
+sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up
+in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in
+their utterance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated
+by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people,
+tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with
+Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all
+this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations
+of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine
+admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its
+playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a
+self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and
+mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not
+be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame
+Tussaud's exhibition, the Lord-Mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if
+one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American
+traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went
+up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the
+little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through
+the wide-awake town of Concord.
+
+In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing
+the name of "The Atlantic Monthly." Professor James Russell Lowell
+was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the
+originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old
+contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them
+Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of
+them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh
+volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as "The
+Romany Girl," "Days," "Brahma," "Waldeinsamkeit," "The Titmouse,"
+"Boston Hymn," "Saadi," and "Terminus."
+
+At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association,
+which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club," the members
+dining together on the last Saturday of every month.
+
+The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present
+day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic
+connection, and the "Atlantic Club" has been spoken of as if there was
+or had been such an institution, but it never existed.
+
+Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality
+before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic
+idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of
+crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the
+habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House"
+of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a
+club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its
+first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as
+visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat
+Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable
+rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always
+pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's
+conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust,
+sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger
+who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the
+table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana,
+Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar,
+eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical
+critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion
+of freedom, Andrew, "the great War Governor" of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe,
+the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy
+of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of
+the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured
+utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental
+phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular
+attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at
+its table, until within a year or two of his death.
+
+Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed
+unrecorded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+1858-1863: AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Worship; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions.
+
+
+The Essay on Persian Poetry, published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in
+1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the
+influence of Oriental poetry on Emerson's verse. In many of the shorter
+poems and fragments published since "May-Day," as well as in the
+"Quatrains" and others of the later poems in that volume, it is
+sometimes hard to tell what is from the Persian from what is original.
+
+On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held
+at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the
+poet's birth. He spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such
+beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as
+one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers
+was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that "every word seemed to have just
+dropped down to him from the clouds." Judge Hoar, who was another of his
+hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his
+time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself
+present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these
+gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His
+words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most
+natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with,
+but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his
+inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.
+
+I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed
+to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most
+devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:--
+
+
+CONCORD, May 13, 1859.
+
+Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these
+lines, which I will hasten to finish. Louis Napoleon will not bayonet
+you the while,--keep him at the door. So long I have promised to
+write! so long I have thanked your long suffering! I have let pass the
+unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with
+Gisela von Arnim (Bettina's daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and
+Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,--wandering in
+Europe with hope of meeting you,--yet met. This contumacy of mine I
+shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer
+first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when
+once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are
+drawn.--Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and
+coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you
+did not like Germany. Where then did Goethe find his lovers? Do all the
+women have bad noses and bad mouths? And will you stop in England, and
+bring home the author of "Counterparts" with you? Or did----write the
+novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them? How
+strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret! I think
+our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent.
+But----is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him.
+I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than
+mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the
+first day. The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and
+creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the
+irresistibility of our bias. Still this is only science, and must remain
+science. Our _praxis_ is never altered for that. We must forever hold
+our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed.
+
+I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an
+immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new
+stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer
+no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in
+our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good
+understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or
+pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but
+from a more convenient nature. But 'tis almost chemistry at last, though
+a meta-chemistry. I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer,
+however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth,
+that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of
+peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in
+the most passive acceptance,--if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out
+around me at this moment the new June,--the leaves say June, though the
+calendar says May,--and we must needs hail our young relatives again,
+though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters
+receiving a late-born brother or sister. Nature herself seems a little
+ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game
+again without a new bract or sepal. But you will think me incorrigible
+with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this
+summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers. My children scan
+curiously your E.'s drawings, as they have seen them.
+
+The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours!
+
+R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke
+of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor
+to his memory. Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in
+the Music Hall to Mr. Parker's society after his death. In 1862, he lost
+his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for August of the same year. Thoreau
+had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson
+is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the
+canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
+
+The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston
+in September, 1862. The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the
+following extract:--
+
+    "Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the
+    earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see
+    Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold
+    them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart
+    with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the
+    melioration of our planet:--
+
+  "'Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
+  And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.'"
+
+The "Conduct of Life" was published in 1860. The chapter on "Fate" might
+leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what
+he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that
+his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in
+adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. But let
+him hold fast to this reassuring statement:--
+
+    "If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm
+    liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty,
+    the power of character.--We are sure, that, though we know not how,
+    necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world,
+    my polarity with the spirit of the times."
+
+But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the
+mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the
+limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are
+illustrated.
+
+    "Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must
+    see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a
+    man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.--The
+    way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider,
+    the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the
+    crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these
+    are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just
+    dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
+    the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive
+    races,--race living at the expense of race.--Let us not deny it up
+    and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its
+    end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
+    instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a
+    clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity."
+
+Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he
+believed in so fully:--
+
+    "They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a
+    lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear."
+
+But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic
+predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who
+dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words,
+which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the
+delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:--
+
+    "People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine
+    brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with
+    high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to
+    distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that
+    a free-soiler."
+
+Let us see what Emerson has to say of "Power:"--
+
+    "All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were
+    _causationists_. They believed that things went not by luck, but by
+    law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that
+    joins the first and the last of things.
+
+    "The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young
+    orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--Imbecility; imbecility
+    in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in
+    all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and
+    fear. This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no
+    habit of self-reliance or original action.--
+
+    "We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_
+    condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of
+    main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found
+    in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the
+    supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive,
+    yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and
+    absorbents provided to take off its edge."
+
+The "two economies which are the best _succedanea"_ for deficiency of
+temperament are concentration and drill. This he illustrates by example,
+and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which "Poor
+Richard" would have cheerfully approved. He might have accepted also the
+Essay on "Wealth" as having a good sense so like his own that he could
+hardly tell the difference between them.
+
+    "Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and
+    wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet
+    water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress
+    when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick
+    lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross
+    the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in
+    books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and
+    auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it
+    added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day,
+    and knowledge and good will. Wealth begins with these articles of
+    necessity.--
+
+    "To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and
+    chief men of each race.--
+
+    "The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the
+    thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their
+    word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush
+    to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest
+    civilization should be undone."
+
+Who can give better counsels on "Culture" than Emerson? But we must
+borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. All kinds of
+secrets come out as we read these Essays of Emerson's. We know something
+of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet.
+It is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite
+portraits Mr. Galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as
+follows:--
+
+    "The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism
+    is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong
+    necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual
+    attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such
+    necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely
+    overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and
+    disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which
+    each individual persists to be what he is.
+
+    "The antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and
+    variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world,
+    with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with
+    eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and
+    religion: books, travel, society, solitude."
+
+    "We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they
+    must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their
+    best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for
+    occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude,
+    the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the
+    cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it
+    farther than suns and stars."
+
+We must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. Try the
+rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth
+knowing. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims
+high, must dread an easy home and popular manners."
+
+Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble
+career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least.
+But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he
+respected. It was "the hand of Douglas" again,--the same feeling that
+Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the
+introduction to this volume.
+
+Here are a few good sayings about "Behavior."
+
+    "There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an
+    egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke
+    of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage."
+
+Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of "Manners" in his Essay under the
+above title.
+
+    "The basis of good manners is self-reliance.--Manners require time,
+    as nothing is more vulgar than haste.--
+
+    "Men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first
+    time,--and every time they meet.--
+
+    "It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his
+    talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that
+    stands by himself, the universe stands by him also."
+
+In his Essay on "Worship," Emerson ventures the following prediction:--
+
+    "The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming
+    ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind
+    must have a faith which is science.--There will be a new church
+    founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a
+    manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church
+    of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will
+    have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol
+    and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture,
+    poetry."
+
+It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and
+unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the
+established facts of science and history when these last reach it in
+their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science
+more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date
+than "Beauty," or "Illusions." But accidental circumstances made such
+confusion in the strata of Emerson's published thought that one is often
+at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer
+layer.
+
+We come to "Considerations by the Way." The common-sense side of
+Emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical
+intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher
+of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth.
+
+    "Franklin said, 'Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they
+    begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it
+    discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'"
+
+"Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the
+minority, surely." Here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant,"
+which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered
+lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this
+matter of the _vox populi_. "Leave this hypocritical prating about the
+masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and
+need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede
+anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
+draw individuals out of them."
+
+Pčre Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer
+in due time. After reading what Emerson says about "the masses," one is
+tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and
+be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not
+make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great
+necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which
+he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often
+discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the
+Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble
+ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather
+than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something
+of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing
+in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens,
+entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses
+his listeners and readers.
+
+The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the
+following passage:--
+
+    "The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of
+    everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left
+    their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My
+    boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors,
+    and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the
+    intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word
+    has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my
+    stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box!
+    I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to
+    sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy
+    in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact,
+    which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days
+    so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the
+    imagination."
+
+One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce
+of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day
+memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if
+often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A
+coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a
+Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification.
+Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something
+could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he
+cannot lift the object he would fain idealize.
+
+The habitual readers of Emerson do not mind an occasional
+over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them
+amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two
+always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up
+as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no
+one should venture upon Emerson. If he had seen the lecturer's smile
+as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact
+unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found
+a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never
+show him.
+
+The Essay on "Illusions" has little which we have not met with, or shall
+not find repeating itself in the Poems.
+
+During this period Emerson contributed many articles in prose and
+verse to the "Atlantic Monthly," and several to "The Dial," a second
+periodical of that name published in Cincinnati. Some of these have
+been, or will be, elsewhere referred to.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of Abraham Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus."
+
+
+The "Boston Hymn" was read by Emerson in the Music Hall, on the first
+day of January, 1863. It is a rough piece of verse, but noble from
+beginning to end. One verse of it, beginning "Pay ransom to the owner,"
+has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it:--
+
+  "I cause from every creature
+    His proper good to flow:
+  As much as he is and doeth
+    So much shall he bestow.
+
+  "But laying hands on another
+    To coin his labor and sweat,
+  He goes in pawn to his victim
+    For eternal years in debt.
+
+  "To-day unbind the captive,
+    So only are ye unbound:
+  Lift up a people from the dust,
+    Trump of their rescue, sound!"
+
+"Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is
+more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than
+the plain song of the "Boston Hymn."
+
+  "But best befriended of the God
+  He who, in evil times,
+  Warned by an inward voice,
+  Heeds not the darkness and the dread,
+  Biding by his rule and choice,
+  Feeling only the fiery thread
+  Leading over heroic ground,
+  Walled with mortal terror round,
+  To the aim which him allures,
+  And the sweet heaven his deed secures.
+  Peril around, all else appalling,
+  Cannon in front and leaden rain
+  Him duly through the clarion calling
+  To the van called not in vain."
+
+It is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they
+were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand
+years:--
+
+  "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+  So near is God to man,
+  When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
+  The youth replies, _I can_."
+
+"Saadi" was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1864, "My Garden" in
+1866, "Terminus" in 1867. In the same year these last poems with many
+others were collected in a small volume, entitled "May-Day, and
+Other Pieces." The general headings of these poems are as follows:
+May-Day.--The Adirondacs.--Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces.--Nature
+and Life.--Elements.--Quatrains.--Translations.--Some of these poems,
+which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous
+pages. "The Adirondacs" is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared
+for its poetical character with "May-Day," one passage from which,
+beginning,
+
+  "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. In this volume will be found
+"Brahma," "Days," and others which are well known to all readers of
+poetry.
+
+Emerson's delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and
+sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham
+Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the
+homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth and delicacy:--
+
+    "Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor;
+    the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four
+    years,--four years of battle-days,--his endurance, his fertility
+    of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found
+    wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his
+    fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the
+    centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American
+    people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow
+    with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true
+    representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of
+    his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart,
+    the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue."
+
+In his "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association,"
+Emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and
+sufficiently "transcendental" way: intelligibly for those who wish to
+understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept
+the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, "The Sphinx."
+
+    --"As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within
+    his own mind,--is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds
+    with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to
+    face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the
+    power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste,
+    all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a
+    religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the
+    private action."
+
+Nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the
+suggestive remark,--
+
+    --"What I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by
+    which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true
+    Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure
+    benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of
+    active duty, that worship finds expression.--The interests that grow
+    out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the
+    old eternal duties."
+
+    In a later address before the same association, Emerson says:--
+    "I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous
+    dispensation,--certainly not to the _doctrine_ of Christianity.--If
+    you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a
+    thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of
+    nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on
+    the teachings."
+
+The "Progress of Culture" was delivered as a Phi Beta Kappa oration just
+thirty years after his first address before the same society. It is very
+instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a
+whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in
+1867, at the age of sixty-four. Both are hopeful, but the second is more
+sanguine than the first. He recounts what he considers the recent gains
+of the reforming movement:--
+
+    "Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or
+    adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an
+    honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil
+    status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she
+    controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her
+    share in power."
+
+He enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of
+intelligence,--"All, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary,
+teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and
+superseding kings."
+
+He repeats some of his fundamental formulae.
+
+    "The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral
+    sentiment.
+
+    "Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any
+    material force, that thoughts rule the world.
+
+    "Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter."
+
+And most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in
+1867,--especially in the view of future possibilities. "Bad kings and
+governors help us, if only they are bad enough." _Non tali auxilio_, we
+exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these
+concluding words: "I read the promise of better times and of greater
+men."
+
+In the year 1866, Emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as
+the "grand climacteric." In that year Harvard University conferred upon
+him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest honor in its gift.
+
+In that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips,
+he met his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, at the Brevoort House, in New
+York. Then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in his second volume, under the
+title "Terminus." This was the first time that Dr. Emerson recognized
+the fact that his father felt himself growing old. The thought, which
+must have been long shaping itself in the father's mind, had been so far
+from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly
+avowed. The poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes
+about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. The
+reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a
+particular purpose, but here is the whole poem:--
+
+  TERMINUS.
+
+  It is time to be old,
+  To take in sail:--
+  The god of bounds,
+  Who sets to seas a shore,
+  Came to me in his fatal rounds,
+  And said: "No more!
+  No farther shoot
+  Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
+  Fancy departs: no more invent;
+  Contract thy firmament
+  To compass of a tent.
+  There's not enough for this and that,
+  Make thy option which of two;
+  Economize the failing river,
+  Not the less revere the Giver,
+  Leave the many and hold the few,
+  Timely wise accept the terms,
+  Soften the fall with wary foot;
+  A little while
+  Still plan and smile,
+  And,--fault of novel germs,--
+  Mature the unfallen fruit.
+  Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
+  Bad husbands of their fires,
+  Who when they gave thee breath,
+  Failed to bequeath
+  The needful sinew stark as once,
+  The baresark marrow to thy bones,
+  But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
+  Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
+  Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
+  Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.
+
+  "As the bird trims her to the gale
+  I trim myself to the storm of time,
+  I man the rudder, reef the sail,
+  Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
+  'Lowly faithful, banish fear,
+  Right onward drive unharmed;
+  The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
+  And every wave is charmed.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication
+of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return.
+
+
+During three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a
+series of Lectures at Harvard University on the "Natural History of the
+Intellect." These Lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a
+great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or
+reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an
+extract from Prof. Thayer's "Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." He is
+there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics.
+It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms
+employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words "subject and
+object" with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin
+shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions.
+Once he ventures on the _not me_, but in the main he uses plain English
+handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ.
+
+"Society and Solitude" was published in 1870. The first Essay in the
+volume bears the same name as the volume itself.
+
+In this first Essay Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims
+of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of
+solitude. We are driven "as with whips into the desert." But there is
+danger in this seclusion. "Now and then a man exquisitely made can live
+alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.--Here again, as
+so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and
+our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.--The
+conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our
+sympathy."
+
+The Essay on "Civilization" is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a
+very agreeable way. The framed or stone-house in place of the cave or
+the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting,
+and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful
+combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the
+press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with
+special brilliancy:--
+
+    "Right position of woman in the State is another index.--Place the
+    sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality
+    gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that
+    is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and
+    learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that I have
+    thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of
+    good women."
+
+My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader
+will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:--
+
+    "The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and
+    compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart,
+    longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven
+    by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from
+    home,--
+
+  "'The pulses of her iron heart
+      Go beating through the storm.'"
+
+I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be
+an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "The
+Steamboat:"
+
+  "The beating of her restless heart
+    Still sounding through the storm."
+
+It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer
+lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his
+verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's
+special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that
+
+    'tis better to be quoted wrong
+  Than to be quoted not at all.
+
+This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy
+to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How
+could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly
+announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that
+he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having
+any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and
+doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:--
+
+    "Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,
+    to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods
+    themselves."--
+
+    "'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that
+    the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON
+    TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and
+    bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find
+    all their teams going the other way,--Charles's Wain, Great Bear,
+    Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those
+    interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love,
+    freedom, knowledge, utility."--
+
+Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the
+same constellation; the _Dipper_ is what our people often call it, and
+the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the
+North Star.
+
+I find in the Essay on "Art" many of the thoughts with which we are
+familiar in Emerson's poem, "The Problem." It will be enough to cite
+these passages:--
+
+    "We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in
+    hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had
+    a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in
+    the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the
+    artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work
+    of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.--
+
+    --"The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the
+    tragedies of Aeschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals,
+    the plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but
+    in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.--
+
+    --"The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest
+    and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid
+    every stone.--
+
+    "Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake,
+    whose melody is sweeter than he knows."
+
+The discourse on "Eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial,
+than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its
+general purport:--
+
+    "Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards,
+    it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,
+    speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it
+    must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.--
+
+    "He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion
+    must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on
+    character and insight.--
+
+    --"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.--
+
+    --"Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their
+    integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they
+    toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a
+    reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or
+    morals, as above the whole world and themselves also."
+
+"Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it
+sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of
+the goblet which holds some tonic draught:--
+
+    "Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in
+    his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the
+    soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham
+    and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations
+    when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,
+    the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to
+    swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful
+    and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that
+    all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more
+    charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching
+    than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--All day,
+    between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,
+    sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he
+    fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before
+    him."
+
+Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about
+"Farming." Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an
+address before the "Middlesex Agricultural Society," and printed in the
+"Transactions" of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and
+the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some
+general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:--
+
+    "The farmer's office is precise and important, but you must not try
+    to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to
+    fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.--This hard work will
+    always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor
+    by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men
+    of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and
+    timely."
+
+Emerson's chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are
+correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his
+imaginative presentation. He tells the commonest facts so as to make
+them almost a surprise:--
+
+    "By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have
+    found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting
+    the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that
+    Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises
+    to pay a better rent than all the superstructure."
+
+In "Works and Days" there is much good reading, but I will call
+attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest
+of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson's assertions and
+predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of
+"the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables
+a man to change his blood as often as his linen!" And once more,
+
+"We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the
+air."
+
+Possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on
+wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles.
+
+The other point I have marked is that we find in this Essay a prose
+version of the fine poem, printed in "May-Day" under the title "Days." I
+shall refer to this more particularly hereafter.
+
+It is wronging the Essay on "Books" to make extracts from it. It is all
+an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the
+public libraries. If I commit the wrong I have spoken of, it is under
+protest against myself. Every word of this Essay deserves careful
+reading. But here are a few sentences I have selected for the reader's
+consideration:--
+
+    "There are books; and it is practicable to read them because they
+    are so few.--
+
+    "I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go
+    there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is
+    already within the four walls of my study at home.--
+
+    "The three practical rules which I have to offer are, 1. Never read
+    any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books.
+    3. Never read any but what you like, or, in Shakspeare's phrase,--
+
+      "'No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en;
+        In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.'"
+
+Emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his Essay on
+"Clubs," but nothing very notable on the special subject of the Essay.
+Perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the
+"Saturday Club," of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself
+around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. But he
+was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of
+talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and
+remembered more. He was hardly what Dr. Johnson would have called a
+"clubable" man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he
+would never have come from Concord so regularly to attend them. He gives
+two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which I have
+been speaking:--
+
+    "I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in
+    their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to
+    an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion
+    shall have its just influence on public questions of education and
+    politics."
+
+    "A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means
+    of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage."
+
+I do not think "public questions of education and politics" were very
+prominent at the social meetings of the "Saturday Club," but "worthy
+foreigners," and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the
+meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and
+callings.
+
+All that Emerson has to say about "Courage" is worth listening to, for
+he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more
+cowards than are found in the battle-field. He spoke his convictions
+fearlessly; he carried the spear of Ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate
+save that which protects him
+
+  "Whose armor is his honest thought,
+    And simple truth his utmost skill."
+
+He mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of
+mankind: 1. Disinterestedness; 2. Practical Power; 3. Courage. "I need
+not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank.
+They forgive everything to it. And any man who puts his life in peril in
+a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men."--There are
+good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this Essay or Lecture,
+which closes with the spirited ballad of "George Nidiver," written "by a
+lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known."
+
+Men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its
+subject, like the one now before me, "Success." Emerson complains of the
+same things in America which Carlyle groaned over in England:--
+
+    "We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing
+    advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is
+    lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.--
+
+    "Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to
+    all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for
+    success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take
+    Michael Angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something
+    of worth and value.'"
+
+Reading about "Success" is after all very much like reading in old books
+of alchemy. "How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and
+treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and
+the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate
+directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into
+Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. "Success" in its
+vulgar sense,--the gaining of money and position,--is not to be reached
+by following the rules of an instructor. Our "self-made men," who govern
+the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by
+adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were
+placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "Poor Richard," or any
+other moralist or economist.--For such as these is meant the cheap
+cynical saying quoted by Emerson, "_Rien ne réussit mieux que le
+succčs_."
+
+But this is not the aim and end of Emerson's teaching:--
+
+    "I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition
+    in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public
+    opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one
+    feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly,
+    and the other hospitality of mind."
+
+And so, though there is no alchemy in this Lecture, it is profitable
+reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character,
+the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the
+market-place.
+
+The Essay on "Old Age" has a special value from its containing two
+personal reminiscences: one of the venerable Josiah Quincy, a brief
+mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825,
+Emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-President John Adams,
+soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is enough to
+allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all.
+
+But many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. He
+recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has
+weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so
+that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling
+that he has found expression,--that his condition, in particular and in
+general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing
+his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future:--
+
+    "When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well
+    spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works
+    that belong to these. But the central wisdom which was old in
+    infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions,
+    leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard
+    that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that
+    whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is
+    announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles
+    our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the
+    inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving
+    skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the
+    inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment."
+
+Other literary labors of Emerson during this period were the
+Introduction to "Plutarch's Morals" in 1870, and a Preface to William
+Ellery Channing's Poem, "The Wanderer," in 1871. He made a speech at
+Howard University, Washington, in 1872.
+
+In the year 1871 Emerson made a visit to California with a very pleasant
+company, concerning which Mr. John M. Forbes, one of whose sons married
+Emerson's daughter Edith, writes to me as follows. Professor James B.
+Thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an
+account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow Mr. Forbes's
+letter:--
+
+    BOSTON, February 6, 1884.
+
+    MY DEAR DR.,--What little I can give will be of a very rambling
+    character.
+
+    One of the first memories of Emerson which comes up is my meeting
+    him on the steamboat at returning from Detroit East. I persuaded him
+    to stop over at Niagara, which he had never seen. We took a carriage
+    and drove around the circuit. It was in early summer, perhaps in
+    1848 or 1849. When we came to Table Rock on the British side, our
+    driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage.
+    We passed on by rail, and the next day's papers brought us the
+    telegraphic news that Table Rock had fallen over; perhaps we were
+    among the last persons on it!
+
+    About 1871 I made up a party for California, including Mr. Emerson,
+    his daughter Edith, and a number of gay young people. We drove with
+    B----, the famous Vermont coachman, up to the Geysers, and then made
+    the journey to the Yosemite Valley by wagon and on horseback. I wish
+    I could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at
+    this time. With the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes
+    drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently
+    indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes
+    of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. I especially
+    remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his
+    reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse's mouth,
+    without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding
+    Pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was
+    he, at the moment, of his surroundings.
+
+    In San Francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers,
+    in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were
+    deposited the stupefied Mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of
+    humanity to be found in the world. The contrast between them and
+    the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all
+    beholders.
+
+    When we reached Salt Lake City on our way home he made a point of
+    calling on Brigham Young, then at the summit of his power. The
+    Prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of
+    hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. He did not seem
+    to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so
+    doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast
+    between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces.
+
+    I regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and
+    other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of Professor
+    J.B. Thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you
+    some notes that would be valuable.
+
+    Perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is
+    his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at Naushon, no
+    doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost
+    none of their value from being transferred to his pages. Next to
+    his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable
+    recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs
+    which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor
+    which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which
+    you and I know he possessed in a marked degree.
+
+    Yours always,
+
+    J.M. FORBES.
+
+Professor James B. Thayer's little book, "A Western Journey with Mr.
+Emerson," is a very entertaining account of the same trip concerning
+which Mr. Forbes wrote the letter just given. Professor Thayer kindly
+read many of his notes to me before his account was published, and
+allows me to make such use of the book as I see fit. Such liberty must
+not be abused, and I will content myself with a few passages in which
+Emerson has a part. No extract will interest the reader more than the
+following:--
+
+    "'How _can_ Mr. Emerson,' said one of the younger members of the
+    party to me that day, 'be so agreeable, all the time, without
+    getting tired!' It was the _naive_ expression of what we all had
+    felt. There was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was
+    always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and
+    there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom
+    he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own
+    estimation. One thing particularly impressed me,--the sense that he
+    seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It
+    was the behavior of one who really _believed_ in an immortal life,
+    and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and
+    grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they
+    were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual
+    charm of our gracious friend. Years afterwards, on that memorable
+    day of his funeral at Concord, I found that a sentence from his own
+    Essay on Immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself
+    all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power:
+    'Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of
+    eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and Nature also, and gave
+    grandeur to the passing hour.'"
+
+This extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the
+same subject.
+
+    "The next evening, Sunday, the twenty-third, Mr. Emerson read his
+    address on 'Immortality,' at Dr. Stebbins's church. It was the first
+    time that he had spoken on the Western coast; never did he speak
+    better. It was, in the main, the same noble Essay that has since
+    been printed.
+
+    "At breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the 'Alta
+    California.' It gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it
+    warmly, and closed with the following observations: 'All left the
+    church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative
+    genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the
+    English language had contributed to that end.'"
+
+The story used to be told that after the Reverend Horace Holley had
+delivered a prayer on some public occasion, Major Ben. Russell, of ruddy
+face and ruffled shirt memory, Editor of "The Columbian Centinel,"
+spoke of it in his paper the next day as "the most eloquent prayer ever
+addressed to a Boston audience."
+
+The "Alta California's" "elegant tribute" is not quite up to this
+rhetorical altitude.
+
+    "'The minister,' said he, 'is in no danger of losing his position;
+    he represents the moral sense and the humanities.' He spoke of his
+    own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that 'some one had
+    lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the
+    name of Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty
+    about it. When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a
+    Republican, he welcomed it. It did not bind him to what he did
+    not like. What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of
+    negation?'"
+
+    "I made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent
+    course of lectures at Cambridge, 'The Natural History of the
+    Intellect.' This opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas!
+    I could recall but little of it,--little more than the mere hintings
+    of what he said. He cared very little for metaphysics. But he
+    thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own
+    mind,--about memory, for example. These he had set down from time
+    to time. As for making any methodical history, he did not undertake
+    it."
+
+Emerson met Brigham Young at Salt Lake City, as has been mentioned, but
+neither seems to have made much impression upon the other. Emerson spoke
+of the Mormons. Some one had said, "They impress the common people,
+through their imagination, by Bible-names and imagery." "Yes," he said,
+"it is an after-clap of Puritanism. But one would think that after this
+Father Abraham could go no further."
+
+The charm of Boswell's Life of Johnson is that it not merely records
+his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser
+peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and
+shades to a portrait on canvas. We are much obliged to Professor Thayer
+therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been
+good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take
+leave of his agreeable little volume:--
+
+    "At breakfast we had, among other things, pie. This article at
+    breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson's weaknesses. A pie stood before
+    him now. He offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and
+    then one or two others, who also declined; and then Mr.----; he too
+    declined. 'But Mr.----!' Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous
+    emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting
+    the entire weight of his character into his manner,--'but Mr.----,
+    _what is pie for_?'"
+
+A near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with Emerson, and
+when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very
+desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace. Presently
+he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in
+the other,--such a wedge! She could hardly have been more dismayed
+if one of Caesar's _cunei_, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge
+against her.
+
+Yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good
+creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees. In
+semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate
+stomachs. But here was Emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never,
+so far as I remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other
+side, was Carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with
+indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness
+habitually centred beneath his diaphragm.
+
+Like his friend Carlyle and like Tennyson, Emerson had a liking for a
+whiff of tobacco-smoke:--
+
+    "When alone," he said, "he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar. But
+    in company it was singular to see how different it was. To one who
+    found it difficult to meet people, as he did, the effect of a cigar
+    was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as silent as he likes, and
+    yet be good company. And so Hawthorne used to say that he found it.
+    On this journey Mr. Emerson generally smoked a single cigar after
+    our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both. This
+    was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with
+    him at home."
+
+Professor Thayer adds in a note:--
+
+    "Like Milton, Mr. Emerson 'was extraordinary temperate in his Diet,'
+    and he used even less tobacco. Milton's quiet day seems to have
+    closed regularly with a pipe; he 'supped,' we are told, 'upon ...
+    some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water
+    went to bed.'"
+
+As Emerson's name has been connected with that of Milton in its nobler
+aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like Milton, indulging in
+this semi-philosophical luxury.
+
+One morning in July, 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson woke to find their room
+filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the
+room over them. The alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did
+their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was
+destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to Emerson,
+including his father's sermons. Emerson got wet and chilled, and it
+seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory
+which came over his declining years.
+
+His kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve
+his temporary needs. A study was made ready for him in the old Court
+House, and the "Old Manse," which had sheltered his grandfather, and
+others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant.
+
+On the 15th of October he spoke at a dinner given in New York in honor
+of James Anthony Froude, the historian, and in the course of this same
+month he set out on his third visit to Europe, accompanied by his
+daughter Ellen. We have little to record of this visit, which was
+suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted
+for him. He went to Egypt, but so far as I have learned the Sphinx had
+no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself
+upon the mysterious and dream-compelling Nile it may be suspected that
+the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision,--that,
+as to his Humble-bee,
+
+  "All was picture as he passed."
+
+But while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him. The
+sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound. It did not
+confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement
+organized itself almost without effort. If any such had been needed, the
+attached friend whose name is appended to the Address to the Subscribers
+to the Fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house would have been as
+energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring
+the reprint of "Sartor Resartus." I have his kind permission to publish
+the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily
+carried out.
+
+    _To the Subscribers to the Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson's
+    House, after the Fire of July_ 24, 1872:
+
+    The death of Mr. Emerson has removed any objection which may have
+    before existed to the printing of the following correspondence. I
+    have now caused this to be done, that each subscriber may have the
+    satisfaction of possessing a copy of the touching and affectionate
+    letters in which he expressed his delight in this, to him, most
+    unexpected demonstration of personal regard and attachment, in the
+    offer to restore for him his ruined home.
+
+    No enterprise of the kind was ever more fortunate and successful in
+    its purpose and in its results. The prompt and cordial response to
+    the proposed subscription was most gratifying. No contribution was
+    solicited from any one. The simple suggestion to a few friends of
+    Mr. Emerson that an opportunity was now offered to be of service
+    to him was all that was needed. From the first day on which it was
+    made, the day after the fire, letters began to come in, with cheques
+    for large and small amounts, so that in less than three weeks I
+    was enabled to send to Judge Hoar the sum named in his letter as
+    received by him on the 13th of August, and presented by him to Mr.
+    Emerson the next morning, at the Old Manse, with fitting words.
+
+    Other subscriptions were afterwards received, increasing the amount
+    on my book to eleven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. A part
+    of this was handed directly to the builder at Concord. The balance
+    was sent to Mr. Emerson October 7, and acknowledged by him in his
+    letter of October 8, 1872.
+
+    All the friends of Mr. Emerson who knew of the plan which was
+    proposed to rebuild his house, seemed to feel that it was a
+    privilege to be allowed to express in this way the love and
+    veneration with which he was regarded, and the deep debt of
+    gratitude which they owed to him, and there is no doubt that a much
+    larger amount would have been readily and gladly offered, if it had
+    been required, for the object in view.
+
+    Those who have had the happiness to join in this friendly
+    "conspiracy" may well take pleasure in the thought that what they
+    have done has had the effect to lighten the load of care and anxiety
+    which the calamity of the fire brought with it to Mr. Emerson, and
+    thus perhaps to prolong for some precious years the serene and noble
+    life that was so dear to all of us.
+
+    My thanks are due to the friends who have made me the bearer of this
+    message of good-will.
+
+    LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+    BOSTON, May 8, 1882.
+
+
+    BOSTON, August 13, 1872.
+
+    DEAR MR. EMERSON:
+
+    It seems to have been the spontaneous desire of your friends, on
+    hearing of the burning of your house, to be allowed the pleasure of
+    rebuilding it.
+
+    A few of them have united for this object, and now request your
+    acceptance of the amount which I have to-day deposited to your order
+    at the Concord Bank, through the kindness of our friend, Judge Hoar.
+    They trust that you will receive it as an expression of sincere
+    regard and affection from friends, who will, one and all, esteem it
+    a great privilege to be permitted to assist in the restoration of
+    your home.
+
+    And if, in their eagerness to participate in so grateful a work,
+    they may have exceeded the estimate of your architect as to what
+    is required for that purpose, they beg that you will devote the
+    remainder to such other objects as may be most convenient to you.
+
+    Very sincerely yours,
+
+    LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+
+    CONCORD, August 14, 1872.
+
+    DR. LE B. RUSSELL:
+
+    _Dear Sir_,--I received your letters, with the check for ten
+    thousand dollars inclosed, from Mr. Barrett last evening. This
+    morning I deposited it to Mr. Emerson's credit in the Concord
+    National Bank, and took a bank book for him, with his little balance
+    entered at the top, and this following, and carried it to him with
+    your letter. I told him, by way of prelude, that some of his friends
+    had made him treasurer of an association who wished him to go to
+    England and examine Warwick Castle and other noted houses that
+    had been recently injured by fire, in order to get the best ideas
+    possible for restoration, and then to apply them to a house which
+    the association was formed to restore in this neighborhood.
+
+    When he understood the thing and had read your letter, he seemed
+    very deeply moved. He said that he had been allowed so far in life
+    to stand on his own feet, and that he hardly knew what to say,--that
+    the kindness of his friends was very great. I said what I thought
+    was best in reply, and told him that this was the spontaneous act of
+    friends, who wished the privilege of expressing in this way their
+    respect and affection, and was done only by those who thought it a
+    privilege to do so. I mentioned Hillard as you desired, and also
+    Mrs. Tappan, who, it seems, had written to him and offered any
+    assistance he might need, to the extent of five thousand dollars,
+    personally.
+
+    I think it is all right, but he said he must see the list of
+    contributors, and would then say what he had to say about it. He
+    told me that Mr. F.C. Lowell, who was his classmate and old friend,
+    Mr. Bangs, Mrs. Gurney, and a few other friends, had already sent
+    him five thousand dollars, which he seemed to think was as much as
+    he could bear. This makes the whole a very gratifying result, and
+    perhaps explains the absence of some names on your book.
+
+    I am glad that Mr. Emerson, who is feeble and ill, can learn what a
+    debt of obligation his friends feel to him, and thank you heartily
+    for what you have done about it. Very truly yours,
+
+    E.R. HOAR.
+
+
+    CONCORD, August 16, 1872.
+
+    MY DEAR LE BARON:
+
+    I have wondered and melted over your letter and its accompaniments
+    till it is high time that I should reply to it, if I can. My
+    misfortunes, as I have lived along so far in this world, have been
+    so few that I have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of
+    good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has
+    come to me. And this late calamity, however rude and devastating,
+    soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins,
+    so that I can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment
+    with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished
+    me. But I cannot read your letter or think of its message without
+    delight, that my companions and friends bear me so noble a
+    good-will, nor without some new aspirations in the old heart toward
+    a better deserving. Judge Hoar has, up to this time, withheld from
+    me the names of my benefactors, but you may be sure that I shall not
+    rest till I have learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at
+    night and at morning.
+
+    Your affectionate friend and debtor,
+
+    R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+    DR. LE BARON RUSSELL
+
+    CONCORD, October 8, 1872.
+
+    MY DEAR DOCTOR LE BARON:
+
+    I received last night your two notes, and the cheque, enclosed in
+    one of them, for one thousand and twenty dollars.
+
+    Are my friends bent on killing me with kindness? No, you will say,
+    but to make me live longer. I thought myself sufficiently loaded
+    with benefits already, and you add more and more. It appears that
+    you all will rebuild my house and rejuvenate me by sending me in my
+    old days abroad on a young man's excursion.
+
+    I am a lover of men, but this recent wonderful experience of their
+    tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts day by day. Now that
+    I have all or almost all the names of the men and women who have
+    conspired in this kindness to me (some of whom I have never
+    personally known), I please myself with the thought of meeting each
+    and asking, Why have we not met before? Why have you not told me
+    that we thought alike? Life is not so long, nor sympathy of thought
+    so common, that we can spare the society of those with whom we best
+    agree. Well, 'tis probably my own fault by sticking ever to my
+    solitude. Perhaps it is not too late to learn of these friends a
+    better lesson.
+
+    Thank them for me whenever you meet them, and say to them that I am
+    not wood or stone, if I have not yet trusted myself so far as to go
+    to each one of them directly.
+
+    My wife insists that I shall also send her acknowledgments to them
+    and you.
+
+    Yours and theirs affectionately,
+
+    R.W. EMERSON.
+
+    DR. LE BARON KUSSELL.
+
+
+The following are the names of the subscribers to the fund for
+rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house:--
+
+Mrs. Anne S. Hooper.
+Miss Alice S. Hooper.
+Mrs. Caroline Tappan.
+Miss Ellen S. Tappan.
+Miss Mary A. Tappan.
+Mr. T.G. Appleton.
+Mrs. Henry Edwards.
+Miss Susan E. Dorr.
+Misses Wigglesworth.
+Mr. Edward Wigglesworth.
+Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.
+Mrs. Sarah S. Russell.
+Friends in New York and Philadelphia, through Mr. Williams.
+Mr. William Whiting.
+Mr. Frederick Beck.
+Mr. H.P. Kidder.
+Mrs. Abel Adams.
+Mrs. George Faulkner.
+Hon. E.R. Hoar.
+Mr. James B. Thayer.
+Mr. John M. Forbes.
+Mr. James H. Beal.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lodge.
+Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge.
+Mr. H.H. Hunnewell.
+Mrs. S. Cabot.
+Mr. James A. Dupee.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lowell.
+Mrs. M.F. Sayles.
+Miss Helen L. Appleton.
+J.R. Osgood & Co.
+Mr. Richard Soule.
+Mr. Francis Geo. Shaw.
+Dr. R.W. Hooper.
+Mr. William P. Mason.
+Mr. William Gray.
+Mr. Sam'l G. Ward.
+Mr. J.I. Bowditch.
+Mr. Geo. C. Ward.
+Mrs. Luicia J. Briggs.
+Mr. John E. Williams.
+Dr. Le Baron Russell.
+
+In May, 1873, Emerson returned to Concord. His friends and
+fellow-citizens received him with every token of affection and
+reverence. A set of signals was arranged to announce his arrival.
+Carriages were in readiness for him and his family, a band greeted him
+with music, and passing under a triumphal arch, he was driven to his
+renewed old home amidst the welcomes and the blessings of his loving and
+admiring friends and neighbors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and
+Originality.--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--
+Greatness.--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems.
+
+
+In December, 1874, Emerson published "Parnassus," a Collection of Poems
+by British and American authors. Many readers may like to see his
+subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together.
+They are as follows: "Nature."--"Human Life."--"Intellectual."
+--"Contemplation."--"Moral and Religious."--"Heroic."--"Personal."
+--"Pictures."--"Narrative Poems and Ballads."--"Songs."--"Dirges and
+Pathetic Poems."--"Comic and Humorous."--"Poetry of Terror."--"Oracles
+and Counsels."
+
+I have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of Mr. George Willis
+Cooke's "Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy," that
+I am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his
+excellent work.
+
+"This collection," he says,
+
+    "was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying
+    into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. Many
+    of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on
+    the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost
+    everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet
+    Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious
+    poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections.
+    With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional
+    poems which have attracted devout souls.--His poetical sympathies
+    are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the
+    seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any
+    other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. The
+    names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently
+    appear. Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to
+    Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make
+    up the list of favorites. Many little known pieces are included, and
+    some whose merit is other than poetical.--This selection of poems
+    is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. I
+    not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and
+    introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general
+    reader. The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of
+    the poems and poets appearing in these selections."
+
+I will only add to Mr. Cooke's criticism these two remarks: First, that
+I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look
+for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies
+at least, there was no paged index where each author's pieces were
+collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss
+of time and patience, under various heads, "imitating the careful search
+that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris." The other remark is that
+each one of Emerson's American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted
+would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of
+his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some
+specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen
+fit to indulge us.
+
+In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among
+the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector. He
+received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was
+elected. He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling:--
+
+    "I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen
+    on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in
+    the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my
+    too partial advocate."
+
+Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to "Letters and Social Aims,"
+that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the
+collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the
+illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of
+mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case
+have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. Sentences, even
+whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what
+even he would have tolerated:--
+
+    "There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his
+    full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and
+    arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely
+    to the matter."
+
+This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just
+enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is
+that entitled "Poetry and Imagination." I have room for little more than
+the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these
+it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are "Introductory;"
+"Poetry;" "Imagination;" "Veracity;" "Creation;" "Melody, Rhythm, Form;"
+"Bards and Trouveurs;" "Morals;" "Transcendency." Many thoughts with
+which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this
+Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his
+leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh
+in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score of pointed
+sayings, striking images, large generalizations. Some of these we find
+repeated in his verse. Thus:--
+
+    "Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and
+    makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a
+    mortal man!"
+
+And so in the well remembered lines of "The Problem":--
+
+  "Himself from God he could not free."
+
+"He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his thought made him,
+and made the sun and stars."
+
+  "Art might obey but not surpass.
+  The passive Master lent his hand
+  To the vast soul that o'er him planned."
+
+Hope is at the bottom of every Essay of Emerson's as it was at the
+bottom of Pandora's box:--
+
+    "I never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the
+    immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology,
+    symbols, religion of our own.
+
+    --"Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every
+    fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song."
+
+Under the title "Social Aims" he gives some wise counsel concerning
+manners and conversation. One of these precepts will serve as a
+specimen--if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear:--
+
+    "Shun the negative side. Never worry people with; your contritions,
+    nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness;
+    even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of
+    unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it."
+
+We have had one Essay on "Eloquence" already. One extract from this new
+discourse on the same subject must serve our turn:--
+
+    "These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain
+    speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but
+    we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your
+    fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes
+    of sincerity. Speak what you know and believe; and are personally in
+    it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to_
+    _translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the
+    person to whom you speak_."
+
+The italics are Emerson's.
+
+If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth
+before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and
+strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson's
+Essay on "Resources":--
+
+    "A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching
+    pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds,
+    and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than
+    sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being
+    odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives;
+    if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what
+    man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic;
+    that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man
+    is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to
+    nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has
+    experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put into genial and
+    working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and
+    gratitude to the Cause of Causes."
+
+The Essay or Lecture on "The Comic" may have formed a part of a series
+he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. Two or three sayings
+in it will show his view sufficiently:--
+
+    "The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or
+    well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to
+    be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of
+    performance.
+
+    "If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect
+    between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why
+    we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest
+    than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by
+    stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic
+    seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It
+    appears to be an essential element in a fine character.--A rogue
+    alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost,
+    his fellow-men can do little for him."
+
+These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by
+well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very
+recent date.
+
+"Quotation and Originality" furnishes the key to Emerson's workshop. He
+believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not
+in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king
+borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and
+superscription.
+
+    "All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every
+    moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two
+    strands.--We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences,
+    religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses,
+    tables and chairs by imitation.--
+
+    "The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and
+    stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his
+    invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.
+
+    "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of
+    it."--
+
+--"The Progress of Culture," his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has
+already been mentioned.
+
+--The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating,
+is repeated and enforced in the Essay on "Greatness."
+
+    "There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree.
+    Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.--Stick to
+    your own; don't inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national
+    crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of
+    heaven for you to walk in.
+
+    "Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own,
+    differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this
+    specialty the _bias_ of each individual. And none of us will ever
+    accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens
+    to this whisper which is heard by him alone."
+
+If to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is
+concentration.--To the bias of the individual mind must be added the
+most catholic receptivity for the genius of others.
+
+    "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every
+    man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of
+    him."--
+
+    "The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded
+    the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself governed others;
+    sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his
+    cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be
+    himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it is whom we
+    seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall
+    he found."
+
+What has Emerson to tell us of "Inspiration?"
+
+    "I believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by
+    inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury.--
+
+    "How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our
+    affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of
+    these."
+
+I will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to
+reproduce his comments on each:--
+
+1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed
+sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the
+faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially
+the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude
+of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel
+in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means
+chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader.
+
+    "Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working
+    mood."
+
+What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on "Immortality"? It is
+to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation
+to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed
+in this discourse,--what does it mean? We must tack together such
+sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:--
+
+    "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction,
+    namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall
+    continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we,
+    if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so."
+
+This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the
+possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues:--
+
+    "Schiller said, 'What is so universal as death must be benefit.'"
+
+He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu
+thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror
+of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two
+skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of
+years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure
+to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in
+permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created
+things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last
+plainly:--
+
+    "Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the
+    world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma."
+
+But turn over a few pages and we may read:--
+
+    "I confess that everything connected with our personality fails.
+    Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a
+    complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We
+    have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to
+    which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The
+    soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not
+    to be good. 'If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,'
+    said one of the old saints, 'and these by any man's suffering are
+    enlarged and enthroned.'"
+
+Once more we get a dissolving view of Emerson's creed, if such a word
+applies to a statement like the following:--
+
+    --"I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are
+    better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for.
+    The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down
+    in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's 'Ode' is the best modern
+    essay on the subject."
+
+Wordsworth's "Ode" is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more?
+The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an
+early period of Emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge
+into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The
+eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs
+to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of
+reason.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the "Fight at
+the Bridge," Emerson delivered a short Address at the unveiling of the
+statue of "The Minute-Man," erected at the place of the conflict, to
+commemorate the event. This is the last Address he ever wrote, though he
+delivered one or more after this date. From the manuscript which lies
+before me I extract a single passage:--
+
+    "In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England,
+    but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had
+    arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play
+    its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine
+    Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the
+    Colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England
+    was so dear to us that the Colonies could only be absolutely
+    disunited by violence from England, and only one man could compel
+    the resort to violence. Parliament wavered, Lord North wavered, all
+    the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he
+    was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent,
+    America was instantly united, and the Nation born."
+
+There is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written
+at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary
+labors.
+
+Emerson's collected "Poems" constitute the ninth volume of the recent
+collected edition of his works. They will be considered in a following
+chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies."
+
+
+The decline of Emerson's working faculties went on gently and gradually,
+but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. His faithful daughter,
+Ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding
+his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an
+echo before the voice whose words it was to shape for him when his mind
+faltered and needed a momentary impulse.
+
+With her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time
+to read a paper before a select audience. Thus, March 30, 1878, he
+delivered a Lecture in the Old South Church,--"Fortune of the Republic."
+On the 5th of May, 1879, he read a Lecture in the Chapel of Divinity
+College, Harvard University,--"The Preacher." In 1881 he read a paper on
+Carlyle before the Massachusetts Historical Society.--He also published
+a paper in the "North American Review," in 1878,--"The Sovereignty of
+Ethics," and one on "Superlatives," in "The Century" for February, 1882.
+
+But in these years he was writing little or nothing. All these papers
+were taken from among his manuscripts of different dates. The same
+thing is true of the volumes published since his death; they were
+only compilations from his stores of unpublished matter, and their
+arrangement was the work of Mr. Emerson's friend and literary executor,
+Mr. Cabot. These volumes cannot be considered as belonging to any single
+period of his literary life.
+
+Mr. Cabot prefixes to the tenth volume of Emerson's collected works,
+which bears the title, "Lectures and Biographical Sketches," the
+following:--
+
+"NOTE.
+
+"Of the pieces included in this volume the following, namely, those from
+'The Dial,' 'Character,' 'Plutarch,' and the biographical sketches of
+Dr. Ripley, of Mr. Hoar, and of Henry Thoreau, were printed by Mr.
+Emerson before I took any part in the arrangement of his papers. The
+rest, except the sketch of Miss Mary Emerson, I got ready for his use
+in readings to his friends, or to a limited public. He had given up
+the regular practice of lecturing, but would sometimes, upon special
+request, read a paper that had been prepared for him from his
+manuscripts, in the manner described in the Preface to 'Letters and
+Social Aims,'--some former lecture serving as a nucleus for the new.
+Some of these papers he afterwards allowed to be printed; others,
+namely, 'Aristocracy,' 'Education,' 'The Man of Letters,' 'The Scholar,'
+'Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,' 'Mary Moody
+Emerson,' are now published for the first time."
+
+Some of these papers I have already had occasion to refer to. From
+several of the others I will make one or two extracts,--a difficult
+task, so closely are the thoughts packed together.
+
+From "Demonology":--
+
+    "I say to the table-rappers
+
+                                   'I will believe
+      Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,'
+      And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!"
+
+    "Meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the
+    supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away
+    all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments
+    which haunt us. Willingly I too say Hail! to the unknown, awful
+    powers which transcend the ken of the understanding."
+
+I will not quote anything from the Essay called "Aristocracy." But let
+him who wishes to know what the word means to an American whose life has
+come from New England soil, whose ancestors have breathed New England
+air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation
+of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation.
+
+"Perpetual Forces" is one of those prose poems,--of his earlier epoch,
+I have no doubt,--in which he plays with the facts of science with
+singular grace and freedom.
+
+What man could speak more fitly, with more authority of "Character,"
+than Emerson? When he says, "If all things are taken away, I have
+still all things in my relation to the Eternal," we feel that such an
+utterance is as natural to his pure spirit as breathing to the frame in
+which it was imprisoned.
+
+We have had a glimpse of Emerson as a school-master, but behind and far
+above the teaching drill-master's desk is the chair from which he speaks
+to us of "Education." Compare the short and easy method of the wise man
+of old,--"He that spareth his rod hateth his son," with this other, "Be
+the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of
+his virtue,--but no kinsman of his sin."
+
+"The Superlative" will prove light and pleasant reading after these
+graver essays. [Greek: Maedhen agan]--_ne quid nimis_,--nothing in
+excess, was his precept as to adjectives.
+
+Two sentences from "The Sovereignty of Ethics" will go far towards
+reconciling elderly readers who have not forgotten the Westminster
+Assembly's Catechism with this sweet-souled dealer in spiritual
+dynamite:--
+
+    "Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the
+    pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the
+    pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.--
+
+    "If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of
+    Platonism, or of Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more
+    truly, have not yet their own legitimate force."
+
+So, too, this from "The Preacher":--
+
+    "All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation
+    against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and
+    its use.--The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the
+    substantial benefit endures."
+
+The special interest of the Address called "The Man of Letters" is, that
+it was delivered during the war. He was no advocate for peace where
+great principles were at the bottom of the conflict:--
+
+    "War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral
+    aspects at once.--War ennobles the age.--Battle, with the sword,
+    has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and
+    West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie."
+
+"The Scholar" was delivered before two Societies at the University of
+Virginia so late as the year 1876. If I must select any of its wise
+words, I will choose the questions which he has himself italicized to
+show his sense of their importance:--
+
+    "For all men, all women, Time, your country, your condition, the
+    invisible world are the interrogators: _Who are you? What do you?
+    Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your consciousness?
+    Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any soul_?
+
+    "Can he answer these questions? Can he dispose of them? Happy if you
+    can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life!
+    Happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer
+    them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general
+    mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all
+    who know them."
+
+The Essay on "Plutarch" has a peculiar value from the fact that Emerson
+owes more to him than to any other author except Plato, who is one of
+the only two writers quoted oftener than Plutarch. _Mutato nomine_, the
+portrait which Emerson draws of the Greek moralist might stand for his
+own:--
+
+    "Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in
+    character, in institutions, in science--natural, moral, or
+    metaphysical, or in memorable sayings drew his attention and came to
+    his pen with more or less fulness of record.
+
+    "A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an
+    intellectual co-perception. Plutarch's memory is full and his
+    horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his.
+
+    "Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends
+    him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his
+    moral sentiment is always pure.--
+
+    "I do not know where to find a book--to borrow a phrase of Ben
+    Jonson's--'so rammed with life,' and this in chapters chiefly
+    ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental.--His
+    vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an
+    incident.--
+
+    "In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to
+    discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents.--'Tis all
+    Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this
+    emperor.
+
+    "It is in consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I
+    confess that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a
+    faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but
+    he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a
+    necessity for completing his studies.
+
+    "He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like
+    another Berkeley, 'Matter is itself privation.'--
+
+    "Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the
+    method. He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and
+    prefers to sit as a scholar with Plato than as a disputant.
+
+    "His natural history is that of a lover and poet, and not of a
+    physicist.
+
+    "But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature
+    and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of
+    character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to
+    the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his
+    rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the
+    soul. La Harpe said that 'Plutarch is the genius the most naturally
+    moral that ever existed.'
+
+    "Plutarch thought 'truth to be the greatest good that man can
+    receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give.'
+
+    "All his judgments are noble. He thought with Epicurus that it is
+    more delightful to do than to receive a kindness.
+
+    "Plutarch was well-born, well-conditioned--eminently social, he was
+    a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and
+    knew the high value of good conversation.--
+
+    "He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its
+    victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities
+    of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental
+    associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially
+    marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the
+    intellect by the force of morals."
+
+How much, of all this would have been recognized as just and true if it
+had been set down in an obituary notice of Emerson!
+
+I have already made use of several of the other papers contained in this
+volume, and will merely enumerate all that follow the "Plutarch." Some
+of the titles will be sure to attract the reader. They are "Historic
+Notes of Life and Letters in New England;" "The Chardon Street
+Convention;" "Ezra Ripley, D.D.;" "Mary Moody Emerson;" "Samuel Hoar;"
+"Thoreau;" "Carlyle."--
+
+Mr. Cabot prefaces the eleventh and last volume of Emerson's writings
+with the following "Note":--
+
+    "The first five pieces in this volume, and the 'Editorial Address'
+    from the 'Massachusetts Quarterly Review,' were published by Mr.
+    Emerson long ago. The speeches at the John Brown, the Walter Scott,
+    and the Free Religious Association meetings were published at the
+    time, no doubt with his consent, but without any active co-operation
+    on his part. The 'Fortune of the Republic' appeared separately in
+    1879; the rest have never been published. In none was any change
+    from the original form made by me, except in the 'Fortune of the
+    Republic,' which was made up of several lectures for the occasion
+    upon which it was read."
+
+The volume of "Miscellanies" contains no less than twenty-three pieces
+of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects. The
+five referred to as having been previously published are, "The Lord's
+Supper," the "Historical Discourse in Concord," the "Address at the
+Dedication of the Soldiers' Monument in Concord," the "Address on
+Emancipation in the British West Indies," and the Lecture or Essay on
+"War,"--all of which have been already spoken of.
+
+Next in order comes a Lecture on the "Fugitive Slave Law." Emerson says,
+"I do not often speak on public questions.--My own habitual view is to
+the well-being of scholars." But he leaves his studies to attack the
+institution of slavery, from which he says he himself has never suffered
+any inconvenience, and the "Law," which the abolitionists would always
+call the "Fugitive Slave _Bill_." Emerson had a great admiration for
+Mr. Webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the
+seventh of March, just four years before the delivery of this Lecture.
+He warns against false leadership:--
+
+    "To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all
+    foolish trust in others.--He only who is able to stand alone is
+    qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which
+    a soul exists in this world,--to be himself the counter-balance of
+    all falsehood and all wrong.--The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and
+    strong and selfish.--England maintains trade, not liberty."
+
+Cowper had said long before this:--
+
+                    "doing good,
+  Disinterested good, is not our trade."
+
+And America found that England had not learned that trade when, fifteen
+years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free
+and slave states threatened the ruin of the great Republic, and England
+forgot her Anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of "a great
+empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth."
+
+It must be remembered that Emerson had never been identified with the
+abolitionists. But an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp
+point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long:--
+
+    "The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us
+    the lessons of centuries. I do not see how a barbarous community and
+    a civilized community can constitute one State. I think we must get
+    rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom."
+
+These were his words on the 26th of May, 1856, in his speech on "The
+Assault upon Mr. Sumner." A few months later, in his "Speech on the
+Affairs of Kansas," delivered almost five years before the first gun
+was fired at Fort Sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and
+commanding words:--
+
+    "The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough.
+    A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be
+    than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. I think the
+    American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new,
+    it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the
+    enemy three thousand miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic
+    interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a
+    net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war.
+
+    "Fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic,
+    I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves
+    into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning
+    from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the
+    sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the
+    country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no
+    country to return to. Come home and stay at home while there is a
+    country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any
+    who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes
+    and depart to some land where freedom exists."
+
+Two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of
+the family of John Brown, on the 18th of November, 1859, the other after
+his execution:--
+
+    "Our blind statesmen," he says, "go up and down, with committees of
+    vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy.
+    They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its
+    birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the
+    arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah
+    Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before
+    Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it."
+
+From his "Discourse on Theodore Parker" I take the following vigorous
+sentence:--
+
+    "His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond
+    all men in pulpits,--I cannot think of one rival,--that the essence
+    of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or
+    it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with
+    ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or
+    private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or
+    unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier
+    nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the
+    high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants,--it is
+    hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious
+    music, or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of
+    Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are."
+
+The Lecture on "American Civilization," made up from two Addresses, one
+of which was delivered at Washington on the 31st of January, 1862, is,
+as might be expected, full of anti-slavery. That on the "Emancipation
+Proclamation," delivered in Boston in September, 1862, is as full of
+"silent joy" at the advent of "a day which most of us dared not hope
+to see,--an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and
+uncertainties."
+
+From the "Remarks" at the funeral services for Abraham Lincoln, held
+in Concord on the 19th of April, 1865, I extract this admirably drawn
+character of the man:--
+
+    "He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by
+    step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening
+    his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an
+    entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty
+    millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds
+    articulated by his tongue."
+
+The following are the titles of the remaining contents of this volume:
+"Harvard Commemoration Speech;" "Editor's Address: Massachusetts
+Quarterly Review;" "Woman;" "Address to Kossuth;" "Robert Burns;"
+"Walter Scott;" "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious
+Association;" "Speech at the Annual Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association;" "The Fortune of the Republic." In treating of the
+"Woman Question," Emerson speaks temperately, delicately, with perfect
+fairness, but leaves it in the hands of the women themselves to
+determine whether they shall have an equal part in public affairs. "The
+new movement," he says, "is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and
+woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart
+is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to
+accomplish."
+
+It is hard to turn a leaf in any book of Emerson's writing without
+finding some pithy remark or some striking image or witty comment which
+illuminates the page where we find it and tempts us to seize upon it for
+an extract. But I must content myself with these few sentences from "The
+Fortune of the Republic," the last address he ever delivered, in which
+his belief in America and her institutions, and his trust in the
+Providence which overrules all nations and all worlds, have found
+fitting utterance:--
+
+    "Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here
+    let there be what the earth waits for,--exalted manhood. What this
+    country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its
+    materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall
+    serve man, and not man corn.
+
+    "They who find America insipid,--they for whom London and Paris have
+    spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. I
+    not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for
+    more than there is in the world.
+
+    "Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course
+    of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little
+    wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows
+    the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to
+    their good."
+
+With this expression of love and respect for his country and trust
+in his country's God, we may take leave of Emerson's prose writings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+EMERSON'S POEMS.
+
+
+The following "Prefatory Note" by Mr. Cabot introduces the ninth volume
+of the series of Emerson's collected works:--
+
+    "This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS
+    and MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876 Mr. Emerson published a
+    selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many.
+    Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the
+    expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some
+    pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix, on
+    various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Emerson's approval,
+    but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it
+    seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their
+    completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished
+    doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of
+    these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify
+    their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been
+    admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts
+    found in the Essays.
+
+    "In coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole
+    preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the
+    opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of
+    time.
+
+    "As was stated in the Preface to the first volume of this edition of
+    Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the "Selected
+    Poems" have not always been followed here, but in some cases
+    preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in
+    fuller strength than at the time of the last revision.
+
+    "A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of "May-Day," in the
+    part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as
+    bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature."
+
+Emerson's verse has been a fertile source of discussion. Some have
+called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of
+the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize
+its true claims. His prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is
+something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his
+prose. An illustration presently to be given will make this point clear.
+
+Poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to
+the plainer garments of the household and the street. Full dress, as
+we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the
+redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet.
+
+It reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its
+drapery and ornaments. A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet
+excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the
+fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we
+should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon
+by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under
+the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,--the flowers
+and jewels of his vocabulary.
+
+Here is a prose sentence from Emerson's "Works and Days:"--
+
+    "The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go
+    like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party;
+    but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring,
+    they carry them as silently away."
+
+Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference
+between prose and poetry:--
+
+  "DAYS.
+
+  "Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
+  Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
+  And marching single in an endless file,
+  Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
+  To each they offer gifts after his will,
+  Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all.
+  I, in my pleachéd garden watched the pomp,
+  Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
+  Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
+  Turned and departed silent. I too late
+  Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."
+
+--Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball! The
+full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like
+bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives
+like edges of embroidery. That one word _pleachéd,_ an heir-loom from
+Queen Elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and
+charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. But mark that now the
+poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first
+extract. It is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he
+now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. It
+is himself who is the object of scorn. Self-revelation of beauty
+embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation
+in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. Passion
+that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic
+utterance. And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which
+shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm
+that "_In_ vino _veritas_" is not truer than _In_ carmine _veritas_.
+As a further illustration of what has just been said of the
+self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson's verse more
+especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily
+presence and infirmities in his poetry,--subjects he never referred to
+in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.
+
+Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so
+many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip
+on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was
+shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the
+metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract
+of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of
+survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds
+his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration.
+
+Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?
+
+    "The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to
+    them, of all men, the severest criticism is due."
+
+These are Emerson's words in the Preface to "Parnassus."
+
+His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They
+lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems
+to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited
+from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but
+with the context. Milton had been speaking of "Logic" and of "Rhetoric,"
+and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple,
+sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be
+forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used
+absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be
+very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the
+poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some
+of the best of Milton's own.
+
+In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson
+was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet
+or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the
+term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat
+at eighty degrees of Réaumur is a very different matter. The rank of
+poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to
+our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to
+this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular
+poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the
+popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered
+passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry.
+Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a
+great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that
+length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is
+crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation.
+And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in
+the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope's "Essay on
+Man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "Paradise Lost" and
+"Paradise Regained" both together? For all that, we know there is a
+school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of
+poet.
+
+It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in
+a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and
+conversation. It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those
+authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. And
+after all, few will dare assert that "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is
+greater as a poem than Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's "Ode
+to a Nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so
+often quoted as
+
+  "To point a moral or adorn a tale."
+
+We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson's poetry
+with Emerson's own self-estimate. He says in a fit of humility, writing
+to Carlyle:--
+
+    "I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of
+    literature, the reporters, suburban men."
+
+But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland:--
+
+    "He once said to me, 'I am not a great poet--but whatever is of me
+    _is a poet_.'"
+
+These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and
+different periods.
+
+Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his
+self-distrust and his consciousness of the "vision," if not "the
+faculty, divine," are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic
+confessional:--
+
+  "A dull uncertain brain,
+  But gifted yet to know
+  That God has cherubim who go
+  Singing an immortal strain,
+  Immortal here below.
+  I know the mighty bards,
+  I listen while they sing,
+  And now I know
+  The secret store
+  Which these explore
+  When they with torch of genius pierce
+  The tenfold clouds that cover
+  The riches of the universe
+  From God's adoring lover.
+  And if to me it is not given
+  To fetch one ingot thence
+  Of that unfading gold of Heaven
+  His merchants may dispense,
+  Yet well I know the royal mine
+    And know the sparkle of its ore,
+  Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,--
+    Explored, they teach us to explore."
+
+These lines are from "The Poet," a series of fragments given in the
+"Appendix," which, with his first volume, "Poems," his second, "May-Day,
+and other Pieces," form the complete ninth volume of the new series.
+These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be
+found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of
+Emerson's self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had
+most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading "The Poet."
+
+Emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this
+passage from "Merlin" sufficiently shows:--
+
+  "Thy trivial harp will never please
+  Or fill my craving ear;
+  Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
+  Free, peremptory, clear.
+  No jingling serenader's art
+  Nor tinkling of piano-strings
+  Can make the wild blood start
+  In its mystic springs;
+  The kingly bard
+  Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
+  As with hammer or with mace;
+  That they may render back
+  Artful thunder, which conveys
+  Secrets of the solar track,
+  Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Great is the art,
+  Great be the manners of the bard.
+  He shall not his brain encumber
+  With the coil of rhythm and number;
+  But leaving rule and pale forethought
+  He shall aye climb
+  For his rhyme.
+  'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say,
+  'In to the upper doors,
+  Nor count compartments of the floors,
+  But mount to paradise
+  By the stairway of surprise.'"
+
+And here is another passage from "The Poet," mentioned in the quotation
+before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater
+miracles than those ascribed to Orpheus:--
+
+  "A Brother of the world, his song
+  Sounded like a tempest strong
+  Which tore from oaks their branches broad,
+  And stars from the ecliptic road.
+  Time wore he as his clothing-weeds,
+  He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.
+  As melts the iceberg in the seas,
+  As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,
+  As snow-banks thaw in April's beam,
+  The solid kingdoms like a dream
+  Resist in vain his motive strain,
+  They totter now and float amain.
+  For the Muse gave special charge
+  His learning should be deep and large,
+  And his training should not scant
+  The deepest lore of wealth or want:
+  His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
+  Every maxim of dreadful Need;
+  In its fulness he should taste
+  Life's honeycomb, but not too fast;
+  Full fed, but not intoxicated;
+  He should be loved; he should be hated;
+  A blooming child to children dear,
+  His heart should palpitate with fear."
+
+We look naturally to see what poets were Emerson's chief favorites. In
+his poems "The Test" and "The Solution," we find that the five whom
+he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe.
+
+Here are a few of his poetical characterizations from "The Harp:"--
+
+  "And this at least I dare affirm,
+  Since genius too has bound and term,
+  There is no bard in all the choir,
+  Not Homer's self, the poet-sire,
+  Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,
+  Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure,
+  Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,
+  Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,
+  Scott, the delight of generous boys,
+  Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,--
+  Not one of all can put in verse,
+  Or to this presence could rehearse
+  The sights and voices ravishing
+  The boy knew on the hills in spring."--
+
+In the notice of "Parnassus" some of his preferences have been already
+mentioned.
+
+Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the
+one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of
+criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman
+amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a
+violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of
+description are not odious.
+
+The difference between Emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries
+with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and
+arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and
+infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular.
+The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something
+definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols
+used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is
+a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days
+and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that
+hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not
+provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day
+use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are
+too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated
+terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that
+he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual
+life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught
+quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly
+known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that
+he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the
+hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor
+Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using
+the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of
+nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments,--he
+reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates
+undertook to "hew Mount Athos to the shape of man" in the likeness of
+Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes
+"Cheshire's haughty hill" stand before us an impersonation of kingly
+humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked.
+
+This is the fascination of Emerson's poetry; it moves in a world of
+universal symbolism. The sense of the infinite fills it with its
+majestic presence. It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the
+every-day aspects of nature. But he looks always with the eye of a poet,
+never with that of the man of science. The law of association of ideas
+is wholly different in the two. The scientific man connects objects in
+sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective
+resemblances. His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and
+contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws
+that govern, the subjects of his study. The poet links the most remote
+objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of
+fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by
+his instinct for the beautiful. The man of science clings to his object,
+as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full
+as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head
+up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens
+above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a
+Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. The
+poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are
+examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet
+is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of
+Fraunhofer's lines to the man of science.
+
+Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the
+best sense of that word. But his realities reached to the highest
+heavens: like Milton,--
+
+  "He passed the flaming bounds of place and time;
+  The living throne, the sapphire blaze
+  Where angels tremble while they gaze,
+  HE SAW"--
+
+Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. If Galileo had been
+a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse
+thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson.
+
+Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors
+of his imagination. He was ready to see beauty everywhere:--
+
+  "Thou can'st not wave thy staff in air,
+  Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
+  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
+  And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
+
+He called upon the poet to
+
+  "Tell men what they knew before;
+  Paint the prospect from their door."
+
+And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life
+with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or
+into a milking-pail.
+
+This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted
+moods he would have us
+
+  "Give to barrows, trays and pans
+  Grace and glimmer of romance."
+
+But in his Lecture on "Poetry and Imagination," he says:--
+
+    "What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound
+    of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps
+    Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet."
+
+The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are
+forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He
+himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the
+prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists"
+have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr.
+Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if
+they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader
+a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of
+selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy
+Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all
+stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page
+of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and
+exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as
+he might see fit.
+
+French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the
+slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that
+
+  "In the mud and scum of things
+  There alway, alway something sings."
+
+Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even
+there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected
+districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the
+genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they
+disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too
+wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du
+Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments,
+and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless
+circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not
+for a mere sensational effect.
+
+What a range of subjects from "The Problem" and "Uriel" and
+"Forerunners" to "The Humble-Bee" and "The Titmouse!" Nor let the reader
+who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the
+singularly impressive home-poem, "Hamatreya," beginning with the names
+of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord,--probably the
+same he owned after the last of them:--
+
+    "Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,"
+
+and ending with the austere and solemn "Earth-Song."
+
+Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical
+expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part
+of metrical composition. His muse picked her way as his speech did in
+conversation and in lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with
+rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born
+singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with
+"Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make
+rhyme without actual verbicide:--
+
+  "Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
+  And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are!
+
+And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this?
+
+  "In Adirondac lakes
+  At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed."
+
+It was surely not difficult to say--
+
+  "At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide."
+And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we
+like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more
+neatly and disposed more nicely. When he is at his best, his lines flow
+with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and
+sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs
+against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over.
+
+There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often,
+indulges in. This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line.
+It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. Shakespeare, the
+supreme artist, and Milton, the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,"
+knew how to use it effectively. Shelley employed it freely. Bryant
+indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of
+the "North American Review" in defence of its use. Willis was fond of
+it. As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,--may even
+have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse.
+But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. A humpback
+may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many
+humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. Can any ear
+reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson's?
+
+  "Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship
+  Of minds that each can stand against the world
+  By its own meek and incorruptible will?"
+
+These lines that lift their backs up in the middle--span-worm lines, we
+may call them--are not to be commended for common use because some great
+poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our
+recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson
+has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his
+leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood.
+
+As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared
+of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have
+tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in
+triolets, or attempt any cat's-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand.
+
+If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless
+versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something
+in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. Who
+would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking
+_lagena_?--Read his poem to the Aeolian harp ("The Harp") and his model
+betrays itself:--
+
+  "These syllables that Nature spoke,
+  And the thoughts that in him woke
+  Can adequately utter none
+  Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
+  Therein I hear the Parcae reel
+  The threads of man at their humming wheel,
+  The threads of life and power and pain,
+  So sweet and mournful falls the strain.
+  And best can teach its Delphian chord
+  How Nature to the soul is moored,
+  If once again that silent string,
+  As erst it wont, would thrill and ring."
+
+There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar
+to most true lovers of poetry. Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians
+by placing "The Sphinx" at the entrance of his temple of song. This poem
+was not fitted to attract worshippers. It is not easy of comprehension,
+not pleasing in movement. As at first written it had one verse in it
+which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed
+upon to omit it in the later versions. There are noble passages in it,
+but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. A commonplace young
+person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come
+by and by to the verse:--
+
+  "Have I a lover
+    Who is noble and free?--
+  I would he were nobler
+    Than to love me."
+
+The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think _c'est
+magnifique, mais ce n'est pas_--_l'amour_.
+
+The third poem in the volume, "The Problem," should have stood first in
+order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson's poems. All his earlier
+verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst
+of song in a poetic nature. "Each and All," "The Humble-Bee," "The
+Snow-Storm," should be read before "Uriel," "The World-Soul," or
+"Mithridates." "Monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for
+Emerson's poetry, and after this "Woodnotes."
+
+In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their
+descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is
+like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of
+descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ His subtle
+selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants,
+as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for
+its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different
+conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its
+descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the
+imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the
+pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes
+with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then
+mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the
+poem called "Destiny":--
+
+  "Alas! that one is born in blight,
+  Victim of perpetual slight:
+  When thou lookest on his face,
+  Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways!
+  None shall ask thee what thou doest,
+  Or care a rush for what thou knowest.
+  Or listen when thou repliest,
+  Or remember where thou liest,
+  Or how thy supper is sodden;'
+  And another is born
+  To make the sun forgotten."
+
+Of all Emerson's poems the "Concord Hymn" is the most nearly complete
+and faultless,--but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a
+poem as Collins might have written,--it has the very movement and
+melody of the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," and of the "Dirge in
+Cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one
+conspicuous line,
+
+  "And fired the shot heard round the world,"
+
+must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little
+poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn,
+musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records
+the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power
+that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom
+and her martyrs.
+
+These poems of Emerson's find the readers that must listen to them and
+delight in them, as the "Ancient Mariner" fastened upon the man who must
+hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them,
+and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the
+question, let him read the paragraph of "May-Day," beginning,--
+
+  "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+"Sea-shore," the fine fragments in the "Appendix" to his published
+works, called, collectively, "The Poet," blocks bearing the mark of
+poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct,
+and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the
+"Threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has
+the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with
+all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's
+picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in
+the language,--with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis,"
+leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as of wider scope and
+larger pattern.
+
+Many critics will concede that there is much truth in Mr. Arnold's
+remark on the want of "evolution" in Emerson's poems. One is struck
+with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical
+workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of
+poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot
+help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete "Christabel," and his
+"Abyssinian Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of.
+We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm
+of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which
+Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we
+go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which
+the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away
+half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of
+sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other
+apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest
+a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be
+something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic
+and artistic anaemia and insufficiency,--the opposite of what we find
+showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on
+the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault. Life seemed lustier
+in Old England than in New England to Emerson, to Hawthorne, and to
+that admirable observer, Mr. John Burroughs. Perhaps we require another
+century or two of acclimation.
+
+Emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties.
+He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal
+respiratory measure,--octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration
+is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal
+facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and
+also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and
+labor. I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had
+been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he
+habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought.
+
+Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. The
+golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their
+way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair
+belonged to their personalities. So with the poets; for Wordsworth the
+air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between
+storm and sunshine. Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist
+that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot. Without its own
+characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by
+
+    "The light that never was on sea or land,"
+
+we may have good verse but no true poem. In his poetry there is not
+merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon.
+
+Emerson's poetry is eminently subjective,--if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the
+word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two
+of his own chapters in his "Modern Painters." These are the chapter
+on "The Pathetic Fallacy," and the one which follows it "On Classical
+Landscape." In these he treats of the transfer of a writer's mental or
+emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. He
+asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by
+the singular name mentioned, "the pathetic fallacy," because, he says,
+"he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the
+landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern
+painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature,
+imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval
+painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual
+qualities of the object itself."
+
+Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" may be found almost
+anywhere in Emerson's poems. Here is one which offers itself without
+search:--
+
+  "Daily the bending skies solicit man,
+  The seasons chariot him from this exile,
+  The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,
+  The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
+  Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
+  Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home."
+
+The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with
+a defect. If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the
+_sympathetic illusion_, his readers might have looked upon it more
+justly.
+
+It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the
+resemblances between Emerson's poetry and that of other poets. Two or
+three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others
+may be mentioned.
+
+In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at
+least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of
+that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. Both
+are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates
+himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged
+to him.
+
+  "Good-by, proud world,"
+
+recalls Spenser and Raleigh. "The Humble-Bee" is strongly marked by the
+manner and thought of Marvell. Marvell's
+
+  "Annihilating all that's made
+  To a green thought in a green shade,"
+
+may well have suggested Emerson's
+
+  "The green silence dost displace
+  With thy mellow, breezy bass."
+
+"The Snow-Storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of
+Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by
+comparison with either.
+
+"Woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been
+found in Milton's "Comus;" this, for instance:--
+
+  "All constellations of the sky
+  Shed their virtue through his eye.
+  Him Nature giveth for defence
+  His formidable innocence."
+
+Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of
+his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were
+original.
+
+So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many
+moods, but with one pervading spirit:--
+
+  "Melting matter into dreams,
+  Panoramas which I saw,
+  And whatever glows or seems
+  Into substance, into Law."
+
+We think in reading his "Poems" of these words of Sainte-Beuve:--
+
+    "The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who
+    suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious,
+    and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to
+    complete in your turn."
+
+Just what he shows himself in his prose, Emerson shows himself in his
+verse. Only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of
+his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is
+higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and
+pour in continuous streams. Where they came from, or whither they flow
+to empty themselves, we cannot always say,--it is enough to enjoy them
+as they flow by us.
+
+Incompleteness--want of beginning, middle, and end,--is their too common
+fault. His pages are too much like those artists' studios all hung round
+with sketches and "bits" of scenery. "The Snow-Storm" and "Sea-Shore"
+are "bits" out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far
+as they go, but forcing us to ask, "Where is the painting for which
+these scraps are studies?" or "Out of what great picture have these
+pieces been cut?"
+
+We do not want his fragments to be made wholes,--if we did, what hand
+could be found equal to the task? We do not want his rhythms and rhymes
+smoothed and made more melodious. They are as honest as Chaucer's,
+and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any
+versifying drill-sergeant,--if we wanted them reshaped whom could we
+trust to meddle with them?
+
+His poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws
+on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its
+air is full of Aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze
+wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and
+from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden
+brilliancy.
+
+After all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons,
+we have to recognize that there is a charm in Emerson's poems
+which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a
+hyacinth,--any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from
+all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its
+articulating representatives should call us by name.
+
+All our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery
+of _style_. "The style is of [a part of] the man himself," said Buffon,
+and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, "The style is the
+man."
+
+The "personal equation" which differentiates two observers is not
+confined to the tower of the astronomer. Every human being is
+individualized by a new arrangement of elements. His mind is a safe with
+a lock to which only certain letters are the key. His ideas follow in
+an order of their own. His words group themselves together in special
+sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the
+total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with
+his individuality. We may not be able to assign the reason of the
+fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. But
+this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought;
+that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the
+accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and
+eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity
+of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and
+phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own,
+with a _curiosa felicitas_ which captivates and enthrals the reader who
+comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all
+he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and
+moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as
+a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding
+of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues,
+shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the
+Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services.
+
+
+Mr. Conway gives the following account of two visits to Emerson after
+the decline of his faculties had begun to make itself obvious:--
+
+    "In 1875, when I stayed at his house in Concord for a little time,
+    it was sad enough to find him sitting as a listener before those
+    who used to sit at his feet in silence. But when alone with him he
+    conversed in the old way, and his faults of memory seemed at
+    times to disappear. There was something striking in the kind of
+    forgetfulness by which he suffered. He remembered the realities
+    and uses of things when he could not recall their names. He would
+    describe what he wanted or thought of; when he could not recall
+    'chair' he could speak of that which supports the human frame, and
+    'the implement that cultivates the soil' must do for plough.--
+
+    "In 1880, when I was last in Concord, the trouble had made heavy
+    strides. The intensity of his silent attention to every word that
+    was said was painful, suggesting a concentration of his powers to
+    break through the invisible walls closing around them. Yet his face
+    was serene; he was even cheerful, and joined in our laughter at some
+    letters his eldest daughter had preserved, from young girls, trying
+    to coax autograph letters, and in one case asking for what price he
+    would write a valedictory address she had to deliver at college. He
+    was still able to joke about his 'naughty memory;' and no complaint
+    came from him when he once rallied himself on living too long.
+    Emerson appeared to me strangely beautiful at this time, and the
+    sweetness of his voice, when he spoke of the love and providence at
+    his side, is quite indescribable."--
+
+One of the later glimpses we have of Emerson is that preserved in the
+journal of Mr. Whitman, who visited Concord in the autumn of 1881. Mr.
+Ireland gives a long extract from this journal, from which I take the
+following:--
+
+    "On entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to
+    several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle
+    pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one,
+    remained silent through the whole talk and discussion. And so, there
+    Emerson sat, and I looking at him. A good color in his face, eyes
+    clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old
+    clear-peering aspect quite the same."
+
+Mr. Whitman met him again the next day, Sunday, September 18th, and
+records:--
+
+    "As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the
+    eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best
+    suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost
+    always with a smile."
+
+Dr. Le Baron Russell writes to me of Emerson at a still later period:--
+
+    "One incident I will mention which occurred at my last visit
+    to Emerson, only a few months before his death. I went by Mrs.
+    Emerson's request to pass a Sunday at their house at Concord towards
+    the end of June. His memory had been failing for some time, and his
+    mind as you know was clouded, but the old charm of his voice and
+    manner had never left him. On the morning after my arrival Mrs.
+    Emerson took us into the garden to see the beautiful roses in which
+    she took great delight. One red rose of most brilliant color she
+    called our attention to especially; its 'hue' was so truly 'angry
+    and brave' that I involuntarily repeated Herbert's line,--
+
+      'Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,'--
+
+    from the verses which Emerson had first repeated to me so long ago.
+    Emerson looked at the rose admiringly, and then as if by a sudden
+    impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low bow, 'I take off
+    my hat to it.'"
+
+Once a poet, always a poet. It was the same reverence for the beautiful
+that he had shown in the same way in his younger days on entering the
+wood, as Governor Rice has told us the story, given in an earlier
+chapter.
+
+I do not remember Emerson's last time of attendance at the "Saturday
+Club," but I recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words
+had become well marked. "My memory hides itself," he said. The last time
+I saw him, living, was at Longfellow's funeral. I was sitting opposite
+to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked
+intently upon the face of the dead poet. A few minutes later he rose
+again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently
+remembering that he had just done so. Mr. Conway reports that he said to
+a friend near him, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I
+have entirely forgotten his name."
+
+Dr. Edward Emerson has very kindly furnished me, in reply to my request,
+with information regarding his father's last years which will interest
+every one who has followed his life through its morning and midday to
+the hour of evening shadows.
+
+"May-Day," which was published in 1867, was made up of the poems written
+since his first volume appeared. After this he wrote no poems, but with
+some difficulty fitted the refrain to the poem "Boston," which had
+remained unfinished since the old Anti-slavery days. "Greatness," and
+the "Phi Beta Kappa Oration" of 1867, were among his last pieces of
+work. His College Lectures, "The Natural History of the Intellect,"
+were merely notes recorded years before, and now gathered and welded
+together. In 1876 he revised his poems, and made the selections from
+them for the "Little Classic" edition of his works, then called
+"Selected Poems." In that year he gave his "Address to the Students of
+the University of Virginia." This was a paper written long before, and
+its revision, with the aid of his daughter Ellen, was accomplished with
+much difficulty.
+
+The year 1867 was about the limit of his working life. During the last
+five years he hardly answered a letter. Before this time it had become
+increasingly hard for him to do so, and he always postponed and thought
+he should feel more able the next day, until his daughter Ellen was
+compelled to assume the correspondence. He did, however, write some
+letters in 1876, as, for instance, the answer to the invitation of the
+Virginia students.
+
+Emerson left off going regularly to the "Saturday Club" probably in
+1875. He used to depend on meeting Mr. Cabot there, but after Mr. Cabot
+began to come regularly to work on "Letters and Social Aims," Emerson,
+who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings.
+The trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his
+staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a
+part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and
+readings and to church. His hearing was very slightly impaired, and his
+sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled,
+and that "M's" and "N's" troubled him to read. He recognized the members
+of his own family and his _old_ friends; but, as I infer from this
+statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new
+acquaintances, as is common with old persons.
+
+He continued the habit of reading,--read through all his printed works
+with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and
+endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. In these Dr. Emerson found
+written "Examined 1877 or 1878," but he found no later date.
+
+In the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his
+table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a
+child. He liked to look over the "Advertiser," and was interested in the
+"Nation." He enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to
+guests.
+
+All this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of Dr.
+Emerson in answer to my questions. The twilight of a long, bright day
+of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and
+gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing
+and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to
+the very verge of its earthly existence.
+
+But darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. From
+these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of
+the worn-out bodily frame.
+
+In April, 1882, Emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he
+could hardly speak. When his son, Dr. Edward Emerson, called to see him,
+he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression
+than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. As he lay on his couch he
+pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of Carlyle "the
+good man,--my friend." His son told him that he had seen Carlyle, which
+seemed to please him much. On the following day the unequivocal signs of
+pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. He still recognized
+those around him, among the rest Judge Hoar, to whom he held out his
+arms for a last embrace. A sharp pain coming on, ether was administered
+with relief. And in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him
+and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. He lived very nearly to the
+completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born May 25, 1803, and
+his death occurring on the 27th of April, 1882.
+
+Mr. Ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for
+the most part, taken the following extracts:--
+
+    "The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson took place
+    at Concord on the 30th of April. A special train from Boston carried
+    a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted
+    by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church
+    where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town
+    bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with
+    other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped,
+    and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at
+    the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman.
+
+    "The services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred
+    at 2.30, and were conducted by Rev. W.H. Furness of Philadelphia, a
+    kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. They were simple in
+    character, and only Dr. Furness took part in them. The body lay in
+    the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and
+    close friends of the deceased. The only flowers were contained in
+    three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and
+    white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were filled
+    with friends and neighbors.
+
+    "At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival
+    of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was
+    packed. In front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of
+    pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow
+    jonquils, the gift of Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Among the floral
+    tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the Emerson
+    school. By the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums
+    and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath.
+
+    "Before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut
+    coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid was turned back,
+    and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small
+    bouquet of roses. While the coffin was being carried in, 'Pleyel's
+    Hymn' was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the
+    deceased. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge
+    E. Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the
+    congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his
+    voice many times trembling with emotion."
+
+I subjoin this most impressive "Address" entire, from the manuscript
+with which Judge Hoar has kindly favored me:--
+
+    "The beauty of Israel is fallen in its high place! Mr. Emerson
+    has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing
+    company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his
+    grave,--to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our
+    parting tribute of memory and love.
+
+    "There is nothing to mourn for him. That brave and manly life was
+    rounded out to the full length of days. That dying pillow was
+    softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to
+    the sleep which the Lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the
+    face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the
+    opening heavens.
+
+    "Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his
+    fame is established and secure. Throughout this great land and from
+    beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great
+    public loss. But we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was
+    _ours_. He was descended from the founders of the town. He chose our
+    village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. It was
+    to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was
+    our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and
+    the elders with reverence. He was our ornament and pride.
+
+                    "'He is gone--is dust,--
+      He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished!
+      For him there is no longer any future.
+      His life is bright--bright without spot it was
+      And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour
+      Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap.
+      Far off is he, above desire and fear;
+      No more submitted to the change and chance
+      Of the uncertain planets.--
+
+      "'The bloom is vanished from my life,
+      For, oh! he stood beside me like my youth;
+      Transformed for me the real to a dream,
+      Clothing the palpable and the familiar
+      With golden exhalations of the dawn.
+      Whatever fortunes wait my future toils,
+      The _beautiful_ is vanished and returns not.'
+
+    "That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high
+    aspirations,--those lips of eloquent music,--that great soul, which
+    trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality,--that large
+    heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,--that
+    hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no
+    repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,--oh,
+    friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there
+    no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and
+    farewell!"
+
+Judge Hoar's remarks were followed by the congregation singing the
+hymns, "Thy will be done," "I will not fear the fate provided by Thy
+love." The Rev. Dr. Furness then read selections from the Scriptures.
+
+The Rev. James Freeman Clarke then delivered an "Address," from which I
+extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any
+that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their
+subject,--for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or
+write of Emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not
+wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion.
+
+    "The saying of the Liturgy is true and wise, that 'in the midst of
+    life we are in death.' But it is still more true that in the midst
+    of death we are in life. Do we ever believe so much in immortality
+    as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a
+    few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? 'He is not here:
+    he is risen.' That power which we knew,--that soaring intelligence,
+    that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit,--_that_ cannot have
+    been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. It
+    has left its darkened dust behind. It has outsoared the shadow of
+    our night. God does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to
+    nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell,
+    or some bodily tissue. Life does not die, but matter dies off from
+    it. The highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which
+    meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose,
+    insight,--this agent of immense resource and boundless power,--this
+    has not been subdued by its instrument. When we think of such an one
+    as he, we can only think of life, never of death.
+
+    "Such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on 'Immortality.'
+    But he himself was the best argument for immortality. Like the
+    greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the
+    higher evidence of universal instincts,--the vast streams of belief
+    which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those
+    shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the
+    Atlantic and Pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the
+    revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun."
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Let us then ponder his words:--
+
+          'Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
+          What rainbows teach and sunsets show?
+          Voice of earth to earth returned,
+          Prayers of saints that inly burned,
+          Saying, _What is excellent
+          As God lives, is permanent;
+          Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
+          Hearts' love will meet thee again._
+
+         *       *       *       *
+
+          House and tenant go to ground
+          Lost in God, in Godhead found.'"
+
+After the above address a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M.
+Brown, of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the
+church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott recited the
+following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion:---
+
+      "His harp is silent: shall successors rise,
+      Touching with venturous hand the trembling string,
+      Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise,
+      And wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing?
+      Shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes,
+      As when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise,
+      World-wide his native melodies did sing,
+      Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories?
+      Ah, no! That matchless lyre shall silent lie:
+      None hath the vanished minstrel's wondrous skill
+      To touch that instrument with art and will.
+      With him, winged poesy doth droop and die;
+      While our dull age, left voiceless, must lament
+      The bard high heaven had for its service sent."
+
+
+    "Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors,
+    friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the
+    dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore
+    a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession
+    took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall
+    pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies
+    of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being
+    concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray
+    surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. The services
+    here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final
+    resting-place.
+
+    "The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal
+    clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the
+    Lord's Prayer, ending at the words, 'and deliver us from evil.'
+    In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pronounced the
+    benediction. After it was over the grandchildren passed the open
+    grave and threw flowers into it."
+
+So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
+and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.--A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard.
+
+
+Emerson's earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so
+slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the
+accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has
+been long living in the companionship of his thought. Still, he had to
+be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all
+immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to
+let them all "soar and sing" as he left his earthly half-way house. It
+is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the
+daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals,
+ourselves among the rest. But Emerson has said truly "Great geniuses
+have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about
+them. They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life
+was trivial and commonplace."
+
+The reader has had many extracts from Emerson's writings laid before
+him. It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are
+so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like
+distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he
+says from his undiluted thought. His books are all so full of his life
+to their last syllable that we might letter every volume _Emersoniana_,
+by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+From the numerous extracts I have given from Emerson's writings it may
+be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man
+and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. But he may
+probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from
+the hand of his biographer, if the author of this Memoir may borrow the
+name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the
+same field. He may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of
+the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading.
+He will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the Memoir
+if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the
+interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate.
+
+Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of
+scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in
+the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that
+he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly
+have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very
+light for a man of his stature. He got on the scales at Cheyenne, on
+his trip to California, comparing his weight with that of a lady of
+the party. A little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller,
+Professor Thayer, "How much did I weigh? A hundred and forty?" "A
+hundred and forty and a half," was the answer. "Yes, yes, a hundred and
+forty and a half! That _half_ I prize; it is an index of better things!"
+
+Emerson's head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a
+philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the
+_cephalometer_ used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches
+and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven
+and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It
+was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly
+equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most
+heads.
+
+His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this
+peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like "Ammon's great son," he carried
+one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose
+somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide,
+well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in
+its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin
+shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His
+expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement,
+centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New
+Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three
+cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied
+thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port
+of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring
+intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious. Few of our
+fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished
+personages than our present minister at the Court of St. James. In
+a recent letter to myself, which I trust Mr. Lowell will pardon my
+quoting, he says of Emerson:--
+
+"There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he
+habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if
+ever, only rise in spurts."
+
+From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars
+relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record.
+
+His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick.
+His eyes were of the "strongest and brightest blue." The member of the
+family who tells me this says:--
+
+"My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else
+had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in
+sea-captains. I have seen three sea-captains who had them."
+
+He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very
+limited, if we may judge from this family story. When he was in College,
+and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented
+himself, intending to learn to sing. The master received him, and when
+his turn came, said to him, "Chord!" "What?" said Emerson. "Chord!
+Chord! I tell you," repeated the master. "I don't know what you mean,"
+said Emerson. "Why, sing! Sing a note." "So I made some kind of a noise,
+and the singing-master said, 'That will do, sir. You need not come
+again.'"
+
+Emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in
+the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with
+others using it, but always _pie_ at breakfast. "It stood before him and
+was the first thing eaten." Ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour
+of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven.
+Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could
+do night after night. He never was hungry,--could go any time from
+breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for
+food when it was set before him.
+
+He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and
+often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the
+better.
+
+It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life
+long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency.
+He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about
+ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to
+Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily
+inheritance. In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:--
+
+  "I bear in youth the sad infirmities
+  That use to undo the limb and sense of age."
+
+Four years later:--
+
+  "Has God on thee conferred
+    A bodily presence mean as Paul's,
+  Yet made thee bearer of a word
+    Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?"
+
+and again, in the same year:--
+
+  "Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,
+  Trembling for the body's sake."--
+
+Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing
+in "Terminus" his inherited weakness of organization.
+
+And in writing to Carlyle, he says:--
+
+"You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and
+postponement of the blonde constitution."
+
+Again, "I am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast
+debility and procrastination."
+
+He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be
+observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that
+semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His
+presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough
+to make him a rapid and enduring walker.
+
+Emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the
+lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly
+penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as
+to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through
+his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a
+well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite
+sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon
+pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until
+it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.
+
+He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it
+were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to
+seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while
+his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground
+swell," as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed
+convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to
+Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.
+
+Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered
+the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of
+the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity,
+and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail,
+--which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it
+to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of
+inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been very
+accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it
+is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work
+with a spade, cried out, "Take care, papa,--you will dig your leg."
+
+He used to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about
+his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the
+nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the
+words.
+
+There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the
+earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he
+had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary
+that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with
+endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.
+
+Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy,
+over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos
+eseito]--Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have
+been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling
+learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with
+impunity.
+
+In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham,
+Emerson is reported as saying, "God has given me the seeing eye, but not
+the working hand." His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its
+envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in
+connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all
+this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden
+and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the
+patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one
+thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left
+no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with
+natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its
+various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity
+(_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it
+appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity,
+according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for
+an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that
+Franklin showed in the affairs of common life.
+
+He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become
+able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships.
+We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first
+edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears
+in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that
+recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still.
+What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded
+worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between
+the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience
+and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to
+make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham
+gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections
+which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his
+equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed,
+and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed
+itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree.
+
+Of Emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory
+of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked
+or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be
+his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity
+apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the
+part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little
+children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic
+smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated
+with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are
+living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has
+already been written. Margaret Fuller,--I must call my early schoolmate
+as I best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of
+five artists,--Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully
+commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives
+in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne
+awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.
+
+How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came
+to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That "majesty" Mr.
+Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that
+doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly
+upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew
+would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent
+persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would
+have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to
+the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too
+exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many
+others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal
+frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better
+sphere of being.
+
+Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village
+in which he lived. He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on
+no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures,
+was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt
+to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came
+flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What was the errand on which he visited our earth,--the message with
+which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life?
+
+Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. These may be opened
+earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can
+tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound.
+
+Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they
+were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country,
+perhaps by too long contact with the "Sons of Liberty," and their
+revolutionary notions. But the most "liberal" Boston pulpit still held
+to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any
+independent thinker.
+
+In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, "began," as
+was said of another,--"to be about thirty years of age." He had opened
+his sealed orders and had read therein:
+
+Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.
+
+Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice
+of God in thine own soul.
+
+Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy
+fellow-servants.
+
+Thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit
+of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold
+interests of life and the typical characters of history.
+
+Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul, in conscious
+union with the Infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence.
+
+This pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing
+is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. Its least
+appearance is not unworthy of thy study. Let thy soul be open and thine
+eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere.
+
+Go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they
+must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with
+the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see
+God.
+
+Teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect
+freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that
+today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to
+reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning's sun.
+
+To thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World,
+that here, here in our America, is the home of man; that here is the
+promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded.
+
+Thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent,
+hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere
+thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was true to the orders he had received. Through doubts, troubles,
+privations, opposition, he would not
+
+                              "bate a jot
+  Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
+  Right onward."
+
+All through the writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests
+itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest
+sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane"
+where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the
+homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners,
+And all his work was done, not so much
+
+  "As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye,"
+
+as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship.
+
+He was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to
+a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. He might have been an
+idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw
+all about him. He gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and
+trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him
+above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has
+held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a
+volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a
+confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and
+Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that
+professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the
+fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings
+of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions.
+
+Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely
+made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not
+in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague
+aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them,
+in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he
+
+  "Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer."
+
+Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout
+listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn,
+who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was
+over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life
+in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.
+
+  "His was the task and his the lordly gift
+  Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift."
+
+This was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier,
+calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more
+help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude
+could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.
+
+"Nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his
+genius," as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a
+poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in
+circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these
+directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and
+he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room
+naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from
+the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very
+popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a
+very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.
+
+--"I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished
+in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos
+not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as
+conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics,
+argument and confession." So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.
+
+It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave
+most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view
+the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson
+was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a
+play-actor.
+
+The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were,
+accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the
+lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of
+Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given
+length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and
+lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience
+would tire before the allotted time was over.
+
+Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists.
+They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative
+observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in
+their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen
+portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes
+little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an
+elevated sentiment.
+
+It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer
+in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had
+learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his
+apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must
+work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the
+playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good
+estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and
+published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in
+the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never
+became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances
+until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he
+was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor,
+writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and
+dangerous winter season.
+
+He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man
+could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed
+plain people whose classics were the Bible and the "Farmer's Almanac."
+Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by
+his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found
+his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow.
+
+When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public
+in the shape of an Essay. But the Essay never lost the character it
+borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a
+lay sermon,--_concio ad populum_. We must always remember what we are
+dealing with. "Expect nothing more of my power of construction,--no
+ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs
+tied together."--"Here I sit and read and write, with very little
+system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent
+particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer
+and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom
+of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," he says, "and there it
+tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing,
+sneer, or pray, according to your genius." In England, he says, "I find
+this lecturing a key which opens all doors." But he did not tend to
+overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so
+diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again,
+"I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and
+am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received."
+Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the
+earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares
+about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest
+itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments.
+But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations
+enough. I remember Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could
+fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very
+advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was
+unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely,
+saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that
+season.
+
+No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages
+with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he
+was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was
+deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the
+end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly,
+without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild
+surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full
+measure to his audience with perfect fairness.
+
+  [Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes
+  Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei
+  Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]
+
+or, in Bryant's version,
+
+  "as the scales
+  Are held by some just woman, who maintains
+  By spinning wool her household,--carefully
+  She poises both the wool and weights, to make
+  The balance even, that she may provide
+  A pittance for her babes."--
+
+As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. It is needless to handle
+this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it. Of their effect on
+his younger listeners he says, "To some of us that long past experience
+remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson
+awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of
+the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may
+fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of 'Chevy Chase,' and we in
+Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of
+victory."
+
+There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in
+Emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. So might "Peace, be
+still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. I remember
+that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror,
+I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson's,
+where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. An
+hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the
+diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for
+a careworn soul.
+
+An author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many
+quarries. Emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide
+range of authors. I shall presently show how extensive was his reading.
+No doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would
+seem, thoroughly. But let no one be frightened away from his pages by
+the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or
+Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not
+pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a
+man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks
+very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.
+
+"As he confesses in the Essay on 'Books,' his learning is second hand;
+but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use
+of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of
+his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the
+original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than
+of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive
+glimpses, and he is content."
+
+One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has
+"contrived to read" almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has
+fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has
+not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to
+Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well
+be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to Goethe are
+very frequent.
+
+Emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly
+know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse
+him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather
+quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson
+quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because
+another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with
+a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously
+appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse
+in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than
+many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his
+authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all,
+and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named
+references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are
+three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred
+and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven
+are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times
+or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or
+more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names
+alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one
+thousand and sixty-five references.
+
+  Authorities.  Number of times mentioned.
+  Shakespeare.....112
+  Napoleon.........84
+  Plato............81
+  Plutarch.........70
+  Goethe...........62
+  Swift............49
+  Bacon............47
+  Milton...........46
+  Newton...........43
+  Homer............42
+  Socrates.........42
+  Swedenborg.......40
+  Montaigne........30
+  Saadi............30
+  Luther...........30
+  Webster..........27
+  Aristotle........25
+  Hafiz............25
+  Wordsworth.......25
+  Burke............24
+  Saint Paul.......24
+  Dante............22
+  Shattuck (Hist. of
+    Concord).......21
+  Chaucer..........20
+  Coleridge........20
+  Michael Angelo...20
+  The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times.
+
+It is interesting to observe that Montaigne, Franklin, and Emerson all
+show the same fondness for Plutarch.
+
+Montaigne says, "I never settled myself to the reading of any book of
+solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."
+
+Franklin says, speaking of the books in his father's library, "There was
+among them Plutarch's Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think
+that time spent to great advantage."
+
+Emerson says, "I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to
+all the ancient writers."
+
+Studies of life and character were the delight of all these four
+moralists. As a judge of character, Dr. Hedge, who knew Emerson well,
+has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of "English
+Traits" can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the
+intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes.
+
+_Noscitur a sociis_ is as applicable to the books a man most affects as
+well as to the companions he chooses. It is with the kings of
+thought that Emerson most associates. As to borrowing from his royal
+acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve.
+
+"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.
+There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By
+necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."
+
+What Emerson says of Plutarch applies very nearly to himself.
+
+"In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate
+between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into
+the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not
+stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all."
+
+Mr. Ruskin and Lord Tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend
+themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Emerson would never have taken
+the trouble to do such a thing. His mind was overflowing with thought as
+a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from
+an endless variety of sources. He drew ashore whatever he wanted that
+would serve his purpose. He makes no secret of his mode of writing. "I
+dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature;
+but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of
+a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities."
+Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of
+his "lapidary style" and say "I build my house of boulders."
+
+"It is to be remembered," says Mr. Ruskin, "that all men who have sense
+and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they
+meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest
+is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human
+minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the
+world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original
+powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to
+their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it."
+
+The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson's words
+and thoughts and those of others.
+
+Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. "Scorn trifles"
+comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph
+Waldo.--"What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?
+This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." So writes Ralph Waldo
+Emerson in his Lecture "New England Reformers."--"Hiding the badges of
+royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest
+their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags."
+Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the "Harvard Register" nearly
+twenty years before.
+
+  "The hero is not fed on sweets,
+  Daily his own heart he eats."
+
+The image comes from Pythagoras _via_ Plutarch.
+
+Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a
+sentence which recalls Carlyle.
+
+"The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.
+The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all
+its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a
+long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule."
+
+Compare this passage from "English Traits" with the following one from
+Carlyle's "French Revolution":--
+
+"So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and
+character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch
+all men:--till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire,
+the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day!
+For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass;
+most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the
+burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing
+will put out."
+
+  "O what are heroes, prophets, men
+  But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow
+  A momentary music."
+
+The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns's letters, again in
+one of Coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a
+letter of Leibnitz.
+
+  "He builded better than he knew"
+
+is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson. The thought is constantly
+recurring in our literature. It helps out the minister's sermon; and a
+Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the "Address
+without a Phoenix" among the Drury Lane mock poems. Can we find any
+trace of this idea elsewhere?
+
+In a little poem of Coleridge's, "William Tell," are these two lines:
+
+  "On wind and wave the boy would toss
+  Was great, nor knew how great he was."
+
+The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle
+called "Characteristics." It reappears in Emerson's poem "Fate."
+
+  "Unknown to Cromwell as to me
+  Was Cromwell's measure and degree;
+  Unknown to him as to his horse,
+  If he than his groom is better or worse."
+
+It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this
+connection. In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest
+themselves. All the best poetry the world has known is full of such
+resemblances. If we find Emerson's wonderful picture, "Initial Love"
+prefigured in the "Symposium" of Plato, we have only to look in the
+"Phaedrus" and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare's
+famous group,--
+
+  "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet."
+
+Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental
+coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed
+from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished
+copies, _éditions de luxe_ of sayings that all the world knows are old,
+but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again.
+The more improved versions of the world's great thoughts we have, the
+better, and we look to the great minds for them. The larger the river
+the more streams flow into it. The wide flood of Emerson's discourse has
+a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries.
+
+It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his
+lectures and essays. He was always on the lookout in conversation for
+things to be remembered. He picked up facts one would not have expected
+him to care for. He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple's time at
+Kalamazoo. I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me
+right. He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown
+in several instances. Another example is where he speaks of Quintus
+Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the
+self-sacrificing equestrian. Little inaccuracies of this kind did not
+concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could
+not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular
+article.
+
+Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him.
+Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most
+easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau.
+Carlyle's harsh virility could not be without its effect on his
+valid, but sensitive nature. Alcott's psychological and physiological
+speculations interested him as an idealist. Thoreau lent him a new set
+of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a
+poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as
+vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like
+those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest
+stone in the darkest night,--or come nearer to seeing it than those of
+most mortals. Emerson's long intimacy with him taught him to give an
+outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to
+him but for this companionship. A nicer analysis would detect many
+alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits
+predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood
+out distinct from the common family qualities. Mr. Whipple has well
+said: "Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his
+ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his
+genius? Indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words,
+and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius 'to spring,
+like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the
+past and refuse all history.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson's place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He cannot
+properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered
+lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have
+been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments
+rather than of the results of systematic study. He was a man of
+intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism.
+This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost,
+if not quite, unintelligible. We can, for this reason, understand why
+the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and Dr. Walter
+Channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. But it is not
+always a writer's fault that he is not understood. Many persons have
+poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand
+themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. But that which is
+mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring
+imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. It is to be hoped that no
+reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found
+under the title "Diogenes," in the work of his namesake, Diogenes
+Laertius. I translate from the Latin version.
+
+"Plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of _mensality_ and _cyathity_
+[_tableity_, and _gobletity_]. 'I can see a table and a goblet,' said
+the cynic, 'but I can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.'
+'Quite so,' answered Plato, 'because you have the eyes to see a goblet
+and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and
+gobletity.'"
+
+This anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following Emerson into
+the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation.
+
+Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a
+spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, "as
+the wise Spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. This, of
+course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than
+Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India,
+fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers
+and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux,
+Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has
+his fancies on the subject. The geography of an undiscovered country and
+the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to
+romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge.
+
+That the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a
+simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different
+proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its
+retina,--why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such
+questions very simply by saying it is so.
+
+The poet in Emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the
+philosopher. He speaks of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of
+Immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. It
+sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble
+Ode as working truths.
+
+     "Not in entire forgetfulness,
+      And not in utter nakedness,
+  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+      From God, who is our home."
+
+In accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a
+preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant:--
+
+    "Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
+     On whom those truths do rest
+  Which we are toiling all our lives to find."--
+
+These are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the
+poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and
+the age of eight years, at which Wordsworth finds the little girl of
+  whom he speaks in the lines,--
+
+             "A simple child--
+    That lightly draws its breath
+  And feels its life in every limb,--
+    What should it know of death?"
+
+What should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which
+Time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone
+render appreciable to the consciousness? Undoubtedly every brain has its
+own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own
+individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a
+good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as Dryden called it, from a
+good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth
+to plant himself on his instincts. But the individual to whom this
+counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts.
+He has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. His
+instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous
+conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided
+tendencies. The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what
+is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological
+language, from God or the devil. That which was a safe guide for Emerson
+might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy. The cloud of glory
+which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts,
+which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,--not the
+truths themselves. And too many children come into life trailing after
+them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory.
+
+It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new
+doctrine,--new to his young disciples,--of planting themselves on their
+instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting
+to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the
+door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which
+listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of
+babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as
+one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a
+very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "The Dial"
+was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness,
+incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to
+satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.
+
+The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less
+than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence.
+It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we
+cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance
+in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout
+religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious
+free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right
+and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its
+legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or
+institutions.
+
+All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of
+emancipation. For the Fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of Medmenham
+Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense _ce que voudras_. There was
+an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some
+susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally
+of the Bedlam sort. Emerson's disciples were never accused of falling
+into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself
+distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing
+effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign
+influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the
+effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the
+regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.
+
+Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration
+of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not
+yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but
+so was throwing the tea overboard. A provincial affair, if the Bohemian
+press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was
+fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over
+the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Too much has been made of Emerson's mysticism. He was an intellectual
+rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let
+go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of
+common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being
+could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob
+Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader
+may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic
+asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the
+contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in
+the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to
+insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable,
+the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played
+with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified
+the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual
+divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach
+to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out
+of itself. If "Rejected Addresses" had not been written half a century
+before Emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant
+to ridicule and parody it.
+
+       "The song of Braham is an Irish howl;
+       Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
+  And nought is everything and everything is nought."
+
+Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma
+that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.
+
+Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the "Yoga" doctrine
+of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The
+oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic
+dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a
+peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to
+construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be,
+of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and
+ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to
+build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a
+human soul had ever constructed.
+
+Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel,"
+illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's
+calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes
+refers to,--that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I
+become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. This
+was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his
+most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well
+known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for
+a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the
+spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.
+
+Emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question
+sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to
+the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a
+charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and
+disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have
+a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "Uriel" is a poem which finds itself
+perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt
+not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment,
+it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the
+voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest
+imaginative conceptions.
+
+Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of
+universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return.
+Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects
+in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the
+landscape. Here is a curious extract from "The Adirondacs," in which the
+reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron's--
+
+  "The sky is changed,--and such a change! O night
+  And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."--
+
+Now Emerson:--
+
+  "And presently the sky is changed; O world!
+  What pictures and what harmonies are thine!
+  The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
+  _So like the soul of me, what if't were me_?"
+
+We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem
+printed among the "Translations" in the Appendix to Emerson's Poems.
+These are the last two lines of "The Flute, from Hilali":--
+
+  "Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,
+  If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?"
+
+The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley's "Ode
+to the West Wind":
+
+              "Be thou, Spirit fierce,
+  My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"
+
+Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops
+of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical
+metempsychosis.
+
+The laird of Balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him
+cherry-brandy instead of port wine. In driving home over a wild tract of
+land called Munrimmon Moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got
+out of the gig and brought them to him. The hat he recognized, but not
+the wig. "It's no my wig, Hairy [Harry], lad; it's no my wig," and he
+would not touch it. At last Harry lost his patience: "Ye'd better tak'
+it, sir, for there's nae waile [choice] o' wigs on Munrimmon Moor."
+And in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman,
+whose _Ego_ was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she
+had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of
+her four-footed companion:--
+
+  "If it be I, he'll wag his little tail;
+  And if it be not I, he'll loudly bark and wail."
+
+I have not lost my reverence for Emerson in showing one of his fancies
+for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. He would
+doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense
+of humor. But I take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about
+"a foresmell of the Infinite" which Mr. Conway has attributed to me, who
+am innocent of all connection with it.
+
+The mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial
+concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special
+endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. It is
+not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great
+composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise
+the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine
+contemplation. The bewildered reader must not forget that passage of
+arms, previously mentioned, between Plato and Diogenes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson looked rather askance at Science in his early days. I remember
+that his brother Charles had something to say in the "Harvard Register"
+(1828) about its disenchantments. I suspect the prejudice may have come
+partly from Wordsworth. Compare this verse of his with the lines of
+Emerson's which follow it.
+
+  "Physician art thou, one all eyes;
+  Philosopher, a fingering slave,
+  One that would peep and botanize
+  Upon his mother's grave?"
+
+Emerson's lines are to be found near the end of the Appendix in the new
+edition of his works.
+
+  "Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
+  And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
+  In love he cannot therefore cease his trade;
+  Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
+  He feels it, introverts his learned eye
+  To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.
+  His mother died,--the only friend he had,--
+  Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
+  Couched like a cat, sat watching close behind
+  And throttled all his passion. Is't not like
+  That devil-spider that devours her mate
+  Scarce freed from her embraces?"
+
+The same feeling comes out in the Poem "Blight," where he says the
+"young scholars who invade our hills"
+
+  "Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
+  And all their botany is Latin names;"
+
+and in "The Walk," where the "learned men" with their glasses are
+contrasted with the sons of Nature,--the poets are no doubt meant,--much
+to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. Emerson's mind
+was very far from being of the scientific pattern. Science is
+quantitative,--loves the foot-rule and the balance,--methodical,
+exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. The poet is curious,
+asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the
+answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it. Emerson wonders,
+for instance,--
+
+  "Why Nature loves the number five,"
+
+but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any
+farther. He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany
+from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr.
+Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial
+anaesthesia. It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz,
+who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most
+delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science
+and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came
+among us. At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their
+specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves
+the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his
+Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says:--
+
+"Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet's
+curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the
+feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection
+they awake."--
+
+This was Emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of
+nature.
+
+Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes
+quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects.
+His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are
+independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is
+frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the
+special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound
+that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing
+_audacities_:--
+
+"There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is
+naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."--
+
+"He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and
+carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic."--
+
+"If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long
+hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy
+which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature."--
+
+"Tapping the tempest for a little side wind."--
+
+"The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot
+every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and
+employment and bind them fast in one web."--
+
+He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes
+the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe,
+Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word "husband"
+in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word "haughty" is so
+fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its
+employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But
+his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like
+dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty Ariel,"--"fine Ariel." It
+belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to
+Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators
+are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of
+Emerson's. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic
+traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn
+fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and
+his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;"
+his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word "fine," with a
+certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the
+word "melioration."
+
+We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel
+with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The "point and
+surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch
+belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is
+very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects,
+ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool
+and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison
+grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such
+delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to
+match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the
+slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced
+organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling
+the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an
+unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he "peddles out all the
+wit he can gather from Time or from Nature," and we find that "he has
+changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying
+about the morning light as merchandise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as
+home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen
+sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets
+familiar to all of us,--"This great, intelligent, sensual, and
+avaricious America." This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his
+Essay, "Works and Days," he is quite as outspoken: "This mendicant
+America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America." "I
+see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the
+respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "The war," he
+says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." All his
+life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization.
+All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them.
+To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the
+ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "Here,"
+he said, in words I have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is
+the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded."
+
+Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent;
+he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him
+as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our
+fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. So it pleases us
+to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of
+Franklin's bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of
+Emerson's:--
+
+  "A blessing through the ages thus
+  Shield all thy roofs and towers,
+  GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
+  Thou darling town of ours!"
+
+Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not
+fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend
+their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop,
+and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the
+penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of
+the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. His courtesy and kindness
+to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. Poets who come to recite
+their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are
+among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted
+his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but
+collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable
+inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one
+phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far
+as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his
+most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in
+its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The natural purity and elevation of Emerson's character show themselves
+in all that he writes. His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him
+from his writings. This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all
+the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so
+spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave
+their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some
+superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about
+Boileau,--
+
+  "Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,--cela porte malheur."
+
+(Don't let us abuse Nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up
+dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had
+their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the
+assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him,
+and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy,
+sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England
+was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The
+_dour_ Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and
+they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise
+above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until
+he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and
+find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. So
+did the music of Emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our
+stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would
+have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When
+a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened
+persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs
+as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the
+convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about
+which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep
+and anxious and devout religious scepticism.
+
+It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by
+Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his
+ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but
+when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the
+end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the
+more he found himself perplexed.
+
+The name most frequently applied to Emerson's form of belief is
+Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can
+tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief
+in the omnipresence of the Deity?
+
+Theodore Parker explained Emerson's position, as he understood it, in an
+article in the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." I borrow this quotation
+from Mr. Cooke:--
+
+"He has an absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of
+Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it.
+He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or
+morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy
+for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates
+at Andover or Cambridge."
+
+We read in his Essay, "Self-Reliance ": "This is the ultimate fact which
+we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all
+into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the
+Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in
+which it enters into all lower forms."
+
+The "ever-blessed ONE" of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the
+doctrine of the Trinity. The "Over-Soul" of Emerson is that aspect of
+Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a
+divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in
+all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as
+he was willing to be called a Platonist.
+
+Explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like
+this. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the
+Almighty unto perfection?" But on certain great points nothing could be
+clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of
+spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His
+views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character,
+brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him
+afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any
+denial of the self-governing power of the will.
+
+His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. In all
+he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in
+all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his light and guide; through
+all nature he looked up to nature's God; and if he did not worship the
+"man Christ Jesus" as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed
+his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of
+him as more like Christ than any man he had known.
+
+Emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church
+from which he had parted. Since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not
+of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of
+well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an
+impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent
+sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before.
+Their official Confessions of Faith make far less difference in their
+human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago.
+These ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials
+with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little
+bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long
+as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully
+treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that.
+
+Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of
+Emerson's religious teachings I will select two as typical.
+
+Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in
+Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has
+written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the
+New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with
+the following sentence:--
+
+"Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of
+Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one
+of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole,
+tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a
+great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest
+of human life: 'HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.'"
+
+"But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report," says
+Mr. Conway "('Macmillan,' June, 1879), that religion had there passed
+through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that 'the genial
+atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all
+the churches equally.'"
+
+What is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of Christianity?
+The good Baptist minister's Essay is full of it. He comes asking what
+has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of
+"fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same
+Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him.
+The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if
+he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations
+ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later
+he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was
+called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished
+to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into
+pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals.
+
+It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the
+self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the
+Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness
+of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely
+claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote:--
+
+"Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place
+these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man
+sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again
+to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our
+faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the
+Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be
+there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and
+the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of
+conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the
+spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of
+voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself
+there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from
+the dead, to swell their number."
+
+The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson's writings and life
+is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and
+critics. The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by
+three considerable Memoirs. Mr. George Willis Cooke's elaborate work is
+remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson's teachings.
+Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway's "Emerson at Home and Abroad" is a lively
+picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. Mr.
+Alexander Ireland's "Biographical Sketch" brings together, from a great
+variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of
+Emerson's history and the comments of those whose opinions were best
+worth reproducing. I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the
+various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject.
+
+From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our
+intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and
+appreciative criticisms of Emerson's Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the
+portrait of the New England "Plotinus-Montaigne" in his brilliant "Fable
+for Critics," to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John
+Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson's
+writings have furnished one of the most enduring _pičces de résistance_
+at the critical tables of the old and the new world.
+
+He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and
+writers: Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services;
+Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss
+Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him "a noble man."
+Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson's
+fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but
+unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned
+whether they would pass current with posterity. He found discerning
+critics in France, Germany, and Holland. Better than all is the
+testimony of those who knew him best. They who repeat the saying that
+"a prophet is not without honor save in his own country," will find an
+exception to its truth in the case of Emerson. Read the impressive words
+spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the
+glowing tributes of three of Concord's poets,--Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing,
+and Mr. Sanborn,--and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame
+had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored,
+beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his
+own fireside.
+
+It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the
+language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the
+adamant of Shakespeare," and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison
+or Gray's Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought
+entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified
+the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as
+a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. _Corpora non agunt
+nisi soluta_, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as
+material substances before they can act. "That which thou sowest is not
+quickened except it die," or rather lose the form with which it was
+sown. Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of "The
+Burial of Sir John Moore" an immortal, and endowed the language with a
+classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. But what is the gift of a
+mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? How many lives
+have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost
+in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their
+influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which
+they formed a part and the generations that came after them! We can dare
+to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr.
+Cranch:--
+
+  "The wise will know thee and the good will love,
+    The age to come will feel thy impress given
+  In all that lifts the race a step above
+    Itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven."
+
+It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson's best literary work in prose and
+verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or
+fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and
+the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends,
+indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly
+pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose
+footsteps Christendom professes to follow. The time was when the divine
+authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported
+to have wrought. As the faith in these exceptions to the general laws
+of the universe diminished, the teachings of the Master, of whom it was
+said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon
+as evidence of his divine mission. Now, when a comparison of these
+teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to
+have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the
+sinless and self-devoted servant of God and friend of man is appealed to
+as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation
+of the Divinity.
+
+Judged by his life Emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity.
+He was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even
+the jail. But the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing
+it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of Queen
+Mary's martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. His faith was too large and
+too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too
+honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred
+calling. His writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of
+admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them
+their true value. It was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on
+so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the
+privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise.
+No matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks,
+carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to
+his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without
+which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. He shaped an ideal for
+the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after
+truth. Look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall
+see it everywhere. Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you
+shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul. Trust yourself because
+you trust the voice of God in your inmost consciousness.
+
+There are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts
+beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. So
+transparent was the life of Emerson; so clearly did the true nature of
+the man show through it. What he taught others to be, he was himself.
+His deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere
+among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest
+manifestations of character. Here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may
+have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if He who knew what was in man
+had wandered from door to door in New England as of old in Palestine, we
+can well believe that one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet"
+would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been
+that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+[For many references, not found elsewhere, see under the general
+headings of _Emerson's Books, Essays, Poems_.]
+
+
+  Abbott, Josiah Gardiner, a pupil of Emerson, 49, 50.
+
+  Academic Races, 2, 3. (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Action, subordinate, 112.
+
+  Adams, John, old age, 261.
+
+  Adams, Samuel, Harvard debate, 115.
+
+  Addison, Joseph, classic, 416.
+
+  Advertiser, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+  Aeolian Harp, his model, 329, 340.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Harp.)
+
+  Aeschylus, tragedies, 253. (See _Greek_.)
+
+  Agassiz, Louis:
+    Saturday Club, 222;
+    companionship, 403.
+
+  Agriculture:
+    in Anthology, 30;
+    attacked, 190;
+    not Emerson's field, 255, 256, 365.
+
+  Akenside, Mark, allusion, 16.
+
+  Alchemy, adepts, 260, 261.
+
+  Alcott, A. Bronson:
+    hearing Emerson, 66;
+    speculations, 86;
+    an idealist, 150;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    sonnet, 355;
+    quoted, 373;
+    personality traceable, 389.
+
+  Alcott, Louisa M., funeral bouquet, 351.
+
+  Alexander the Great:
+    allusion, 184;
+    mountain likeness, 322.
+
+  Alfred the Great, 220, 306.
+
+  Allston, Washington, unfinished picture, 334.
+      (See _Pictures_.)
+
+  Ambition, treated in Anthology, 30.
+
+  America:
+    room for a poet, 136, 137;
+    virtues and defects, 143;
+    faith in, 179;
+    people compared with English, 216;
+    things awry, 260;
+    _aristocracy_, 296;
+    in the Civil War, 304;
+    Revolution, 305;
+    Lincoln, the true history of his time, 307;
+    passion for, 308, 309;
+    artificial rhythm, 329;
+    its own literary style, 342;
+    home of man, 371;
+    loyalty to, 406;
+    epithets, 406, 407.
+      (See _England, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Amici, meeting Emerson, 63.
+      (See _Italy_.)
+
+  Amusements, in New England, 30.
+
+  Anaemia, artistic, 334.
+
+  Ancestry:
+    in general, 1-3;
+    Emerson's, 3 _et seq._
+      (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Andover, Mass.:
+    Theological School, 48;
+    graduates, 411.
+
+  Andrew, John Albion:
+    War Governor, 223;
+    hearing Emerson, 379.
+      (See _South_.)
+
+  Angelo. (See _Michael Angelo_.)
+
+  Antinomianism:
+    in The Dial, 162;
+    kept from, 177.
+      (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Anti-Slavery:
+    in Emerson's pulpit, 57;
+    the reform, 141, 145, 152;
+    Emancipation address, 181;
+    Boston and New York addresses, 210-212;
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 228;
+    Fugitive Slave Law, and other matters, 303-307.
+      (See _South_.)
+
+  Antoninus, Marcus, allusion, 16.
+
+  Architecture, illustrations, 253.
+
+  Arianism, 51.
+      (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+  Aristotle:
+    influence over Mary Emerson, 17;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Arminianism, 51.
+      (See _Methodism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Arnim, Gisela von, 225.
+
+  Arnold, Matthew:
+    quotation about America, 137:
+    lecture, 236;
+    on Milton, 315;
+    his Thyrsis, 333;
+    criticism, 334;
+    string of Emerson's epithets, 406.
+
+  Aryans, comparison, 312.
+
+  Asia:
+    a pet name, 176;
+    immovable, 200.
+
+  Assabet River, 70, 71.
+
+  Astronomy:
+    Harp illustration, 108;
+    stars against wrong, 252, 253.
+    (See _Galileo, Stars, Venus_, etc.)
+
+  Atlantic Monthly:
+    sketch of Dr. Ripley, 14, 15;
+    of Mary Moody Emerson, 16;
+    established, 221;
+    supposititious club, 222;
+    on Persian Poetry, 224;
+    on Thoreau, 228;
+    Emerson's contributions, 239, 241;
+    Brahma, 296.
+
+  Atmosphere:
+    effect on inspiration, 290;
+    spiritual, 413, 414.
+
+  Augustine, Emerson's study of, 52.
+
+  Authors, quoted by Emerson, 381-383.
+    (See _Plutarch_, etc.)
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis:
+    allusion, 22, 111;
+    times quoted, 382.
+
+  Bancroft, George:
+    literary rank, 33;
+    in college, 45.
+
+  Barbier, Henri Auguste, on Napoleon, 208.
+
+  Barnwell, Robert W.:
+    in history, 45;
+    in college, 47.
+
+  Beaumont and Fletcher, disputed, line, 128, 129.
+
+  Beauty:
+    its nature, 74, 94, 95;
+    an end, 99, 135, 182;
+    study, 301.
+
+  Beecher, Edward, on preexistence, 391.
+    (See _Preexistence_.)
+
+  Behmen, Jacob:
+    mysticism, 201, 202, 396;
+    citation, 380.
+
+  Berkeley, Bishop:
+    characteristics, 189;
+    matter, 300.
+
+  Bible:
+    Mary Emerson's study, 16;
+    Mosaic cosmogony, 18;
+    the Exodus, 35;
+    the Lord's Supper, 58;
+    Psalms, 68, 181, 182, 253;
+    lost Paradise, 101;
+    Genesis, Sermon on the Mount, 102;
+    Seer of Patmos, 102, 103;
+    Apocalypse, 105;
+    Song of Songs, 117;
+    Baruch's roll, 117, 118;
+    not closed, 122;
+    the Sower, 154;
+    Noah's Ark, 191;
+    Pharisee's trumpets, 255;
+    names and imagery, 268;
+    sparing the rod, 297;
+    rhythmic mottoes, 314;
+    beauty of Israel, 351;
+    face of an angel, 352;
+    barren fig-tree, 367;
+    a classic, 376;
+    body of death, "Peace be still!" 379;
+    draught of fishes, 381;
+    its semi-detached sentences, 405;
+    Job quoted, 411;
+    "the man Christ Jesus," 412;
+    scattering abroad, 414.
+    (See _Christ, God, Religion,_ etc.)
+
+  Bigelow, Jacob, on rural cemeteries, 31.
+
+  Biography, every man writes his own, 1.
+
+  Blackmore, Sir Richard, controversy, 31.
+
+  Bliss Family, 9.
+
+  Bliss, Daniel, patriotism, 72.
+
+  Blood, transfusion of, 256.
+
+  Books, use and abuse, 110, 111.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Boston, Mass.:
+    First Church, 10, 12, 13;
+    Woman's Club, 16;
+    Harbor, 19;
+    nebular spot, 25, 26;
+    its pulpit darling, 27;
+    Episcopacy, 28;
+    Athenaeum, 31;
+    magazines, 28-34;
+    intellectual character, lights on its three hills, high caste
+  religion, 34;
+    Samaria and Jerusalem, 35;
+    streets and squares, 37-39;
+    Latin School, 39, 40, 43;
+    new buildings, 42;
+    Mrs. Emerson's boarding-house, the Common as a pasture, 43;
+    Unitarian preaching, 51;
+    a New England centre, 52;
+    Emerson's settlement, 54;
+    Second Church, 55-61;
+    lectures, 87, 88, 191;
+    Trimount Oracle, 102;
+    stirred by the Divinity-School address, 126;
+    school-keeping, Roxbury, 129;
+    aesthetic society, 149;
+    Transcendentalists, 155, 156;
+    Bay, 172;
+    Freeman Place Chapel, 210:
+    Saturday Club, 221-223;
+    Burns Centennial, 224, 225;
+    Parker meeting, 228;
+    letters, 263, 274, 275;
+    Old South lecture, 294;
+    Unitarianism, 298;
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 307;
+    special train, 350;
+    Sons of Liberty, 369;
+    birthplace, 407;
+    Baptists, 413.
+
+  Boswell, James:
+    allusion, 138;
+    one lacking, 223;
+    Life of Johnson, 268.
+
+  Botany, 403.
+    (See _Science_.)
+
+  Bowen, Francis: literary rank, 34;
+    on Nature, 103, 104.
+
+  Brook Farm, 159, 164-166, 189, 191.
+    (See _Transcendentalism_, etc.)
+
+  Brown, Howard N., prayer, 355.
+
+  Brown, John, sympathy with, 211.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery, South_.)
+
+  Brownson, Orestes A., at a party, 149.
+
+  Bryant, William Cullen:
+    his literary rank, 33;
+    redundant syllable, 328;
+    his translation of Homer quoted, 378.
+
+  Buckminster, Joseph Stevens:
+    minister in Boston, 12, 26, 27, 52;
+    Memoir, 29;
+    destruction of Goldau, 31.
+
+  Buddhism:
+    like Transcendentalism, 151;
+    Buddhist nature, 188;
+    saints
+    298. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma,
+    --_India_, etc.)
+
+  Buffon, on style, 341.
+
+  Bulkeley Family, 4-7.
+
+  Bulkeley, Peter:
+    minister of Concord, 4-7, 71;
+    comparison of sermons, 57;
+    patriotism, 72;
+    landowner, 327.
+
+  Bunyan, John, quoted, 169.
+
+  Burke, Edmund:
+    essay, 73;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Burns, Robert:
+    festival, 224, 225;
+    rank, 281;
+    image referred to, 386;
+    religious position, 409. (See _Scotland_.)
+
+  Burroughs, John, view of English life, 335.
+
+  Burton, Robert, quotations, 109, 381.
+
+  Buttrick, Major, in the Revolution, 71, 72.
+
+  Byron, Lord:
+    allusion, 16;
+    rank, 281;
+    disdain, 321;
+    uncertain sky, 335;
+    parallelism, 399.
+
+
+  CABOT, J. ELLIOT:
+    on Emerson's literary habits, 27;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    prefaces, 283, 302;
+    Note, 295, 296;
+    Prefatory Note, 310, 311;
+    the last meetings, 347, 348.
+
+  Caesar, Julius, 184,197.
+
+  California, trip, 263-271, 359. (See _Thayer_.)
+
+  Calvin, John:
+    his Commentary, 103;
+    used by Cotton, 286.
+
+  Calvinism:
+    William Emerson's want of sympathy with, 11, 12;
+    outgrown, 51;
+    predestination, 230;
+    saints, 298;
+    spiritual influx, 412.
+    (See _God, Puritanism, Religion, Unitarianism.)_
+
+  Cambridge, Mass.:
+    Emerson teaching there, 50;
+    exclusive circles, 52.
+    (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+  Cant, disgust with, 156.
+
+  Carlyle, Thomas:
+    meeting Emerson, 63;
+    recollections of their relations, 78-80, 83;
+    Sartor Resartus, 81, 82, 91;
+    correspondence, 82, 83, 89, 90, 127, 176, 177, 192, 315, 317, 374,
+         380, 381, 406, 407;
+    Life of Schiller, 91;
+    on Nature, 104, 105;
+    Miscellanies, 130;
+    the Waterville Address, 136-138;
+    influence, 149, 150;
+    on Transcendentalism, 156-158;
+    The Dial, 160-163;
+    Brook Farm, 164;
+    friendship, 171;
+    Chelsea visit, 194;
+    bitter legacy, 196;
+    love of power, 197;
+    on Napoleon and Goethe, 208;
+    grumblings, 260;
+    tobacco, 270;
+    Sartor reprinted, 272;
+    paper on, 294;
+    Emerson's dying friendship, 349;
+    physique, 363;
+    Gallic fire, 386;
+    on Characteristics, 387;
+    personality traceable, 389.
+
+  Carpenter, William B., 230.
+
+  Century, The, essay in, 295.
+
+  Cerebration, unconscious, 112, 113.
+
+  Chalmers, Thomas, preaching, 65.
+
+  Channing, Walter, headache, 175, 390.
+
+  Channing, William Ellery:
+    allusion, 16;
+    directing Emerson's studies, 51;
+    preaching, 52;
+    Emerson in his pulpit, 66;
+    influence, 147, 149;
+    kept awake, 157.
+
+  Channing, William Ellery, the poet:
+    his Wanderer, 263;
+    Poems, 403.
+
+  Channing, William Henry:
+    allusions, 131, 149;
+    in The Dial, 159;
+    the Fuller Memoir, 209;
+    Ode inscribed to, 211, 212.
+
+  Charleston, S C, Emerson's preaching, 53. (See _South_.)
+
+  Charlestown, Mass., Edward Emerson's residence, 8.
+
+  Charles V., 197.
+
+  Charles XII., 197.
+
+  Chatelet, Parent du, a realist, 326.
+
+  Chatham, Lord, 255.
+
+  Chaucer, Geoffrey:
+    borrowings, 205;
+    rank, 281;
+    honest rhymes, 340;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Chelmsford, Mass., Emerson teaching there, 49, 50.
+
+  Chemistry, 403. (See _Science_.)
+
+  Cheshire, its "haughty hill," 323.
+
+  Choate, Rufus, oratory, 148.
+
+  Christ:
+    reserved expressions about, 13;
+    mediatorship, 59;
+    true office, 120-122;
+    worship, 412. (See _Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Christianity:
+    its essentials, 13;
+    primitive, 35;
+    a mythus, defects, 121;
+    the true, 122;
+    two benefits, 123;
+    authority, 124;
+    incarnation of, 176;
+    the essence, 306;
+    Fathers, 391.
+
+  Christian, Emerson a, 267.
+
+  Christian Examiner, The:
+    on William Emerson, 12;
+    its literary predecessor, 29;
+    on Nature, 103, 104;
+    repudiates Divinity School Address, 124.
+
+  Church:
+    activity in 1820, 147;
+    avoidance of, 153;
+    the true, 244;
+    music, 306. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Cicero, allusion, 111.
+  Cid, the, 184.
+
+  Clarke, James Freeman:
+    letters, 77-80, 128-131;
+    transcendentalism, 149;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    Fuller Memoir, 209;
+    Emerson's funeral, 351, 353-355.
+
+  Clarke, Samuel, allusion, 16.
+
+  Clarke, Sarah, sketches, 130.
+
+  Clarkson, Thomas, 220.
+
+  Clergy:
+    among Emerson's ancestry, 3-8;
+    gravestones, 9. (See _Cotton, Heredity_, etc.)
+
+  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:
+    allusion, 16;
+    Emerson's account, 63;
+    influence, 149, 150;
+    Carlyle's criticism, 196;
+    Ancient Mariner, 333;
+    Christabel, Abyssinian Maid, 334;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    an image quoted, 386;
+    William Tell, 387.
+
+  Collins, William:
+    poetry, 321;
+    Ode and Dirge, 332.
+
+  Commodity, essay, 94.
+
+  Concentration, 288.
+
+  Concord, Mass.:
+    Bulkeley's ministry, 4-7;
+    first association with the Emerson name, 7;
+    Joseph's descendants, 8;
+    the Fight, 9; Dr. Ripley, 10;
+    Social Club, 14;
+    Emerson's preaching, 54;
+    Goodwin's settlement, 56;
+    discord, 57;
+    Emerson's residence begun, 69, 70;
+    a typical town, 70;
+    settlement, 71;
+    a Delphi, 72;
+    Emerson home, 83;
+    Second Centennial, 84, 85, 303;
+    noted citizens, 86;
+    town government, the, monument, 87;
+    the Sage, 102;
+    letters, 125-131, 225;
+    supposition of Carlyle's life there, 171;
+    Emancipation Address, 181;
+    leaving, 192;
+    John Brown meeting, 211;
+    Samuel Hoar, 213;
+    wide-awake, 221;
+    Lincoln obsequies, 243, 307;
+    an _under_-Concord, 256;
+    fire, 271-279;
+    letters, 275-279;
+    return, 279;
+    Minute Man unveiled, 292;
+    Soldiers' Monument, 303;
+    land-owners, 327;
+    memorial stone, 333;
+    Conway's visits, 343, 344;
+    Whitman's, 344, 345;
+    Russell's, 345; funeral, 350-356;
+    founders, 352;
+    Sleepy Hollow, 356;
+    a strong attraction, 369;
+    neighbors, 373;
+    Prophet, 415.
+
+  Congdon, Charles, his Reminiscences,
+  66.
+
+  Conservatism, fairly treated, 156,
+  157. (See _Reformers, Religion,
+  Transcendentalism,_ etc.)
+
+  Conversation:
+    C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 258;
+    inspiration, 290.
+
+  Conway, Moncure D.:
+    account of Emerson, 55, 56, 66, 194;
+    two visits, 343, 344;
+    anecdote, 346;
+    error, 401;
+    on Stanley, 414.
+
+  Cooke, George Willis:
+    biography of Emerson, 43, 44, 66, 88;
+    on American Scholar, 107, 108;
+    on anti-slavery, 212;
+    on Parnassus, 280-282;
+    on pantheism, 411.
+
+  Cooper, James Fenimore, 33.
+
+  Corot, pearly mist, 335, 336. (See
+  _Pictures_, etc.)
+
+  Cotton, John:
+    service to scholarship, 34;
+    reading Calvin, 286.
+
+  Counterparts, the story, 226.
+
+  Cowper, William:
+    Mother's Picture, 178;
+    disinterested good, 304;
+    tenderness, 333;
+    verse, 338.
+
+  Cranch, Christopher P.:
+    The Dial, 159;
+    poetic prediction, 416, 417.
+
+  Cromwell, Oliver:
+    saying by a war saint, 252;
+    in poetry, 387.
+
+  Cudworth, Ralph, epithets, 200.
+
+  Cupples, George, on Emerson's lectures, 195.
+
+  Curtius, Quintus for Mettus, 388.
+
+  Cushing, Caleb:
+    rank, 33;
+    in college, 45.
+
+
+  Dana, Richard Henry, his literary place, 33, 223.
+
+  Dante:
+    allusion in Anthology, 31;
+    rank, 202, 320;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Dartmouth College, oration, 131-135.
+
+  Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, 105.
+
+  Dawes, Rufus, Boyhood Memories, 44.
+
+  Declaration of Independence, intellectual,
+  115. (See _American_, etc.)
+
+  Delirium, imaginative, easily produced,
+  238. (See _Intuition_.)
+
+  Delia Cruscans, allusion, 152. (See
+  _Transcendentalism_.)
+
+  Delos, allusion, 374.
+
+  Delphic Oracle:
+    of New England, 72;
+    illustration, 84.
+
+  Democratic Review, The, on Nature, 103.
+
+  De Profundis, illustrating Carlyle's spirit, 83.
+
+  De Quincey, Thomas:
+    Emerson's interview with, 63, 195;
+    on originality, 92.
+
+  De Staėl, Mme., allusion, 16.
+
+  De Tocqueville, account of Unitarianism, 51.
+  Dewey, Orville, New Bedford ministry, 67.
+
+  Dexter, Lord Timothy, punctuation, 325, 326.
+
+  Dial, The:
+    established, 147, 158;
+    editors, 159;
+    influence, 160-163;
+    death, 164;
+    poems, 192;
+    old contributors, 221;
+    papers, 295;
+    intuitions, 394.
+
+  Dial, The (second), in Cincinnati, 239.
+
+  Dickens, Charles:
+    on Father Taylor, 56;
+    American Notes, 155.
+
+  Diderot, Denis, essay, 79.
+
+  Diogenes, story, 401. (See _Laertius_.)
+
+  Disinterestedness, 259.
+
+  Disraeli, Benjamin, the rectorship, 282.
+
+  Dramas, their limitations, 375. (See _Shakespeare_.)
+
+  Dress, illustration of poetry, 311, 312.
+
+  Dryden, John, quotation, 20, 21.
+
+  Dwight, John S.:
+    in The Dial, 159;
+    musical critic, 223.
+
+
+  East Lexington, Mass., the Unitarian pulpit, 88.
+
+  Economy, its meaning, 142.
+
+  Edinburgh, Scotland:
+    Emerson's visit and preaching, 64, 65;
+    lecture, 195.
+
+  Education:
+    through friendship, 97, 98;
+    public questions, 258, 259.
+
+  Edwards, Jonathan:
+    allusions, 16, 51;
+    the atmosphere changed, 414.
+    (See _Calvinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Egotism, a pest, 233.
+
+  Egypt:
+    poetic teaching, 121;
+    trip, 271, 272;
+    Sphinx, 330. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Sphinx.)
+
+  Election Sermon, illustration, 112.
+
+  Elizabeth, Queen, verbal heir-loom, 313. (See _Raleigh_, etc.)
+
+  Ellis, Rufus, minister of the First Church, Boston, 43.
+
+  Eloquence, defined, 285, 286.
+
+  Emerson Family, 3 _et seq_.
+
+  Emerson, Charles Chauncy, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+    feeling towards natural science, 18, 237;
+    memories, 19-25, 37, 43;
+    character, 77;
+    death, 89, 90;
+    influence, 98;
+    The Dial, 161;
+    "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+    nearness, 368;
+    poetry, 385;
+    Harvard Register, 401.
+
+  Emerson, Edith, daughter of Ralph Waldo, 263.
+
+  Emerson, Edward, of Newbury, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Edward Bliss, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+    allusions, 19, 20, 37, 38;
+    death, 89;
+    Last Farewell, poem, 161;
+    nearness, 368.
+
+  Emerson, Edward Waldo, son of Ralph Waldo:
+    in New York, 246;
+    on the Farming essay, 255;
+    father's last days, 346-349;
+    reminiscences, 359.
+
+  Emerson, Ellen, daughter of Ralph Waldo:
+    residence, 83;
+    trip to Europe, 271;
+    care of her father, 294;
+    correspondence, 347.
+
+  Emerson, Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tucker, first wife of Ralph Waldo, 55.
+
+  Emerson, Joseph, minister of Mendon, 4, 7, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Joseph, the second, minister of Malden, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Mrs. Lydia Jackson, second wife of Ralph Waldo:
+    marriage, 83;
+    _Asia_, 176.
+
+  Emerson, Mary Moody:
+    influence over her nephew, 16-18;
+    quoted, 385.
+
+  Emerson, Robert Bulkeley, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37.
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, His Life:
+    moulding influences, 1;
+    New England heredity, 2;
+    ancestry, 3-10;
+    parents, 10-16;
+    Aunt Mary, 16-19;
+    brothers, 19-25;
+    the nest, 25;
+    noted scholars, 26-36;
+    birthplace, 37, 38;
+    boyhood, 39, 40;
+    early efforts, 41, 42;
+    parsonages, 42;
+    father's death, 43;
+    boyish appearance, 44;
+    college days, 45-47;
+    letter, 48;
+    teaching, 49, 50;
+    studying theology, and preaching, 51-54;
+    ordination, marriage, 55;
+    benevolent efforts, wife's death, 56;
+    withdrawal from his church, 57-61;
+    first trip to Europe, 62-65;
+    preaching in America, 66, 67;
+    remembered conversations, 68, 69;
+    residence in the Old Manse, 69-72;
+    lecturing, essays in The North American, 73;
+    poems, 74;
+    portraying himself, 75;
+    comparison with Milton, 76, 77;
+    letters to Clarke, 78-80, 128-131;
+    interest in Sartor Resartus, 81;
+    first letter to Carlyle, 82;
+    second marriage and Concord home, 83;
+    Second Centennial, 84-87;
+    Boston lectures, Concord Fight; 87;
+    East Lexington church, War, 88;
+    death of brothers, 89, 90;
+    Nature published, 91;
+    parallel with Wordsworth, 92;
+    free utterance, 93;
+    Beauty, poems,
+    94;
+    Language, 95-97;
+    Discipline, 97, 98;
+    Idealism, 98, 99;
+    Illusions, 99, 100;
+    Spirit and Matter, 100;
+    Paradise regained, 101;
+    the Bible spirit, 102;
+    Revelations, 103;
+    Bowen's criticism, 104;
+    Evolution, 105, 106;
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 108;
+    fable of the One Man, 109;
+    man thinking, 110;
+    Books, 111;
+    unconscious cerebration, 112;
+    a scholar's duties, 113;
+    specialists, 114;
+    a declaration of intellectual independence, 115;
+    address at the Theological School, 116, 117;
+    effect on Unitarians, 118;
+    sentiment of duty, 119;
+    Intuition, 120;
+    Reason, 121;
+    the Traditional Jesus, 122;
+    Sabbath and Preaching, 123;
+    correspondence with Ware, 124-127;
+    ensuing controversy, 127;
+    Ten Lectures, 128;
+    Dartmouth Address, 131-136;
+    Waterville Address, 136-140;
+    reforms, 141-145;
+    new views, 146;
+    Past and Present, 147;
+    on Everett, 148;
+    assembly at Dr. Warren's, 149;
+    Boston _doctrinaires_, 150;
+    unwise followers, 151-156;
+    Conservatives, 156, 157;
+    two Transcendental products, 157-166;
+    first volume of Essays, 166;
+    History, 167, 168;
+    Self-reliance, 168, 169;
+    Compensation, 169;
+    other essays, 170;
+    Friendship, 170, 171;
+    Heroism, 172;
+    Over-Soul, 172-175;
+    house and income, 176;
+    son's death, 177, 178;
+    American and Oriental qualities, 179;
+    English virtues, 180;
+    Emancipation addresses in 1844, 181;
+    second series of Essays, 181-188;
+    Reformers, 188-191;
+    Carlyle's business, Poems published, 192;
+    a second trip to Europe, 193-196;
+    Representative Men, 196-209;
+    lectures again, 210;
+    Abolitionism, 211, 212;
+    Woman's Rights, 212, 213;
+    a New England Roman, 213, 214;
+    English Traits, 214-221;
+    a new magazine, 221;
+    clubs, 222, 223;
+    more poetry, 224;
+    Burns Festival, 224;
+    letter about various literary matters, 225-227;
+    Parker's death, Lincoln's Proclamation, 228;
+    Conduct of Life, 228-239;
+    Boston Hymn, 240;
+    "So nigh is grandeur to our dust," 241;
+    Atlantic contributions, 242;
+    Lincoln obsequies, 243;
+    Free Religion, 243, 244;
+    second Phi Beta Kappa oration, 244-246;
+    poem read to his son, 246-248;
+    Harvard Lectures, 249-255;
+    agriculture and science, 255, 256;
+    predictions, 257;
+    Books, 258;
+    Conversation, 258;
+    elements of Courage, 259;
+    Success, 260, 261;
+    on old men, 261, 262;
+    California trip, 263-268;
+    eating, 269;
+    smoking, 270;
+    conflagration, loss of memory, Froude banquet, third trip abroad, 272;
+    friendly gifts, 272-279;
+    editing Parnassus, 280-282;
+    failing powers, 283;
+    Hope everywhere, 284;
+    negations, 285;
+    Eloquence, Pessimism, 286;
+    Comedy, Plagiarism, 287;
+    lessons repeated, 288;
+    Sources of Inspiration, 289, 290;
+    Future Life, 290-292;
+    dissolving creed, 292;
+    Concord Bridge, 292, 293;
+    decline of faculties, Old South lecture, 294;
+    papers, 294, 295;
+    quiet pen, 295;
+    posthumous works, 295 _et seq.;_
+    the pedagogue, 297;
+    University of Virginia, 299;
+    indebtedness to Plutarch, 299-302;
+    slavery questions, 303-308;
+    Woman Question, 308;
+    patriotism, 308, 309;
+    nothing but a poet, 311;
+    antique words, 313;
+    self-revelation, 313, 314;
+    a great poet? 314-316;
+    humility, 317-319;
+    poetic favorites, 320, 321;
+    comparison with contemporaries, 321;
+    citizen of the universe, 322;
+    fascination of symbolism, 323;
+    realism, science, imaginative coloring, 324;
+    dangers of realistic poetry, 325;
+    range of subjects, 326;
+    bad rhymes, 327;
+    a trick of verse, 328;
+    one faultless poem, 332;
+    spell-bound readers, 333;
+    workshop, 334;
+    octosyllabic verse, atmosphere, 335, 336;
+    comparison with Wordsworth, 337;
+    and others, 338;
+    dissolving sentences, 339;
+    incompleteness, 339, 340;
+    personality, 341, 342;
+    last visits received, 343-345;
+    the red rose, 345;
+    forgetfulness, 346;
+    literary work of last years, 346, 347;
+    letters unanswered, 347;
+    hearing and sight, subjects that interested him, 348;
+    later hours, death, 349;
+    last rites, 350-356;
+    portrayal, 357-419;
+    atmosphere, 357;
+    books, distilled alcohol, 358;
+    physique, 359;
+    demeanor, 360;
+    hair and eyes, insensibility to music, 361;
+    daily habits, 362;
+    bodily infirmities, 362, 363;
+    voice, 363;
+    quiet laughter, want of manual dexterity, 364;
+    spade anecdote, memory,
+    ignorance of exact science, 305;
+    intuition and natural sagacity united, fastidiousness, 366;
+    impatience with small-minded worshippers, Frothingham's Biography, 367;
+    intimates, familiarity not invited, 368;
+    among fellow-townsmen, errand to earth, inherited traditions, 369;
+    sealed orders, 370, 371;
+    conscientious work, sacrifices for truth, essays instead of sermons,
+      372;
+    congregation at large, charm, optimism, 373;
+    financially straitened, 374;
+    lecture room limitations, 374, 375;
+    a Shakespeare parallel, 375, 376;
+    platform fascination, 376;
+    constructive power, 376, 377;
+    English experiences, lecture-peddling, 377;
+    a stove relinquished, utterance, an hour's weight, 378;
+    trumpet-sound, sweet seriousness, diamond drops, effect on Governor
+      Andrew, 379;
+    learning at second hand, 380;
+    the study of Goethe, 380;
+    a great quoter, no pedantry, 381;
+    list of authors referred to, 381, 382;
+    special indebtedness, 382;
+    penetration, borrowing, 383;
+    method of writing and its results, aided by others, 384;
+    sayings that seem family property, 385;
+    passages compared, 385-387;
+    the tributary streams, 388;
+    accuracy as to facts, 388;
+    personalities traceable in him, 389;
+    place as a thinker, 390;
+    Platonic anecdote, 391;
+    preėxistence, 391, 392;
+    mind-moulds, 393;
+    relying on instinct, 394;
+    dangers of intuition, 395;
+    mysticism, 396;
+    Oriental side, 397;
+    transcendental mood, 398;
+    personal identity confused, 399;
+    a distorting mirror, 400;
+    distrust of science, 401-403;
+    style illustrated, 403, 404;
+    favorite words, 405;
+    royal imagery, 406;
+    comments on America, 406, 407;
+    common property of mankind, 407;
+    public spirit, solitary workshop, martyrdom from visitors, 408;
+    white shield invulnerable, 409;
+    religious attitude, 409-411;
+    spiritual influx, creed, 412;
+    clerical relations, 413;
+    Dr. Hague's criticism, 413, 414;
+    ameliorating religious influence, 414;
+    freedom, 415;
+    enduring verse and thought, 416, 417;
+    comparison with Jesus, 417;
+    sincere manhood, 418;
+    transparency, 419.
+
+  Emerson's Books:--
+    Conduct of Life, 229, 237.
+    English Traits:
+      the first European trip, 62;
+      published, 214;
+      analysis, 214-220;
+      penetration, 383;
+      Teutonic fire, 386.
+    Essays:
+      Dickens's allusion, 156;
+      collected, 166.
+    Essays, second series, 183.
+    Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 128, 295, 296, 347.
+    Letters and Social Aims, 210, 283, 284, 296.
+    May-day and Other Pieces, 161, 192, 224, 242, 257, 310, 318, 346.
+    Memoir of Margaret Fuller, 209.
+    Miscellanies, 302, 303.
+    Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 179.
+    Nature:
+      resemblance of extracts from Mary Moody Emerson, 17;
+      where written, 70;
+      the Many in One, 73;
+      first published, 91, 92, 373;
+      analysis, 93-107;
+      obscure, 108;
+      Beauty, 237.
+    Parnassus:
+      collected, 280;
+      Preface, 314;
+      allusion, 321.
+    Poems, 293, 310, 318, 339.
+    Representative Men, 196-209.
+    Selected Poems, 311, 347.
+    Society and Solitude, 250.
+
+  Emerson's Essays, Lectures, Sermons, Speeches, etc.:--
+    In general:
+      essays, 73, 88, 91, 92, 310;
+      income from lectures, 176, 191, 192;
+      lectures in England, 194-196;
+      long series, 372;
+      lecture-room, 374;
+      plays and lectures, 375;
+      double duty, 376, 377;
+      charm, 379.
+      (See _Emerson's Life, Lyceum_, etc.)
+    American Civilization, 307.
+    American Scholar, The, 107-115, 133, 188.
+    Anglo-Saxon Race, The, 210.
+    Anti-Slavery Address, New York, 210-212.
+    Anti-Slavery Lecture, Boston, 210, 211.
+    Aristocracy, 296.
+    Art, 166, 175, 253, 254.
+    Beauty, 235-237.
+    Behavior, 234.
+    Books, 257, 380.
+    Brown, John, 302, 305, 306.
+    Burke, Edmund, 73.
+    Burns, Robert, 224, 225, 307.
+    Carlyle, Thomas, 294, 302, 317.
+    Channing's Poem, preface, 262, 263, 403.
+    Character, 183, 295, 297.
+    Chardon Street and Bible Convention, 159, 302.
+    Circles, 166, 174, 175.
+    Civilization, 250-253.
+    Clubs, 258.
+    Comedy. 128.
+    Comic, The, 286, 287.
+    Commodity, 94.
+    Compensation, 166, 169.
+    Concord Fight, the anniversary speech, 292, 293.
+    Concord, Second Centennial Discourse, 84-86.
+    Conservative, The, 156, 157, 159.
+    Considerations by the Way, 235.
+    Courage, 259.
+    Culture, 232, 233.
+    Demonology, 128, 296.
+    Discipline, 97, 98.
+    Divinity School Address, 116-127, 131.
+    Doctrine of the Soul, 127.
+    Domestic Life, 254, 255.
+    Duty, 128.
+    Editorial Address, Mass. Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307.
+    Education, 296, 297.
+    Eloquence, 254;
+      second essay, 285, 286.
+    Emancipation in the British West Indies, 181, 303.
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 228, 307.
+    Emerson, Mary Moody, 295, 296, 302.
+    English Literature, 87.
+    Experience, 182.
+    Farming, 255, 256.
+    Fate, 228-330.
+    Fortune of the Republic, 294, 302, 307-309.
+    Fox, George, 73.
+    France, 196.
+    Free Religious Association, 243, 302, 307.
+    Friendship, 166, 170.
+    Froude, James Anthony, after-dinner speech, 271.
+    Fugitive Slave Law, 303, 304.
+    Genius, 127.
+    Gifts, 184, 185.
+    Goethe, or the Writer, 208, 209.
+    Greatness, 288, 346.
+    Harvard Commemoration, 307.
+    Heroism, 166, 172.
+    Historical Discourse, at Concord, 303.
+    Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England, 147, 165, 296, 302.
+    History, 166, 167.
+    Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214, 295, 302.
+    Home, 127.
+    Hope, 284, 285.
+    Howard University, speech, 263.
+    Human Culture, 87.
+    Idealism, 98-100.
+    Illusions, 235, 239.
+    Immortality, 266, 290-292, 354.
+    Inspiration, 289.
+    Intellect, 166, 175.
+    Kansas Affairs, 305.
+    Kossuth, 307.
+    Language, 95-97.
+    Lincoln, Abraham, funeral remarks, 242, 243, 307.
+    Literary Ethics, 131-136.
+    Lord's Supper, 57-60, 303.
+    Love, 127,128,166,170. (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+    Luther, 73.
+    Manners, 183, 234.
+    Man of Letters, The, 296, 298.
+    Man the Reformer, 142, 143.
+    Method of Nature, The, 136-141.
+    Michael Angelo, 73, 75.
+    Milton, 73, 75.
+    Montaigne, or the Skeptic, 202-204.
+    Napoleon, or the Man of the World, 206-209.
+    Natural History of the Intellect, 249, 268, 347.
+    Nature (the essay), 185, 186, 398.
+    New England Reformers, 188-191, 385.
+    Nominalism and Realism, 188.
+    Old Age, 261, 262.
+    Over-Soul, The, 166, 172-175, 398, 411.
+    Parker, Theodore, 228, 306.
+    Perpetual Forces, 297.
+    Persian Poetry, 224.
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 347.
+    Philosophy of History, 87.
+    Plato, 198-200;
+      New Readings, 200.
+    Plutarch, 295, 299-302.
+    Plutarch's Morals, introduction, 262.
+    Poet, The, 181, 182.
+    Poetry, 210.
+    Poetry and Imagination, 283;
+      subdivisions: Bards and Trouveurs,
+      Creation, Form, Imagination,
+      Melody, Morals, Rhythm, Poetry,
+      Transcendency, Veracity, 283, 284;
+      quoted, 325.
+    Politics, 186, 187.
+    Power, 230, 231.
+    Preacher, The, 294, 298.
+    Professions of Divinity, Law, and Medicine, 41.
+    Progress of Culture, The, 244, 288.
+    Prospects, 101-103.
+    Protest, The, 127.
+    Providence Sermon, 130.
+    Prudence, 166, 171, 172.
+    Quotation and Originality, 287, 288.
+    Relation of Man to the Globe, 73.
+    Resources, 286.
+    Right Hand of Fellowship, The, at Concord, 56.
+    Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 295, 302.
+    Scholar, The, 296, 299.
+    School, The, 127.
+    Scott, speech, 302, 307.
+    Self-Reliance, 166, 168, 411.
+    Shakespeare, or the Poet, 204-206.
+    Social Aims, 285.
+    Soldiers' Monument, at Concord, 303.
+    Sovereignty of Ethics, The, 295, 297, 298.
+    Spirit, 100, 101.
+    Spiritual Laws, 166, 168.
+    Success, 260, 261.
+    Sumner Assault, 304.
+    Superlatives, 295, 297.
+    Swedenborg, or the Mystic, 201, 202, 206.
+    Thoreau, Henry D., 228, 295, 302.
+    Times, The, 142-145.
+    Tragedy, 127.
+    Transcendentalist, The, 145-155, 159.
+    Universality of the Moral Sentiment, 66.
+    University of Virginia, address, 347.
+    War, 88, 303.
+    Water, 73.
+    Wealth, 231, 232.
+    What is Beauty? 74, 94, 95.
+    Woman, 307, 308.
+    Woman's Rights, 212, 213.
+    Work and Days, 256, 312, 406, 407.
+    Worship, 235.
+    Young American, The, 166, 180, 181.
+
+  Emerson's Poems:--
+    In general: inspiration from nature, 22, 96;
+      poetic rank in college, 45, 46;
+      prose-poetry and philosophy, 91, 93;
+      annual _afflatus_, in America, 136, 137;
+      first volume, 192;
+      five immortal poets, 202;
+      ideas repeated, 239;
+      true position, 311 _et seq.; in carmine veritas_, 313;
+      litanies, 314;
+      arithmetic, 321, 322;
+      fascination, 323;
+      celestial imagery, 324;
+      tin pans, 325;
+      realism, 326;
+      metrical difficulties, 327, 335;
+      blemishes, 328;
+      careless rhymes, 329;
+      delicate descriptions, 331;
+      pathos, 332;
+      fascination, 333;
+      unfinished, 334, 339, 340;
+      atmosphere, 335;
+      subjectivity, 336;
+      sympathetic illusion, 337;
+      resemblances, 337, 338;
+      rhythms, 340;
+      own order, 341, 342;
+      always a poet, 346.
+      (See _Emerson's Life, Milton, Poets_, etc.)
+    Adirondacs, The, 242, 309, 327.
+    Blight, 402.
+    Boston, 346, 407, 408.
+    Boston Hymn, 211, 221, 241, 242.
+    Brahma, 221, 242, 396, 397.
+    Celestial Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+    Class Day Poem, 45-47.
+    Concord Hymn, 87, 332.
+    Daemonic Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+    Days, 221, 242, 257, 312;
+      _pleachéd_, 313.
+    Destiny, 332.
+    Each and All, 73, 74, 94, 331.
+    Earth-Song, 327.
+    Elements, 242.
+    Fate, 159, 387.
+    Flute, The, 399.
+    Good-by, Proud World, 129, 130, 338.
+    Hamatreya, 327.
+    Harp, The, 320, 321, 329, 330. (See _Aeolian Harp_.)
+    Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214.
+    Humble Bee, 46, 74, 75, 128, 272, 326, 331, 338.
+    Initial Love, 170, 387. (Three Loves.)
+    In Memoriam, 19, 89.
+    Latin Translations, 43.
+    May Day, 242;
+      changes, 311, 333.
+    Merlin, 318, 319. (Merlin's Song.)
+    Mithridates, 331.
+    Monadnoc, 322, 331;
+      alterations, 366.
+    My Garden, 242.
+    Nature and Life, 242.
+    Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces, 242.
+    Ode inscribed to W.H. Channing, 211, 212.
+    Poet, The, 317-320, 333.
+    Preface to Nature, 105.
+    Problem, The, 159, 161, 253, 284, 326, 337, 380.
+    Quatrains, 223, 242.
+    Rhodora, The, 74, 94, 95, 129.
+    Romany Girl, The, 221.
+    Saadi, 221, 242.
+    Sea-Shore, 333, 339.
+    Snow-Storm, 331, 338, 339.
+    Solution, 320.
+    Song for Knights of Square Table, 42.
+    Sphinx, The, 113, 159, 243, 330, 398.
+    Terminus, 221, 242;
+      read to his son, 246-248, 363.
+    Test, The, 201, 202, 320.
+    Threnody, 178, 333.
+    Titmouse, The, 221, 326.
+    Translations, 242, 399.
+    Uriel, 326, 331, 398.
+    Voluntaries, 241.
+    Waldeinsamkeit, 221.
+    Walk, The, 402.
+    Woodnotes, 46, 159, 331, 338.
+    World-Soul, The, 331.
+
+  Emersoniana, 358.
+
+  Emerson, Thomas, of Ipswich, 38.
+
+  Emerson, Waldo, child of Ralph Waldo:
+    death, 177, 178;
+    anecdote, 265.
+
+  Emerson, William, grandfather of Ralph Waldo:
+    minister of Concord, 8-10, 14;
+    building the Manse, 70;
+    patriotism, 72.
+
+  Emerson, William, father of Ralph Waldo:
+    minister, in Harvard and Boston, 10-14;
+    editorship, 26, 32, 33;
+    the parsonage, 37, 42;
+    death, 43.
+
+  Emerson, William, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37, 39, 49, 53.
+
+  England:
+    first visit, 62-65;
+    Lake Windermere, 70;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    the virtues of the people, 179, 180;
+    a second visit, 192 _et seq.;_
+    notabilities 195;
+    the lectures, 196;
+    Stonehenge, 215;
+    the aristocracy, 215;
+    matters wrong, 260;
+    Anglo-Saxon race, trade and liberty, 304;
+    lustier life, 335;
+    language, 352;
+    lecturing, a key, 377;
+    smouldering fire, 385. (See _America, Europe_, etc.)
+
+  Enthusiasm:
+    need of, 143;
+    weakness, 154.
+
+  Epicurus, agreement with, 301.
+
+  Episcopacy:
+    in Boston, 28, 34, 52;
+    church in Newton, 68;
+    at Hanover, 132;
+    quotation from liturgy, 354;
+    burial service, 356. (See _Calvinism, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Esquimau, allusion, 167.
+
+  Establishment, party of the, 147. (See _Puritanism, Religion,
+    Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Eternal, relations to the, 297. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Europe:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62-65;
+    return, 72;
+    the Muses, 114;
+    debt to the East, 120;
+    famous gentlemen, 184;
+    second visit, 193-196;
+    weary of Napoleon, 207;
+    return, 210;
+    conflict possible, 218;
+    third visit, 271-279;
+    cast-out passion for, 308. (See _America, England, France_, etc.)
+
+  Everett, Edward:
+    on Tudor, 28;
+    literary rank, 33;
+    preaching, 52;
+    influence, 148.
+
+  Evolution, taught in "Nature," 105, 106.
+
+  Eyeball, transparent, 398.
+
+
+  Faith:
+    lacking in America, 143,
+    building cathedrals, 253. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Fine, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Fire, illustration, 386. (See _England, France_, etc.)
+
+  Forbes, John M., connected with the Emerson family, 263-265;
+    his letter, 263.
+
+  Foster, John, minister of Brighton, 15.
+
+  Fourth-of-July, orations, 386. (See _America_, etc.)
+
+  Fox, George, essay on, 73.
+
+  France:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    Revolution, 80;
+    tired of Napoleon, 207, 208;
+    realism, 326;
+    wrath, 385, 386. (See _Carlyle, England, Europe_, etc.)
+
+  Francis, Convers, at a party, 149.
+
+  Franklin, Benjamin:
+    birthplace, 37;
+    allusion, 184;
+    characteristics, 189;
+    Poor Richard, 231;
+    quoted, 236;
+    maxims, 261;
+    fondness for Plutarch, 382;
+    bequest, 407.
+
+  Fraunhofer, Joseph, optician, 230, 324.
+
+  Frazer's Magazine:
+    "The Mud," 79;
+    Sartor Resartus, 81. (See _Carlyle_.)
+
+  Freeman, James, minister of King's Chapel, 11, 12, 52.
+  Free Trade, Athenaeum banquet, 220.
+
+  Friendship, C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 23, 77.
+
+  Frothingham, Nathaniel L., account of Emerson's mother, 13.
+
+  Frothingham, Octavius Brooks: Life of Ripley, 165;
+    an unpublished manuscript, 365-367.
+
+  Fuller, Margaret:
+    borrowed sermon, 130;
+    at a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159, 160, 162;
+    Memoir, 209;
+    causing laughter, 364;
+    mosaic Biography, 368.
+
+  Furness, William Henry:
+    on the Emerson family, 14;
+    Emerson's funeral, 350, 353.
+
+  Future, party of the, 147.
+
+
+  Galton, Francis, composite portraits, 232.
+
+  Gardiner, John Sylvester John:
+    allusion, 26;
+    leadership in Boston, 28;
+    Anthology Society, 32.
+    (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+  Gardner, John Lowell, recollections of Emerson's boyhood, 38-42.
+
+  Gardner, S.P., garden, 38.
+
+  Genealogy, survival of the fittest, 3.
+    (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Gentleman's Magazine, 30.
+
+  Gentleman, the, 183.
+
+  Geography, illustration, 391.
+
+  German:
+    study of, 48, 49, 78, 380;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    scholarship, 148;
+    oracles, 206;
+    writers unread, 208;
+    philosophers, 380;
+    professors, 391.
+
+  Germany, a visit, 225, 226.
+    (See _Europe, France, Goethe_, etc.)
+
+  Gifts, 185.
+
+  Gilfillan, George:
+    on Emerson's preaching, 65;
+    Emerson's physique, 360.
+
+  Gilman, Arthur, on the Concord home, 83.
+
+  Glasgow, the rectorship, 280.
+
+  God:
+    the universal spirit, 68, 69, 94;
+    face to face, 92, 93;
+    teaching the human mind, 98, 99;
+    aliens from, 101;
+    in us, 139-141;
+    his thought, 146;
+    belief, 170;
+    seen by man, 174;
+    divine offer, 176;
+    writing by grace, 182;
+    presence, 243;
+    tribute to Great First Cause, 267;
+    perplexity about, 410;
+    ever-blessed One, 411;
+    mirrored, 412.
+    (See _Christianity, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Goethe:
+    called _Mr_., 31;
+    dead, 63;
+    Clarke's essay, 79;
+    generalizations, 148;
+    influence, 150;
+    on Spinoza, 174, 175;
+    rank as a poet, 202, 320;
+    lovers, 226;
+    rare union, 324;
+    his books read, 380, 381;
+    times quoted, 382.
+    (See _German_, etc.)
+
+  Goldsmith, Oliver, his Vicar of Wakefield, 9, 10, 15.
+
+  Good, the study of, 301.
+
+  Goodwin, H.B., Concord minister, 56.
+
+  Gould, Master of Latin School, 39.
+
+  Gould, Thomas R., sculptor, 68.
+
+  Gourdin, John Gaillard Keith and Robert, in college, 47.
+
+  Government, abolition of, 141.
+
+  Grandmother's Review, 30.
+
+  Gray, Thomas, Elegy often quoted, 316, 317, 416.
+
+  Greece:
+    poetic teaching, 121;
+    allusion, 108.
+
+  Greek:
+    Emerson's love for, 43, 44;
+    in Harvard, 49;
+    poets, 253;
+    moralist, 299;
+    Bryant's translation, 378;
+    philosophers, 391.
+    (See _Homer_, etc.)
+
+  Greenough, Horatio, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+  Grimm, Hermann, 226.
+
+  Guelfs and Ghibellines, illustration, 47.
+
+
+  Hafiz, times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Persia_.)
+
+  Hague, William, essay, 413.
+
+  Haller, Albert von, rare union, 324.
+
+  Harvard, Mass., William Emerson's settlement, 10, 11.
+
+  Harvard University:
+    the Bulkeley gift, 6;
+    William Emerson's graduation, 10;
+    list of graduates, 12;
+    Emerson's brothers, 19, 21;
+    Register, 21, 24, 385, 401;
+    Hillard, 24, 25;
+    Kirkland's presidency, 26, 27;
+    Gardner, 39-41;
+    Emerson's connection, 44-49;
+    the Boylston prizes, 46;
+    Southern students, 47;
+    graduates at Andover, 48;
+    Divinity School, 51, 53;
+    a New England centre, 52;
+    Bowen's professorship, 103;
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 115, 133, 188, 244;
+    Divinity School address, 116-132;
+    degree conferred, 246;
+    lectures, 249;
+    library, 257;
+    last Divinity address, 294;
+    Commemoration, 307;
+    singing class, 361;
+    graduates, 411.
+    (See _Cambridge_.)
+
+  Haskins, David Green, at Emerson's funeral, 356.
+
+  Haskins, Ruth (Emerson's mother), 10, 13, 14.
+  Haughty, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Hawthorne, Nathaniel:
+    his Mosses, 70;
+    "dream-peopled solitude," 86;
+    at the club, 223;
+    view of English life, 335;
+    grave, 356;
+    biography, 368.
+
+  Hazlitt, William:
+    British Poets, 21.
+
+  Health, inspiration, 289.
+
+  Hebrew Language, study, 48. (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Hedge, Frederic Henry:
+    at a party, 149;
+    quoted, 383.
+
+  Henry VII., tombs, 415.
+
+  Herbert, George:
+    Poem on Man, 102;
+    parallel, 170;
+    poetry, 281;
+    a line quoted, 345.
+
+  Herder, Johann Gottfried, allusion, 16.
+
+  Heredity:
+    Emerson's belief, 1, 2;
+    in Emerson family, 4, 19;
+    Whipple on, 389;
+    Jonson, 393.
+
+  Herrick, Robert, poetry, 281.
+
+  Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. (See _Emerson's Books_,--Nature.)
+
+  Hilali, The Flute, 399.
+
+  Hillard, George Stillman:
+    in college, 24, 25;
+    his literary place, 33;
+    aid, 276.
+
+  Hindoo Scriptures, 199, 200. (See _Bible, India_, etc.)
+
+  History, how it should be written, 168.
+
+  Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood:
+    reference to, 223;
+    on the Burns speech, 225;
+    kindness, 273, 274, 276-279;
+    at Emerson's death-bed, 349;
+    funeral address, 351-353.
+
+  Hoar, Samuel:
+    statesman, 72;
+    tribute, 213, 214.
+
+  Holland, description of the Dutch, 217.
+
+  Holley, Horace, prayer, 267.
+
+  Holmes, John, a pupil of Emerson, 50.
+
+  Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
+    memories of Dr. Ripley, 15;
+    of C.C. Emerson, 20, 21;
+    familiarity with Cambridge and its college, 45;
+    erroneous quotation from, 251, 252;
+    jest erroneously attributed to, 400, 401.
+
+  Holy Ghost, "a new born bard of the," 123. (See _Christ, God,
+    Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Homer:
+    poetic rank, 202, 320;
+    plagiarism, 205;
+    Iliad, 253;
+    allusion, 315;
+    tin pans, 325;
+    times quoted, 382. (See _Greek_, etc.)
+
+  Homer, Jonathan, minister of Newton, 15.
+
+  Hooper, Mrs. Ellen, The Dial, 159, 160.
+
+  Hope:
+    lacking in America, 143;
+    in every essay, 284.
+
+  Horace:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Ars Poetica, 316.
+
+  Horses, Flora Temple's time, 388.
+
+  Howard University, speech, 263.
+
+  Howe, Samuel Gridley, the philanthropist, 223.
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, meeting Emerson, 195.
+
+  Hunt, William, the painter, 223.
+
+
+  Idealism, 98-100, 146, 150.
+
+  Idealists:
+    Ark full, 191;
+    Platonic sense, 391.
+
+  Imagination:
+    the faculty, 141;
+    defined, 237, 238;
+    essay, 283;
+    coloring life, 324.
+
+  Imbecility, 231.
+
+  Immortality, 262. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Incompleteness, in poetry, 339.
+
+  India:
+    poetic models, 338;
+    idea of preėxistence, 391;
+    Brahmanism, 397. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma.)
+
+  Indians:
+    in history of Concord, 71;
+    Algonquins, 72.
+
+  Inebriation, subject in Monthly Anthology, 30.
+
+  Insects, defended, 190.
+
+  Inspiration:
+    of Nature, 22, 96, 141;
+    urged, 146.
+
+  Instinct, from God or Devil, 393.
+
+  Intellect, confidence in, 134.
+
+  Intuition, 394.
+
+  Ipswich, Mass., 3, 4, 8.
+
+  Ireland, Alexander:
+    glimpses of Emerson, 44, 64, 65:
+    reception, 193,194;
+    on Carlyle, 196;
+    letter from Miss Peabody, 317;
+    quoting Whitman, 344;
+    quoted, 350.
+
+  Irving, Washington, 33.
+
+  Italy:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+    Naples, 113.
+
+
+  Jackson, Charles, garden, 38.
+
+  Jackson, Dr. Charles Thomas, anaesthesia, 403.
+
+  Jackson, Miss Lydia, reading Carlyle, 81. (See _Mrs. Emerson_.)
+
+  Jahn, Johann, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+  Jameson, Anna, new book, 131.
+
+  Jesus:
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    a divine manifestation, 411;
+    followers, 417;
+    and Emerson, 419. (See _Bible, Christ, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+  Joachim, the violinist, 225, 226.
+
+  Johnson, Samuel, literary style, 29.
+
+  Jonson, Ben:
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    a phrase, 300;
+    _traduction_, 393.
+    (See _Heredity_, etc.)
+
+  Journals, as a method of work, 384.
+
+  Jupiter Scapin, 207.
+
+  Jury Trial, and dinners, 216.
+
+  Justice, the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+
+  Juvenal:
+    allusion, 22;
+    precept from heaven, 252.
+
+
+  Kalamazoo, Mich., allusion, 388.
+
+  Kamschatka, allusion, 167.
+
+  Keats, John:
+    quoted, 92;
+    Ode to a Nightingale, 316;
+    _faint, swoon_, 405.
+
+  King, the, illustration, 74.
+
+  Kirkland, John Thornton:
+    Harvard presidency, 26, 52;
+    memories, 27.
+
+  Koran, allusion, 198.
+    (See _Bible, God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+
+  Labor:
+    reform, 141;
+    dignity, 142.
+
+  Lacenaire, evil instinct, 392.
+
+  Laertius, Diogenes, 390, 391.
+
+  La Harpe, Jean Francois, on Plutarch, 301.
+
+  Lamarck, theories, 166.
+
+  Lamb, Charles, Carlyle's criticism, 196.
+
+  Landor, Walter Savage, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+  Landscape, never painted, 339, 240.
+    (See _Pictures, etc_.)
+
+  Language:
+    its symbolism, 95-97;
+    an original, 394.
+
+  Latin:
+    Peter Bulkeley's scholarship, 7;
+    translation, 24, 25;
+    Emerson's Translations, 43, 44.
+
+  Laud, Archbishop, 6.
+
+  Law, William, mysticism, 396.
+
+  Lawrence, Mass., allusion, 44.
+
+  Lecturing, given up, 295.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays, Lectures_, etc.)
+
+  Leibnitz, 386.
+
+  Leroux, Pierre, preėxistance, 391.
+
+  Letters, inspiration, 289.
+
+  Lincoln, Abraham, character, 307.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Linnaeus, illustration, 323, 324.
+
+  Litanies, in Emerson, 314.
+    (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+  Literature:
+    aptitude for, 2, 3;
+    activity in 1820, 147.
+
+  Little Classics, edition, 347.
+
+  Liverpool, Eng., a visit, 193, 194.
+    (See _England, Europe, Scotland_, etc.)
+
+  Locke, John, allusion, 16, 111.
+
+  London, England.:
+    Tower Stairs, 63;
+    readers, 194;
+    sights, 221;
+    travellers, 308;
+    wrath, 385.
+    (See _England_, etc.)
+
+  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
+    allusions, 31, 33;
+    Saturday Club, 222, 223;
+    burial, 346.
+
+  Lord, Nathan, President of Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+  Lord's Supper, Emerson's doubts, 57-61.
+
+  Lothrop & Co., publishers, 83.
+
+  Louisville, Ky., Dr. Clarke's residence, 78-80.
+
+  Lounsbury, Professor, Chaucer letter, 205.
+
+  Love:
+    in America, 143;
+    the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+
+  Lowell, Charles:
+    minister of the West Church, 11, 12, 52;
+    on Kirkland, 27.
+
+  Lowell, F.C., generosity, 276.
+
+  Lowell, James Russell:
+    an allusion, 33;
+    on The American Scholar, 107;
+    editorship, 221;
+    club, 223;
+    on the Burns speech, 225;
+    on Emerson's bearing, 360, 361;
+    Hawthorne biography, 368;
+    on lectures, 379.
+
+  Lowell, Mass., factories, 44.
+
+  Luther, Martin:
+    lecture, 73;
+    his conservatism, 298;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Lyceum, the:
+    a pulpit, 88;
+    New England, 192;
+    a sacrifice, 378.
+    (See _Lecturing, Emerson's Lectures_, etc.)
+
+  Lycurgus, 306. (See _Greece_.)
+
+
+  Mackintosh, Sir James, an allusion, 16.
+
+  Macmillan's Magazine, 414.
+
+  Malden, Mass.:
+    Joseph Emerson's ministry, 8;
+    diary, 17.
+
+  Man:
+    a fable about, 109, 110;
+    faith in, 122;
+    apostrophe, 140.
+
+  Manchester, Eng.:
+    visit, 194, 195;
+    banquet, 220.
+    (See _England_, etc.)
+
+  Marlowe, Christopher, expressions, 404.
+
+  Marvell, Andrew:
+    reading by C.C. Emerson, 21;
+    on the Dutch, 217;
+    verse, 338.
+
+  Mary, Queen, her martyrs, 418.
+
+  Massachusetts Historical Society:
+    tribute to C.C. Emerson, 21;
+    quality of its literature, 84;
+    on Carlyle, 294.
+
+  Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307, 411.
+  Materialism, 146, 391.
+    (See _Religion_.)
+
+  Mather, Cotton:
+    his Magnalia, 5-7;
+    on Concord discord, 57;
+    on New England Melancholy, 216;
+    a borrower, 381.
+
+  Mathew, Father, disciples, 368.
+
+  Mayhew, Jonathan, Boston minister, 51.
+
+  Melioration, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Mendon, Mass., Joseph Emerson's ministry, 4.
+
+  Mephistopheles, Goethe's creation, 208.
+
+  Merrimac River, 71.
+
+  Metaphysics, indifference to, 249.
+
+  Methodism, in Boston, 56.
+    (See _Father Taylor_.)
+
+  Michael Angelo:
+    allusions, 73, 75;
+    on external beauty, 99;
+    course, 260;
+    filled with God, 284;
+    on immortality, 290;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Middlesex Agricultural Association, 235.
+    (See _Agriculture, Emerson's Essays._)
+
+  Middlesex Association, Emerson admitted, 53.
+
+  Miller's Retrospect, 34.
+
+  Milton, John:
+    influence in New England, 16;
+    quotation, 24;
+    essay, 73, 75;
+    compared with Emerson, 76, 77;
+    Lycidas, 178;
+    supposed speech, 220;
+    diet, 270, 271;
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    Arnold's citation, Logic, Rhetoric, 315;
+    popularity, 316;
+    quoted, 324;
+    tin pans, 325;
+    inventor of harmonies, 328;
+    Lycidas, 333;
+    Comus, 338;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    precursor, quotation, 415.
+
+  Miracles:
+    false impression, 121, 122;
+    and idealism, 146;
+    theories, 191;
+    St. Januarius, 217;
+    objections, 244.
+    (See _Bible, Christ, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Modena, Italy, Emerson's visit, 63.
+
+  Monadnoc, Mount, 70.
+
+  Montaigne:
+    want of religion, 300;
+    great authority, 380;
+    times quoted, 382.
+
+  Montesquieu, on immortality, 291.
+
+  Monthly Anthology:
+    Wm. Emerson's connection, 13, 26;
+    precursor of North American Review, 28, 29;
+    character, 30, 31;
+    Quincy's tribute, 31;
+    Society formed, 32;
+    career, 33;
+    compared with The Dial, 160.
+
+  Moody Family, of York, Me., 8,10.
+
+  Morals, in Plutarch, 301.
+
+  Morison, John Hopkins, on Emerson's preaching, 67.
+
+  Mormons, 264, 268.
+
+  Mother-wit, a favorite expression, 404, 405.
+
+  Motley, John Lothrop, 33, 223.
+
+  Mount Auburn, strolls, 40.
+
+  Movement, party of the, 147.
+
+  Munroe & Co., publishers, 81.
+
+  Music:
+    church, 306;
+    inaptitude for, 361;
+    great composers, 401.
+
+  Musketaquid River, 22, 70, 71.
+
+  Mysticism:
+    unintelligible, 390;
+    Emerson's, 396.
+
+
+  Napoleon:
+    allusion, 197;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Napoleon III., 225.
+
+  Nation, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+  Native Bias, 288.
+
+  Nature:
+    in undress, 72;
+    solicitations, 110;
+    not truly studied, 135;
+    great men, 199;
+    tortured, 402.
+    (See _Emerson's Books, Emerson's Essays_, etc.)
+
+  Negations, to be shunned, 285.
+
+  New Bedford, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 52, 67.
+
+  Newbury, Mass., Edward Emerson's deaconship, 8.
+
+  New England:
+    families, 2, 3, 5;
+    Peter Bulkeley's coming, 6;
+    clerical virtues, 9;
+    Church, 14;
+    literary sky, 33;
+    domestic service, 34, 35;
+    two centres, 52;
+    an ideal town, 70, 71;
+    the Delphi, 72;
+    Carlyle invited, 83;
+    anniversaries, 84;
+    town records, 85;
+    Genesis, 102;
+    effect of Nature, 106;
+    boys and girls, 163;
+    Massachusetts, Connecticut River, 172;
+    lyceums, 192;
+    melancholy, 216;
+    New Englanders and Old, 220;
+    meaning of a word, 296, 297;
+    eyes, 325;
+    life, 325, 335;
+    birthright, 364;
+    a thorough New Englander, 406;
+    Puritan, 409;
+    theologians, 410;
+    Jesus wandering in, 419.
+    (See _America, England_, etc.)
+
+  Newspapers:
+    defaming the noble, 145;
+    in Shakespeare's day, 204.
+
+  Newton, Mass.:
+    its minister, 15;
+    Episcopal Church, 68.
+    (See _Rice_.)
+
+  Newton, Sir Isaac, times quoted, 382.
+
+  Newton, Stuart, sketches, 130.
+
+  New World, gospel, 371. (See _America_.)
+
+  New York:
+    Brevoort House, 246;
+    Genealogical Society, 413.
+
+  Niagara, visit, 263.
+
+  Nidiver, George, ballad, 259.
+
+  Nightingale, Florence, 220.
+
+  Nithsdale, Eng., mountains, 78.
+
+  Non-Resistance, 141.
+
+  North American Review:
+    its predecessor, 28, 29, 33;
+    the writers, 34;
+    Emerson's contributions, 73;
+    Ethics, 294, 295;
+    Bryant's article, 328.
+
+  Northampton, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 53.
+
+  Norton, Andrews:
+    literary rank, 34;
+    professorship, 52.
+
+  Norton, Charles Eliot:
+    editor of Correspondence, 82;
+    on Emerson's genius, 373.
+
+
+  Old Manse, The:
+    allusion, 70;
+    fire, 271-279.
+    (See _Concord_.)
+
+  Oliver, Daniel, in Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+  Optimism:
+    in philosophy, 136;
+    "innocent luxuriance," 211;
+    wanted by the young, 373.
+
+  Oriental:
+    genius, 120;
+    spirit in Emerson, 179.
+
+  Orpheus, allusion, 319.
+
+
+  Paine, R.T., JR., quoted, 31.
+
+  Palfrey, John Gorham:
+    literary rank, 34;
+    professorship, 52.
+
+  Pan, the deity, 140.
+
+  Pantheism:
+    in Wordsworth and Nature, 103;
+    dreaded, 141;
+    Emerson's, 410, 411.
+
+  Paris, Trance:
+    as a residence, 78;
+    allusion, 167;
+    salons, 184;
+    visit, 196, 308.
+
+  Parker, Theodore:
+    a right arm of freedom, 127;
+    at a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159, 160;
+    editorship, 193;
+    death, 228;
+    essence of Christianity, 306;
+    biography, 368;
+    on Emerson's position, 411.
+
+  Parkhurst, John, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+  Parr, Samuel, allusion, 28.
+
+  Past, party of the, 147.
+
+  Peabody, Andrew Preston, literary rank, 34.
+
+  Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer:
+    her Aesthetic Papers, 88;
+    letter to Mr. Ireland, 317.
+
+  Peirce, Benjamin, mathematician, 223.
+
+  Pelagianisin, 51.
+    (See _Religion_.)
+
+  Pepys, Samuel, allusion, 12.
+
+  Pericles, 184, 253.
+
+  Persia, poetic models, 338.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems, Saadi_).
+
+  Pessimism, 286.
+    (See _Optimism_).
+
+  Philadelphia, Pa., society, 184.
+
+  Philanthropy, activity in 1820, 147.
+
+  Philolaus, 199.
+
+  Pie, fondness for, 269.
+
+  Pierce, John:
+    the minister of Brookline, 11;
+    "our clerical Pepys," 12.
+
+  Pindar, odes, 253.
+    (See _Greek, Homer_, etc.)
+
+  Plagiarism, 205, 206, 287, 288, 384.
+    (See _Quotations, Mather_, etc.)
+
+  Plato:
+    influence on Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+    over Emerson, 22, 52, 173, 188, 299, 301;
+    youthful essay, 74;
+    Alcott's study, 150;
+    reading, 197;
+    borrowed thought, 205, 206;
+    Platonic idea, 222;
+    a Platonist, 267;
+    saints of Platonism, 298;
+    academy inscription, 365;
+    great authority, 380;
+    times quoted, 382;
+    Symposium and Phaedrus quoted, 387;
+    _tableity_, preėxistence, 391;
+    Diogenes dialogue, 401;
+    a Platonist, 411.
+    (See _Emerson's Books_, and _Essays, Greek_, etc.)
+
+  Plotinus:
+    influence over Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+    ashamed of his body, 99;
+    motto, 105;
+    opinions, 173, 174;
+    studied, 380.
+
+  Plutarch:
+    allusion, 22;
+    his Lives, 50;
+    study, 197;
+    on immortality, 291;
+    influence over Emerson, 299 _et seq_.;
+    his great authority, 380;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    Emerson on, 383;
+    imagery quoted, 385;
+    style, 405.
+
+  Plymouth, Mass.:
+    letters written, 78, 79;
+    marriage, 83.
+
+  Poetry:
+    as an inspirer, 290;
+    Milton on, 315.
+    (See _Shakespeare_, etc.)
+
+  Poets:
+    list in Parnassus, 281;
+    comparative popularity, 316, 317;
+    consulting Emerson, 408.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_).
+
+  Politics:
+    activity in 1820, 147;
+    in Saturday Club, 259.
+
+  Pomeroy, Jesse, allusion, 393.
+
+  Pope, Alexander, familiar lines, 316
+
+  Porphyry:
+    opinions, 173, 174;
+    studied, 380.
+
+  Porto Rico, E.B. Emerson's death, 19.
+
+  Power, practical, 259.
+
+  Prayer:
+    not enough, 138, 139;
+    anecdotes, 267.
+    (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Preaching, a Christian blessing, 123.
+  Preėxistence, 391.
+
+  Presbyterianism, in Scotland, 409.
+
+  Prescott, William, the Judge's mansion, 38.
+
+  Prescott, William Hickling:
+    rank, 33;
+    Conquest of Mexico, 38.
+
+  Prior, Matthew, 30.
+
+  Proclus, influence, 173, 380.
+
+  Prometheus, 209.
+
+  Prospects, for man, 101-103.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Protestantism, its idols, 28.
+    (See _Channing, Religion, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Psammetichus, an original language, 394.
+    (See _Heredity, Language_, etc.)
+
+  Punch, London, 204.
+
+  Puritans, rear guard, 15.
+    (See _Calvinism_, etc.)
+
+  Puritanism:
+    relaxation from, 30;
+    after-clap, 268;
+    in New England, 409.
+    (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+  Putnam's Magazine, on Samuel Hoar, 213, 214.
+
+  Pythagoras:
+    imagery quoted, 385;
+    preėxistence, 391.
+
+
+  Quakers, seeing only broad-brims, 218.
+
+  Quincy, Josiah:
+    History of Boston Athenaeum, 31;
+    tribute to the Anthology, 32, 33;
+    memories of Emerson, 45-47;
+    old age, 261.
+
+  Quotations, 381-383.
+    (See _Plagiarism_, etc.)
+
+
+  Raleigh, Sir Walter, verse, 338.
+
+  Raphael, his Transfiguration, 134.
+    (See _Allston, Painters_, etc.)
+
+  Rats, illustration, 167, 168.
+
+  Reed, Sampson, his Growth of the Mind, 80.
+
+  Reforms, in America, 141-145.
+
+  Reformers, fairness towards, 156, 157, 188-192.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery, John Brown_.)
+
+  Religion:
+    opinions of Wm. Emerson and others, 11-13;
+    nature the symbol of spirit, 95;
+    pleas for independence, 117;
+    universal sentiment, 118-120;
+    public rites, 152;
+    Church of England, 219;
+    of the future, 235;
+    relative positions towards, 409, 410;
+    Trinity, 411;
+    Emerson's belief, 412-415;
+    bigotry modified, 414.
+    (See _Calvinism, Channing, Christ, Emerson's Life, Essays_,
+    and _Poems, Episcopacy, God, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Republicanism, spiritual, 36.
+
+  Revolutionary War:
+    Wm. Emerson's service, 8, 9;
+    subsequent confusion, 25, 32;
+    Concord's part, 71, 72, 292, 293.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 228.
+
+  Rhythm, 328, 329, 340.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_, etc.)
+
+  Rice, Alexander H., anecdote, 68, 69, 346.
+    (See _Newton_.)
+
+  Richard Plantagenet, 197.
+
+  Ripley, Ezra:
+    minister of Concord, 10;
+    Emerson's sketch, 14-16;
+    garden, 42;
+    colleague, 56;
+    residence, 70.
+
+  Ripley, George:
+    a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    Brook Farm, 164-166;
+    on Emerson's limitations, 380.
+
+  Robinson, Edward, literary rank, 34.
+
+  Rochester, N.Y., speech, 168.
+
+  Rome:
+    allusions, 167, 168;
+    growth, 222;
+    amphora, 321.
+    (See _Latin_.)
+
+  Romilly, Samuel, allusion, 220.
+
+  Rose, anecdote, 345.
+    (See _Flowers_.)
+
+  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, his Savoyard Vicar, 51, 52.
+
+  Ruskin, John:
+    on metaphysics, 250;
+    certain chapters, 336;
+    pathetic fallacy, 337;
+    plagiarism, 384.
+
+  Russell, Ben., quoted, 267.
+
+  Russell, Le Baron:
+    on Sartor Resartus, 81, 82;
+    groomsman, 83;
+    aid in rebuilding the Old Manse, 272-279;
+    Concord visit, 345.
+
+
+  Saadi: a borrower, 205;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Persia_.)
+
+  Sabbath: a blessing of Christianity, 123, 298.
+
+  Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, on poetry, 339.
+
+  Saint Paul, times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Saladin, 184.
+
+  Sallust, on Catiline, 207.
+
+  Sanborn, Frank B.:
+    facts about Emerson, 42, 43, 66;
+    Thoreau memoir, 368;
+    old neighbor, 373.
+
+  Sapor, 184.
+
+  Satan, safety from, 306.
+    (See _Mephistopheles, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Saturday Club:
+    establishment, 221-223, 258;
+    last visits, 346, 347;
+    familiarity at, 368.
+
+  Scaliger, quotation, 109, 110.
+
+  Schelling, idealism, 148;
+    influence 173.
+
+  Schiller, on immortality, 290.
+
+  Scholarship:
+    a priesthood, 137;
+    docility of, 289.
+
+  School-teaching, 297.
+    (See _Chelmsford_.)
+
+  Schopenhauer, Arthur:
+    his pessimism, 286;
+    idea of a philosopher, 359.
+
+  Science:
+    growth of, 148;
+    Emerson inaccurate in, 256;
+    attitude toward, 401, 402.
+    (See _C.C. Emerson_.)
+
+  Scipio, 184.
+
+  Scotland:
+    Carlyle's haunts, 79;
+    notabilities, 195, 196;
+    Presbyterian, 409.
+
+  Scott, Sir Walter:
+    allusion, 22;
+    quotations, 23, 77;
+    dead, 63;
+    "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+    as a poet, 281;
+    popularity, 316;
+    poetic rank, 321.
+
+  Self:
+    the highest, 113;
+    respect for, 288, 289.
+
+  Seneca, Montaigne's study, 382.
+
+  Shakespeare:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Hamlet, 90, 94;
+    Benedick and love, 106;
+    disputed line, 128, 129;
+    an idol, 197;
+    poetic rank, 202, 281, 320, 321;
+    plagiarism, 204-206;
+    on studies, 257, 258;
+    supremacy, 328;
+    a comparison, 374;
+    a playwright, 375, 376;
+    punctiliousness of Portia, 378;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    lunatic, lover, poet, 387;
+    Polonius, 389;
+    _mother-wit_, 404;
+    _fine_ Ariel, 405;
+    adamant, 418.
+
+  Shattuck, Lemuel, History of Concord, 382.
+
+  Shaw, Lemuel, boarding-place, 43.
+
+  Shelley, Percy Bysshe:
+    Ode to the West Wind, 316, 399;
+    redundant syllable, 328;
+    Adonais, 333.
+
+  Shenandoah Mountain, 306.
+
+  Shingle, Emerson's jest, 364.
+
+  Ships:
+    illustration of longitude, 154;
+    erroneous quotation, 251, 252;
+    building illustration, 376, 377.
+
+  Sicily:
+    Emerson's visit, 62;
+    Etna, 113.
+
+  Sidney, Sir Philip, Chevy Chace, 379.
+
+  Silsbee, William, aid in publishing Carlyle, 81.
+
+  Simonides, prudence, 410.
+
+  Sisyphus, illustration, 334.
+
+  Sleight-of-hand, illustration, 332.
+
+  Smith, James and Horace, Rejected Addresses, 387, 397.
+
+  Smith, Sydney, on bishops, 219.
+
+  Socrates:
+    allusion, 203;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Solitude, sought, 135.
+
+  Solomon, epigrammatic, 405.
+    (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Solon, 199.
+
+  Sophron, 199.
+
+  South, the:
+    Emerson's preaching tour, 53;
+    Rebellion, 305, 407.
+    (See _America, Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+  Southerners, in college, 47.
+
+  Sparks, Jared, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Spenser, Edmund:
+    stanza, 335, 338;
+    soul making body, 391;
+    _mother-wit_, 404.
+
+  Spinoza, influence, 173, 380.
+
+  Spirit and matter, 100, 101.
+    (See _God, Religion, Spenser_, etc.)
+
+  Spiritualism, 296.
+
+  Sprague, William Buel, Annals of the American Pulpit, 10-12.
+
+  Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, on American religion, 414.
+
+  Star:
+    "hitch your wagon to a star," 252, 253;
+    stars in poetry, 324.
+
+  Sterling, J. Hutchinson, letter to, 282, 283.
+
+  Stewart, Dugald, allusion, 16.
+
+  Story, Joseph, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Stuart, Moses, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Studio, illustration, 20.
+
+  Summer, description, 117.
+
+  Sumner, Charles:
+    literary rank, 33:
+    the outrage on, 211;
+    Saturday Club, 223.
+
+  Swedenborg, Emanuel:
+    poetic rank, 202, 320;
+    dreams, 306;
+    Rosetta-Stone, 322;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Swedenborgians:
+    liking for a paper of Carlyle's, 78;
+    Reed's essay, 80;
+    spiritual influx, 412.
+
+  Swift, Jonathan:
+    allusion, 30;
+    the Houyhnhnms, 163;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Synagogue, illustration, 169.
+
+
+  Tappan, Mrs. Caroline, The Dial, 159.
+
+  Tartuffe, allusion, 312.
+
+  Taylor, Father, relation to Emerson, 55, 56, 413.
+
+  Taylor, Jeremy:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Emerson's study, 52;
+    "the Shakespeare of divines," 94;
+    praise for, 306.
+
+  Teague, Irish name, 143.
+
+  Te Deum:
+    the hymn, 68;
+    illustration, 82.
+
+  Temperance, the reform, 141, 152.
+    (See _Reforms_.)
+
+  Tennyson, Alfred:
+    readers, 256;
+    tobacco, 270;
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    In Memoriam, 333;
+    on plagiarism, 384.
+
+  Thacher, Samuel Cooper:
+    allusion, 26;
+    death, 29.
+
+  Thayer, James B.:
+    Western Journey with Emerson, 249, 263, 265-271, 359;
+    _ground swell_, 364.
+    (See _California_.)
+
+  Thinkers, let loose, 175.
+
+  Thomson, James, descriptions, 338.
+
+  Thoreau, Henry D.:
+    allusion, 22;
+    a Crusoe, 72;
+    "nullifier of civilization," 86;
+    one-apartment house, 142, 143;
+    The Dial, 159, 160;
+    death, 228;
+    Emerson's burial-place, 356;
+    biography, 368;
+    personality traceable, 389;
+    woodcraft, 403.
+
+  Ticknor, George:
+    on William Emerson, 12;
+    on Kirkland, 27;
+    literary rank, 33.
+
+  Traduction, 393.
+    (See _Heredity, Jonson_, etc.)
+
+  Transcendentalism:
+    Bowen's paper, 103, 104;
+    idealism, 146;
+    adherents, 150-152;
+    dilettanteism, 152-155;
+    a terror, 161.
+
+  Transcendentalist, The, 157-159.
+
+  Truth:
+    as an end, 99;
+    sought, 135.
+
+  Tudor, William:
+    allusion, 26;
+    connecting literary link, 28, 29.
+
+  Turgot, quoted, 98, 99.
+
+  Tyburn, allusion, 183.
+
+
+  Unitarianism:
+    Dr. Freeman's, 11, 12;
+    nature of Jesus, 13;
+    its sunshine, 28;
+    white-handed, 34;
+    headquarters, 35;
+    lingual studies, 48, 49;
+    transition, 51;
+    domination, 52;
+    pulpits, 53, 54;
+    chapel in Edinburgh, 65;
+    file-leaders, 118;
+    its organ, 124;
+    "pale negations," 298.
+    (See _Religion, Trinity_, etc.)
+
+  United States, intellectual history, 32.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Unity, in diversity, 73, 106, 284.
+
+  Upham, Charles W., his History, 45.
+
+
+  Verne, Jules, _onditologie_, 186.
+
+  Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Virginia, University of, 299.
+
+  Volcano, illustration, 113.
+
+  Voltaire, 409.
+
+  Voting, done reluctantly, 152, 153.
+
+
+  Wachusett, Mount, 70.
+
+  Walden Pond:
+    allusion, 22, 70, 72;
+    cabin, 142, 143.
+    (See _Concord_.)
+
+  War:
+    outgrown, 88, 89;
+    ennobling, 298.
+
+  Ware, Henry, professorship, 52.
+    (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+  Ware, Henry, Jr.:
+    Boston ministry, 55;
+    correspondence, 124-127.
+    (See _Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Warren, John Collins, Transcendentalism and Temperance, 149.
+
+  Warren, Judge, of New Bedford, 67.
+
+  Warwick Castle, fire, 275.
+
+  Washington City, addresses, 307.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+  Waterville College, Adelphi Society, 135-142.
+
+  Webster, Daniel:
+    E.B. Emerson's association with, 19;
+    on Tudor, 28, 29;
+    literary rank, 33;
+    Seventh-of-March Speech, 303;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Weiss, John, Parker biography, 368.
+
+  Wellington, Lord, seen by Emerson, 63, 64.
+
+  Wesley, John, praise of, 306.
+    (See _Methodism_.)
+
+  Western Messenger, poems in, 128.
+
+  West India Islands, Edward B. Emerson's death, 89.
+
+  Westminster Abbey, Emerson's visit, 63, 64.
+    (See _Emerson's Books_,--English Traits,--_England_, etc.)
+
+  Westminster Catechism, 298.
+    (See _Calvinism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Whipple, Edwin Percy:
+    literary rank, 33;
+    club, 223;
+    on heredity, 389.
+
+  White of Selborne, 228.
+
+  Whitman, Walt:
+    his enumerations, 325, 326;
+    journal, 344, 346.
+
+  Wilberforce, William, funeral, 64.
+
+  Will:
+    inspiration of, 289;
+    power of, 290.
+
+  Windermere, Lake, 70.
+    (See _England_.)
+
+  Winthrop, Francis William, in college, 45.
+
+  Wolfe, Charles, Burial of Moore, 416.
+
+  Woman:
+    her position, 212, 213, 251;
+    crossing a street, 364.
+
+  Woman's Club, 16.
+
+  Words, Emerson's favorite, 404, 405.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Days.)
+
+  Wordsworth, William:
+    Emerson's account, 63;
+    early reception, Excursion, 92, 95;
+    quoted, 96, 97;
+    Tintern Abbey, 103;
+    influence, 148, 150;
+    poetic rank, 281, 321;
+    on Immortality, 293, 392;
+    popularity, 316;
+    serenity, 335;
+    study of nature, 337;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    We are Seven, 393;
+    prejudice against science, 401.
+
+  Wotton, Sir Henry, quoted, 259.
+
+
+  Yankee:
+    a spouting, 136;
+    _improve_, 176;
+    whittling, 364.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Yoga, Hindoo idea, 397.
+
+  Young, Brigham:
+    Utah, 264, 268;
+    on preėxistence, 391.
+
+  Young, Edward, influence in New England, 16, 17.
+
+
+  Zola, Émile, offensive realism, 326.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+Release Date: June 24, 2004 [EBook #12700]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RALPH WALDO EMERSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+American Men of Letters
+
+EDITED BY
+
+CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
+
+
+  "_Thou wert the morning star among the living,
+    Ere thy fair light had fled:
+  Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
+    New splendor to the dead._"
+
+
+American Men of Letters
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
+
+BY
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+1891
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+My thanks are due to the members of Mr. Emerson's family, and the other
+friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and
+furnishing valuable information.
+
+The Index, carefully made by Mr. J.H. Wiggin, was revised and somewhat
+abridged by myself.
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+BOSTON, November 25, 1884.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+1803-1823. To AET. 20.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section I. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.--Publication of the
+Second Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.
+--Character.--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist
+and Realist.--New England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second
+Visit to England
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review."--Visit to
+Europe.--England.--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published.
+I. Lives of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli"
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1853-1858. AET. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club"
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+1858-1863. AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival.--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of President Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus".
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication of
+"Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and Originality.
+--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--Greatness.
+--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies"
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+Emerson's Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.---A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+"I have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense. He
+furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography
+is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be
+known and believed."
+
+So writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is
+certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. He delineates
+himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader
+sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little
+more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him
+in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and
+pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were
+the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social
+influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature
+added to make him Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+He himself believes in the hereditary transmission of certain
+characteristics. Though Nature appears capricious, he says, "Some
+qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the
+finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to
+perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fixed and permanent
+in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until
+at last Nature adopts them and bakes them in her porcelain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what
+may be called the Academic Races. Their names have been on college
+catalogues for generation after generation. They have filled the learned
+professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to
+our own time. If aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be
+bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are
+developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a
+descendant of one of the Academic Races. Other things being equal, he
+will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. His features will
+be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more
+plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. The
+gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than
+a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a
+surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which
+it springs has been long under cultivation.
+
+These thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record
+of the family made historic by the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was
+remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and
+for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls.
+
+A genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the "survival of the
+fittest,"--in the estimate of the descendants. It is inclined to
+remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living
+heirs of the family name and traditions. As every man may count two
+grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers,
+and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection. If
+he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of
+personages to choose from. The great-grandfathers of Mr. Emerson at the
+sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by
+intermarriage of relatives. One of these, from whom the name descended,
+was Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the
+people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood.
+
+His son, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, minister of the town of Mendon,
+Massachusetts, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Edward
+Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, as
+Minister of Concord, Massachusetts.
+
+Peter Bulkeley was therefore one of Emerson's sixty-four grandfathers
+at the seventh remove. We know the tenacity of certain family
+characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible
+that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the
+full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted
+his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover
+more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities
+move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of
+chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that
+of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one
+square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows
+in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white
+bishop sweeps the board on his own color. Sometimes the distinguishing
+characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle
+strides over the black and white squares. Sometimes an uncle or aunt
+lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight's move were
+repeated on the squares of human individuality. It is not impossible,
+then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from
+the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early
+history of New England.
+
+The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies
+consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of
+fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or
+second hand, the _Magnolia Christi Americana_, of the Reverend Cotton
+Mather. The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one
+can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a
+few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies
+from the London-printed, folio of 1702.
+
+    "He was descended of an Honourable Family in _Bedfordshire_.--He was
+    born at _Woodhil_ (or _Odel_) in _Bedfordshire_, _January_ 31st,
+    1582.
+
+    "His _Education_ was answerable unto his _Original_; it was
+    _Learned_, it was _Genteel_, and, which was the top of all, it was
+    very _Pious_: At length it made him a _Batchellor_ of _Divinity_,
+    and a Fellow of Saint _John's_ Colledge in Cambridge.--
+
+    "When he came abroad into the World, a good benefice befel him,
+    added unto the estate of a Gentleman, left him by his Father; whom
+    he succeeded in his Ministry, at the place of his Nativity: Which
+    one would imagine _Temptations_ enough to keep him out of a
+    _Wilderness_."
+
+But he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the
+English Church, and so,--
+
+    "When Sir _Nathaniel Brent_ was Arch-Bishop _Laud's_ General, as
+    Arch-Bishop _Laud_ was _another's_, Complaints were made against Mr.
+    _Bulkly_, for his Non-Conformity, and he was therefore Silenced.
+
+    "To _New-England_ he therefore came, in the Year 1635; and there
+    having been for a while, at _Cambridge_, he carried a good Number of
+    Planters with him, up further into the _Woods_, where they gathered
+    the _Twelfth Church_, then formed in the Colony, and call'd the Town
+    by the Name of _Concord_.
+
+    "Here he _buried_ a great Estate, while he _raised_ one still,
+    for almost every Person whom he employed in the Affairs of his
+    Husbandry.--
+
+    "He was a most excellent _Scholar_, a very-_well read_ Person, and
+    one, who in his advice to young Students, gave Demonstrations, that
+    he knew what would go to make a _Scholar_. But it being essential
+    unto a _Scholar_ to love a _Scholar_, so did he; and in Token
+    thereof, endowed the Library of _Harvard_-Colledge with no small
+    part of his own.
+
+    "And he was therewithal a most exalted _Christian_--In his Ministry
+    he was another _Farel, Quo nemo tonuit fortius_--And the observance
+    which his own People had for him, was also paid him from all sorts
+    of People throughout the Land; but especially from the Ministers of
+    the Country, who would still address him as a _Father_, a _Prophet_,
+    a _Counsellor_, on all occasions."
+
+These extracts may not quite satisfy the exacting reader, who must be
+referred to the old folio from which they were taken, where he will
+receive the following counsel:--
+
+"If then any Person would know what Mr. _Peter Bulkly_ was, let him read
+his Judicious and Savory Treatise of the _Gospel Covenant_, which has
+passed through several Editions, with much Acceptance among the People
+of God." It must be added that "he had a competently good Stroke at
+Latin Poetry; and even in his Old Age, affected sometimes to improve it.
+Many of his Composure are yet in our Hands."
+
+It is pleasant to believe that some of the qualities of this
+distinguished scholar and Christian were reproduced in the descendant
+whose life we are studying. At his death in 1659 he was succeeded, as
+was mentioned, by his son Edward, whose daughter became the wife of the
+Reverend Joseph Emerson, the minister of Mendon who, when that village
+was destroyed by the Indians, removed to Concord, where he died in the
+year 1680. This is the first connection of the name of Emerson with
+Concord, with which it has since been so long associated.
+
+Edward Emerson, son of the first and father of the second Reverend
+Joseph Emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one,
+for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: "Mr. Edward Emerson, sometime
+Deacon of the first church in Newbury." He was noted for the virtue of
+patience, and it is a family tradition that he never complained but
+once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her dumplings were
+somewhat harder than needful,--"_but not often_." This same Edward was
+the only break in the line of ministers who descended from Thomas of
+Ipswich. He is remembered in the family as having been "a merchant in
+Charlestown."
+
+Their son, the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, Minister of Malden for
+nearly half a century, married Mary, the daughter of the Reverend Samuel
+Moody,--Father Moody,--of York, Maine. Three of his sons were ministers,
+and one of these, William, was pastor of the church at Concord at the
+period of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
+
+As the successive generations narrow down towards the individual whose
+life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes more and
+more important and interesting to the biographer. The Reverend William
+Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was an excellent and popular
+preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. He preached resistance to
+tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his townsmen and their allies to
+make a stand against the soldiers who had marched upon their peaceful
+village, and would have taken a part in the Fight at the Bridge, which
+he saw from his own house, had not the friends around him prevented
+his quitting his doorstep. He left Concord in 1776 to join the army at
+Ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was advised to return to Concord and
+set out on the journey, but died on his way. His wife was the daughter
+of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord.
+This was another very noticeable personage in the line of Emerson's
+ancestors. His merits and abilities are described at great length on his
+tombstone in the Concord burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that
+his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs
+which record the excellences of our New England clergymen of the past
+generations are so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help
+inquiring whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter,
+like that which the good Vicar of Wakefield arranged with the
+portrait-painter. He was to represent Sophia as a shepherdess, it will
+be remembered, with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for
+nothing.
+
+William Emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and
+three daughters, one of whom, Mary Moody Emerson, is well remembered as
+pictured for us by her nephew, Ralph Waldo. His widow became the wife
+of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, Doctor of Divinity, and his successor as
+Minister at Concord.
+
+The Reverend William Emerson, the second of that name and profession,
+and the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in the year 1769, and
+graduated at Harvard College in 1789. He was settled as Minister in the
+town of Harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became Minister of the
+First Church in Boston. In 1796 he married Ruth Haskins of Boston. He
+died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom Ralph Waldo was the second.
+
+The interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man
+like Emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics
+of the Reverend William Emerson so far as we can learn them from his own
+writings and from the record of his contemporaries.
+
+The Reverend Dr. Sprague's valuable and well-known work, "Annals of the
+American Pulpit," contains three letters from which we learn some of
+his leading characteristics. Dr. Pierce of Brookline, the faithful
+chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary,
+but thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people
+of the quiet little town of Harvard, while he was highly acceptable in
+the pulpits of the metropolis. In personal appearance he was attractive;
+his voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable.
+"He was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an
+enemy.--In his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal
+side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated.--He was,
+however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most
+widely."
+
+Dr. Charles Lowell, another brother minister, says of him, "Mr. Emerson
+was a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his cheeks
+slightly tinted, his motions easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike, his
+manners bland and pleasant. He was an honest man, and expressed himself
+decidedly and emphatically, but never bluntly or vulgarly.--Mr. Emerson
+was a man of good sense. His conversation was edifying and useful; never
+foolish or undignified.--In his theological opinions he was, to say the
+least, far from having any sympathy with Calvinism. I have not supposed
+that he was, like Dr. Freeman, a Humanitarian, though he may have been
+so."
+
+There was no honester chronicler than our clerical Pepys, good, hearty,
+sweet-souled, fact-loving Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, who knew the
+dates of birth and death of the graduates of Harvard, starred and
+unstarred, better, one is tempted to say (_Hibernice_), than they did
+themselves. There was not a nobler gentleman in charge of any Boston
+parish than Dr. Charles Lowell. But after the pulpit has said what it
+thinks of the pulpit, it is well to listen to what the pews have to say
+about it.
+
+This is what the late Mr. George Ticknor said in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner" for September, 1849.
+
+"Mr. Emerson, transplanted to the First Church in Boston six years
+before Mr. Buckminster's settlement, possessed, on the contrary, a
+graceful and dignified style of speaking, which was by no means without
+its attraction, but he lacked the fervor that could rouse the masses,
+and the original resources that could command the few."
+
+As to his religious beliefs, Emerson writes to Dr. Sprague as follows:
+"I did not find in any manuscript or printed sermons that I looked
+at, any very explicit statement of opinion on the question between
+Calvinists and Socinians. He inclines obviously to what is ethical
+and universal in Christianity; very little to the personal and
+historical.--I think I observe in his writings, as in the writings of
+Unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of
+the nature and offices of Jesus. They had not made up their own minds on
+it. It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so."
+
+Mr. William Emerson left, published, fifteen Sermons and Discourses, an
+Oration pronounced at Boston on the Fourth of July, 1802, a Collection
+of Psalms and Hymns, an Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston,
+besides his contributions to the "Monthly Anthology," of which he was
+the Editor.
+
+Ruth Haskins, the wife of William and the mother of Ralph Waldo
+Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner," as a woman "of great patience and fortitude, of
+the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous
+bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long
+as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew
+how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that
+authority was resigned. Both her mind and her character were of a
+superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar
+softness and natural grace and quiet dignity. Her sensible and kindly
+speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it
+was ever ready, was a reward."
+
+The Reverend Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, who grew up with her son,
+says, "Waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children
+resembled their mother."
+
+Such was the descent of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If the ideas of parents
+survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had
+a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this
+representative of a long line of ministers. The same trains of thought
+and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of
+near family relationship, though not of blood. After the death of the
+first William Emerson, the Concord minister, his widow, Mr. Emerson's
+grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, Dr. Ezra
+Ripley. The grandson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ripley, whose
+character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before
+The Social Circle of Concord, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly"
+for November, 1883. Mr. Emerson says of him: "He was identified with the
+ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same
+time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the
+great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days
+declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and
+liberated America.... The same faith made what was strong and what was
+weak in Dr. Ripley." It would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of
+character than Mr. Emerson's living picture of Dr. Ripley. I myself
+remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so
+communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling
+John Foster of Brighton and chatty Jonathan Homer of Newton. Mr. Emerson
+says, "He was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable,
+manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all
+men.--His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and
+he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His
+friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his
+tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was
+no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous.
+Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his
+compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the
+beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door." How
+like Goldsmith's good Dr. Primrose! I do not know any writing of
+Mr. Emerson which brings out more fully his sense of humor,--of the
+picturesque in character,--and as a piece of composition, continuous,
+fluid, transparent, with a playful ripple here and there, it is
+admirable and delightful.
+
+Another of his early companionships must have exercised a still more
+powerful influence on his character,--that of his aunt, Mary Moody
+Emerson. He gave an account of her in a paper read before the Woman's
+Club several years ago, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for
+December, 1883. Far more of Mr. Emerson is to be found in this aunt of
+his than in any other of his relations in the ascending series, with
+whose history we are acquainted. Her story is an interesting one, but
+for that I must refer the reader to the article mentioned. Her character
+and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. "Her early
+reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards,
+and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart,
+Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madam De Stael, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron.
+Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of
+old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious
+authority in their minds, and nowise the slight merely entertaining
+quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,--how venerable
+and organic as Nature they are in her mind!"
+
+There are many sentences cited by Mr. Emerson which remind us very
+strongly of his own writings. Such a passage as the following might have
+come from his Essay, "Nature," but it was written when her nephew was
+only four years old.
+
+    "Malden, 1807, September.--The rapture of feeling I would part from
+    for days devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with
+    such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its
+    Author,--feels it is related to Him more than by any ties of
+    creation,--it exults, too fondly, perhaps, for a state of trial. But
+    in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow, or
+    appear to glow, with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which
+    penetrates the spirits with wonder and curiosity,--then, however
+    awed, who can fear?"--"A few pulsations of created beings, a few
+    successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable
+    us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories,--to do more,--to
+    date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to
+    measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history
+    of God's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It
+    is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying,
+    acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting,
+    dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity.
+    Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished,
+    and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the
+    activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of
+    virtue, the approval of God."
+
+Miss Mary Emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural
+science which may be noted in her nephews Waldo and Charles. After
+speaking of "the poor old earth's chaotic state, brought so near in its
+long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist," she says:--
+
+    "Yet its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of Moses'
+    Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to
+    science."--"And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give
+    the idea of the Infinite, far, far better than when dignified with
+    arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless
+    ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. How
+    grand its preparation for souls, souls who were to feel the
+    Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions and applied its
+    steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither
+    psychology nor element."--"Usefulness, if it requires action, seems
+    less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God,
+    retaining consciousness.... Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do
+    what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from
+    sublimity of motive."
+
+So far as hereditary and family influences can account for the character
+and intellect of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we could hardly ask for a better
+inborn inheritance, or better counsels and examples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having traced some of the distinguishing traits which belong by descent
+to Mr. Emerson to those who were before him, it is interesting to note
+how far they showed themselves in those of his own generation, his
+brothers. Of these I will mention two, one of whom I knew personally.
+
+Edward Bliss Emerson, who graduated at Harvard College in 1824, three
+years after Ralph Waldo, held the first place in his class. He began
+the study of the law with Daniel Webster, but overworked himself and
+suffered a temporary disturbance of his reason. After this he made
+another attempt, but found his health unequal to the task and exiled
+himself to Porto Rico, where, in 1834, he died. Two poems preserve his
+memory, one that of Ralph Waldo, in which he addresses his memory,--
+
+  "Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star,"
+
+the other his own "Last Farewell," written in 1832, whilst sailing out
+of Boston Harbor. The lines are unaffected and very touching, full of
+that deep affection which united the brothers in the closest intimacy,
+and of the tenderest love for the mother whom he was leaving to see no
+more.
+
+I had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits
+which were in due time to develop themselves in Emerson's character and
+intelligence. As on the wall of some great artist's studio one may find
+unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions
+of pictures painted in after years, so we see that Nature often
+sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its
+rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors
+which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The
+sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life
+is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea.
+
+Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which I find in the
+long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy
+Emerson. Save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my
+life's early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes
+ever beheld. Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the
+veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in
+life might well say with Dryden,--
+
+  "If by traduction came thy mind
+  Our wonder is the less to find
+  A soul so charming from a stock so good."
+
+His image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years
+ago, I spoke of him in these lines, which I may venture to quote from
+myself, since others have quoted them before me.
+
+  Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,
+  The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,
+  O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down
+  In graceful folds the academic gown,
+  On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught
+  How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,
+  And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,
+  Too bright to live,--but O, too fair to die.
+
+Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much
+of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands.
+I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles
+Emerson's coming into my study,--this was probably in 1826 or
+1827,--taking up Hazlitt's "British Poets" and turning at once to a poem
+of Marvell's, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. The
+influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson's
+poems, and Charles' liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo.
+When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called "The
+Harvard Register" was published by students and recent graduates. Three
+articles were contributed by him to this periodical. Two of them have
+the titles "Conversation," "Friendship." His quotations are from Horace
+and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and
+Scott. There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of
+his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. Take
+this as an example:--
+
+    "Men and mind are my studies. I need no observatory high in air to
+    aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. I do not want a costly
+    apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility.
+    I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all
+    knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my
+    employment. I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at
+    home at my chambers, and I shall have enough to do and enjoy."
+
+The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson's poems.
+He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which
+he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons
+made famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness
+in the bitter cold winter's day; the mountain that rose in the horizon;
+the lofty pines; the lowly flowers. All talked with him as brothers and
+sisters, and he with them as of his own household.
+
+The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his
+maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.
+
+    "All men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says Charles Emerson,
+    "must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are
+    constrained to yield where it is due,--to rank, merit, talents. But
+    our affections we give not thus easily.
+
+      'The hand of Douglas is his own.'"
+
+    --"I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good
+    men hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent
+    conventions of polite life. But my friends I must know, and,
+    knowing, I must love. There must be a daily beauty in their life
+    that shall secure my constant attachment. I cannot stand upon the
+    footing of ordinary acquaintance. Friendship is aristocratical--the
+    affections which are prostituted to every suitor I will not accept."
+
+Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long
+outlived him became. Here is the dignity which commands reverence,--a
+dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson's sweetness of manner and
+expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence. There was
+something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was with into
+a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. A vulgar soul stood
+abashed in his presence. I could never think of him in the presence
+of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action
+without recalling Milton's line,
+
+  "Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed,"
+
+and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial
+messenger.
+
+No doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences,
+and of that exaggeration which belongs to the _laudator temporis acti_.
+But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and
+out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and neck
+they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the
+class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part
+assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some
+extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the
+result of a Presidential election,--or the Winner of the Derby. But
+Hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. "Who has a part with ****
+at this next exhibition?" I asked him one day, as I met him in the
+college yard. "***** the Post," answered Hillard. "Why call him _the
+Post_?" said I. "He is a wooden creature," said Hillard. "Hear him and
+Charles Emerson translating from the Latin _Domus tota inflammata erat_.
+The Post will render the words, 'The whole house was on fire.' Charles
+Emerson will translate the sentence 'The entire edifice was wrapped in
+flames.'" It was natural enough that a young admirer should prefer the
+Bernini drapery of Charles Emerson's version to the simple nudity of
+"the Post's" rendering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred
+in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a
+scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental
+life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly.
+
+When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion
+by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange
+themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had
+found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of
+political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was
+as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and
+there, waiting to form centres of condensation.
+
+Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a
+number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became
+visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries:
+John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards President of Harvard University;
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster; John Sylvester John Gardiner; William Tudor;
+Samuel Cooper Thacher; William Emerson. These were the chief stars of
+the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of
+it, as reflected from the pages of "The Monthly Anthology," which very
+soon came under the editorship of the Reverend William Emerson.
+
+The father of Ralph Waldo Emerson may be judged of in good measure by
+the associates with whom he was thus connected. A brief sketch of these
+friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these
+men made the local sphere of thought into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was
+born.
+
+John Thornton Kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is
+remembered by old graduates of Harvard, sitting in the ancient
+Presidential Chair, on Commencement Day, and calling in his penetrating
+but musical accents: "_Expectatur Oratio in Lingua Latina_" or
+"_Vernacula_," if the "First Scholar" was about to deliver the English
+oration. It was a presence not to be forgotten. His "shining morning
+face" was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did,
+with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. Mr. Ticknor speaks
+of his sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom,
+with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor." It was of him
+that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of
+printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to
+pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished
+out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the
+leaves together as he best might. The Reverend Dr. Lowell says: "He
+always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of
+his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the
+labor." Mr. Cabot, who knew all Emerson's literary habits, says he used
+to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the
+same way. Emerson's father, however, was very methodical, according
+to Dr. Lowell, and had "a place for everything, and everything in its
+place." Dr. Kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of
+the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very
+thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries.
+
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in Boston.
+The beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of
+his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of
+those living idols which seem to be as necessary to Protestantism as
+images and pictures are to Romanism.
+
+John Sylvester John Gardiner, once a pupil of the famous Dr. Parr, was
+then the leading Episcopal clergyman of Boston. Him I reconstruct from
+scattered hints I have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a
+sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome English
+parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice. Mild
+Orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of
+Christianity, and none was readier than Dr. Gardiner, if the voice of
+tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal
+persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to
+the interests of learning.
+
+William Tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the
+"Monthly Anthology," and that of the "North American Review," for he was
+a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the
+founder of the second. Edward Everett characterizes him, in speaking of
+his "Letters on the Eastern States," as a scholar and a gentleman, an
+impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a
+correct writer. Daniel Webster bore similar testimony to his talents and
+character.
+
+Samuel Cooper Thacher was hardly twenty years old when the "Anthology"
+was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty. He
+contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various
+controversial sermons, and writing the "Memoir of Buckminster."
+
+There was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities.
+There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much
+scholarship. The "Anthology" was the literary precursor of the "North
+American Review," and the theological herald of the "Christian
+Examiner." Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity.
+It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine,
+with all manner of literary chips and shavings. It had Magazine
+ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced
+paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations
+that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to
+Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and
+languid trickle of Laura Matilda's sentimentalities. It talked about
+"the London Reviewers" with a kind of provincial deference. It printed
+articles with quite too much of the license of Swift and Prior for the
+Magazines of to-day. But it had opinions of its own, and would compare
+well enough with the "Gentleman's Magazine," to say nothing of "My
+Grandmother's Review, the British." A writer in the third volume (1806)
+says: "A taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our
+country. I believe that, fifty years ago, England had never seen a
+Miscellany or a Review so well conducted as our 'Anthology,' however
+superior such publications may now be in that kingdom."
+
+It is well worth one's while to look over the volumes of the "Anthology"
+to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how
+they expressed themselves. The stiffness of Puritanism was pretty well
+relaxed when a Magazine conducted by clergymen could say that "The
+child,"--meaning the new periodical,--"shall not be destitute of the
+manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. He shall
+attend Theatres, Museums, Balls, and whatever polite diversions the town
+shall furnish." The reader of the "Anthology" will find for his reward
+an improving discourse on "Ambition," and a commendable schoolboy's
+"theme" on "Inebriation." He will learn something which may be for his
+advantage about the "Anjou Cabbage," and may profit by a "Remedy for
+Asthma." A controversy respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore
+may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for
+relief to the epistle "Studiosus" addresses to "Alcander." If the lines
+of "The Minstrel" who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from "The
+District of Main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "R.T. Paine,
+Jr., Esq.," of tameness when he exclaims:--
+
+  "Rise Columbia, brave and free,
+  Poise the globe and bound the sea!"
+
+But the writers did not confine themselves to native or even to English
+literature, for there is a distinct mention of "Mr. Goethe's new novel,"
+and an explicit reference to "Dante Aligheri, an Italian bard." But
+let the smiling reader go a little farther and he will find Mr.
+Buckminster's most interesting account of the destruction of Goldau.
+And in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by Dr. Jacob
+Bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries,
+and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is
+sweetening our atmospheric existence.
+
+The late President Josiah Quincy, in his "History of the Boston
+Athenaeum," pays a high tribute of respect to the memory and the
+labors of the gentlemen who founded that institution and conducted the
+"Anthology." A literary journal had already been published in Boston,
+but very soon failed for want of patronage. An enterprising firm of
+publishers, "being desirous that the work should be continued, applied
+to the Reverend William Emerson, a clergyman of the place, distinguished
+for energy and literary taste; and by his exertions several gentlemen
+of Boston and its vicinity, conspicuous for talent and zealous for
+literature, were induced to engage in conducting the work, and for this
+purpose they formed themselves into a Society. This Society was not
+completely organized until the year 1805, when Dr. Gardiner was elected
+President, and William Emerson Vice-President. The Society thus formed
+maintained its existence with reputation for about six years, and issued
+ten octavo volumes from the press, constituting one of the most lasting
+and honorable monuments of the literature of the period, and may be
+considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country after
+that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the
+Revolutionary War, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history
+of the United States. Its records yet remain, an evidence that it was a
+pleasant, active, high-principled association of literary men, laboring
+harmoniously to elevate the literary standard of the time, and with a
+success which may well be regarded as remarkable, considering the little
+sympathy they received from the community, and the many difficulties
+with which they had to struggle."
+
+The publication of the "Anthology" began in 1804, when Mr. William
+Emerson was thirty-four years of age, and it ceased to be published in
+the year of his death, 1811. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight years old at
+that time. His intellectual life began, we may say, while the somewhat
+obscure afterglow of the "Anthology" was in the western horizon of the
+New England sky.
+
+The nebula which was to form a cluster about the "North American Review"
+did not take definite shape until 1815. There is no such memorial of
+the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first half
+century of that periodical. It is easy to find fault with it for uniform
+respectability and occasional dulness. But take the names of its
+contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of
+that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved
+from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like Irving
+and Cooper. Strike out the names of Webster, Everett, Story, Sumner, and
+Cushing; of Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor,
+Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of
+Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and,
+lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic
+literature would be left for a new edition of "Miller's Retrospect"?
+
+These were the writers who helped to make the "North American Review"
+what it was during the period of Emerson's youth and early manhood.
+These, and men like them, gave Boston its intellectual character. We
+may count as symbols the three hills of "this darling town of ours,"
+as Emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon. Civil liberty
+lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and
+shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily
+on the third from the days when John Cotton preached his first sermon to
+those in which we are living.
+
+The social religious influences of the first part of the century
+must not be forgotten. The two high-caste religions of that day were
+white-handed Unitarianism and ruffled-shirt Episcopalianism. What called
+itself "society" was chiefly distributed between them. Within less than
+fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat
+changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies. This
+movement is the general withdrawal of the native New Englanders of both
+sexes from domestic service. A large part of the "hired help,"--for
+the word servant was commonly repudiated,--worshipped, not with their
+employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages
+stood at the doors. The congregations that went chiefly from the
+drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the
+culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of
+social cleavage. A certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not
+reminding us exactly of primitive Christianity, was the inevitable
+result. This must always be remembered in judging the men and women
+of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving
+prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of King George in
+the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue. The line of social
+separation was more marked, probably, in Boston, the headquarters of
+Unitarianism, than in the other large cities; and even at the present
+day our Jerusalem and Samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing
+with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and
+dollars. The exodus of those children of Israel from the house of
+bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of
+independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even
+in the sanctuary. True religious equality is harder to establish than
+civil liberty. No man has done more for spiritual republicanism than
+Emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time
+in the whole country.
+
+Such were Emerson's intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and
+environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to
+manhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+1803-1823. To _AET_. 20.
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of
+May, 1803.
+
+He was the second of five sons; William, R.W., Edward Bliss, Robert
+Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy.
+
+His birthplace and that of our other illustrious Bostonian, Benjamin
+Franklin, were within a kite-string's distance of each other. When
+the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from Milk Street
+through the narrow passage long known as Bishop's Alley, now Hawley
+Street, he came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite the spot
+where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the
+First Church, the home of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and
+the birthplace of his son, Ralph Waldo. The oblong quadrangle between
+Newbury, now Washington Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street,
+and the open space called Church Green, where the New South Church was
+afterwards erected, is represented on Bonner's maps of 1722 and 1769 as
+an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway.
+
+Even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a
+most attractive little _rus in urbe_. The sunny gardens of the late
+Judge Charles Jackson and the late Mr. S.P. Gardner opened their flowers
+and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses
+and other massive edifices. The most aristocratic pears, the "Saint
+Michael," the "Brown Bury," found their natural homes in these sheltered
+enclosures. The fine old mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out
+upon these gardens. Some of us can well remember the window of his
+son's, the historian's, study, the light from which used every evening
+to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while "The Conquest of
+Mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable
+than those encountered by Cortes. It was a charmed region in which
+Emerson first drew his breath, and I am fortunate in having a
+communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other
+living person.
+
+Mr. John Lowell Gardner, a college classmate and life-long friend of Mr.
+Emerson, has favored me with a letter which contains matters of
+interest concerning him never before given to the public. With his kind
+permission I have made some extracts and borrowed such facts as seemed
+especially worthy of note from his letter.
+
+    "I may be said to have known Emerson from the very beginning. A very
+    low fence divided my father's estate in Summer Street from the field
+    in which I remember the old wooden parsonage to have existed,--but
+    this field, when we were very young, was to be covered by Chauncy
+    Place Church and by the brick houses on Summer Street. Where the
+    family removed to I do not remember, but I always knew the boys,
+    William, Ralph, and perhaps Edward, and I again associated with
+    Ralph at the Latin School, where we were instructed by Master Gould
+    from 1815 to 1817, entering College in the latter year.
+
+    "... I have no recollection of his relative rank as a scholar, but it
+    was undoubtedly high, though not the highest. He never was idle or a
+    lounger, nor did he ever engage in frivolous pursuits. I should say
+    that his conduct was absolutely faultless. It was impossible that
+    there should be any feeling about him but of regard and affection.
+    He had then the same manner and courtly hesitation in addressing you
+    that you have known in him since. Still, he was not prominent in the
+    class, and, but for what all the world has since known of him,
+    his would not have been a conspicuous figure to his classmates in
+    recalling College days.
+
+    "The fact that we were almost the only Latin School fellows in the
+    class, and the circumstance that he was slow during the Freshman
+    year to form new acquaintances, brought us much together, and an
+    intimacy arose which continued through our College life. We were in
+    the habit of taking long strolls together, often stopping for repose
+    at distant points, as at Mount Auburn, etc.... Emerson was not
+    talkative; he never spoke for effect; his utterances were well
+    weighed and very deliberately made, but there was a certain flash
+    when he uttered anything that was more than usually worthy to be
+    remembered. He was so universally amiable and complying that my
+    evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his
+    gentleness and forbearance, but nothing could disturb his
+    equanimity. All that was wanting to render him an almost perfect
+    character was a few harsher traits and perhaps more masculine vigor.
+
+    "On leaving College our paths in life were so remote from each other
+    that we met very infrequently. He soon became, as it were, public
+    property, and I was engrossed for many years in my commercial
+    undertakings. All his course of life is known to many survivors. I
+    am inclined to believe he had a most liberal spirit. I remember that
+    some years since, when it was known that our classmate ---- was
+    reduced almost to absolute want by the war, in which he lost his two
+    sons, Emerson exerted himself to raise a fund among his classmates
+    for his relief, and, there being very few possible subscribers, made
+    what I considered a noble contribution, and this you may be sure was
+    not from any Southern sentiment on the part of Emerson. I send you
+    herewith the two youthful productions of Emerson of which I spoke to
+    you some time since."
+
+The first of these is a prose Essay of four pages, written for a
+discussion in which the Professions of Divinity, Medicine, and Law were
+to be weighed against each other. Emerson had the Lawyer's side to
+advocate. It is a fair and sensible paper, not of special originality or
+brilliancy. His opening paragraph is worth citing, as showing the same
+instinct for truth which displayed itself in all his after writings and
+the conduct of his life.
+
+    "It is usual in advocating a favorite subject to appropriate all
+    possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful
+    auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our
+    attention. Such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far
+    as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments
+    being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for
+    the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the merits of the
+    subject."
+
+From many boys this might sound like well-meaning commonplace, but in
+the history of Mr. Emerson's life that "bold appeal to the heart," that
+"tribute of honest conviction," were made eloquent and real. The
+boy meant it when he said it. To carry out his law of sincerity and
+self-trust the man had to sacrifice much that was dear to him, but he
+did not flinch from his early principles.
+
+It must not be supposed that the blameless youth was an ascetic in his
+College days. The other old manuscript Mr. Gardner sends me is marked
+"'Song for Knights of Square Table,' R.W.E."
+
+There are twelve verses of this song, with a chorus of two lines. The
+Muses and all the deities, not forgetting Bacchus, were duly invited to
+the festival.
+
+  "Let the doors of Olympus be open for all
+  To descend and make merry in Chivalry's hall."
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Sanborn has kindly related to me several circumstances told him by
+Emerson about his early years.
+
+The parsonage was situated at the corner of Summer and what is now
+Chauncy streets. It had a yard, and an orchard which Emerson said was as
+large as Dr. Ripley's, which might have been some two or three acres.
+Afterwards there was a brick house looking on Summer Street, in which
+Emerson the father lived. It was separated, Emerson said, by a brick
+wall from a garden in which _pears grew_ (a fact a boy is likely to
+remember). Master Ralph Waldo used to _sit on this wall_,--but we cannot
+believe he ever got off it on the wrong side, unless politely asked to
+do so. On the occasion of some alarm the little boy was carried in his
+nightgown to a neighboring house.
+
+After Reverend William Emerson's death Mrs. Emerson removed to a house
+in Beacon Street, where the Athenaeum Building now stands. She kept some
+boarders,--among them Lemuel Shaw, afterwards Chief Justice of the State
+of Massachusetts. It was but a short distance to the Common, and Waldo
+and Charles used to drive their mother's cow there to pasture.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Reverend Doctor Rufus Ellis, the much respected living successor of
+William Emerson as Minister of the First Church, says that R.W. Emerson
+must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died
+when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in "the new
+parsonage," which was, doubtless, the "brick house" above referred to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources. Mr. Cooke tells us
+that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and
+soon afterwards the Latin School. At the age of eleven he was turning
+Virgil into very readable English heroics. He loved the study of Greek;
+was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses.
+But he thinks "the idle books under the bench at the Latin School" were
+as profitable to him as his regular studies.
+
+Another glimpse of him is that given us by Mr. Ireland from the "Boyhood
+Memories" of Rufus Dawes. His old schoolmate speaks of him as "a
+spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years
+old,--whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my
+mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him
+so angelic and remarkable." That "blue nankeen" sounds strangely, it may
+be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter
+of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from China were a
+common summer clothing of children. The places where the factories and
+streets of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence were to rise were then open
+fields and farms. My recollection is that we did not think very highly
+of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen,--a dull-colored fabric, too
+nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering.
+
+Emerson was not particularly distinguished in College. Having a near
+connection in the same class as he, and being, as a Cambridge boy,
+generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in College
+from the year when George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, and Francis William
+Winthrop graduated until after I myself left College, I might have
+expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of
+the great writers of his time. I do not recollect hearing of him except
+as keeping school for a short time in Cambridge, before he settled as a
+minister. His classmate, Mr. Josiah Quincy, writes thus of his college
+days:--
+
+    "Two only of my classmates can be fairly said to have got into
+    history, although one of them, Charles W. Upham [the connection of
+    mine referred to above] has written history very acceptably. Ralph
+    Waldo Emerson and Robert W. Barnwell, for widely different reasons,
+    have caused their names to be known to well-informed Americans. Of
+    Emerson, I regret to say, there are few notices in my journals. Here
+    is the sort of way in which I speak of the man who was to make so
+    profound an impression upon the thought of his time. 'I went to the
+    chapel to hear Emerson's dissertation: a very good one, but rather
+    too long to give much pleasure to the hearers.' The fault, I
+    suspect, was in the hearers; and another fact which I have mentioned
+    goes to confirm this belief. It seems that Emerson accepted the duty
+    of delivering the Poem on Class Day, after seven others had been
+    asked who positively, refused. So it appears that, in the opinion of
+    this critical class, the author of the 'Woodnotes' and the 'Humble
+    Bee' ranked about eighth in poetical ability. It can only be because
+    the works of the other five [seven] have been 'heroically unwritten'
+    that a different impression has come to prevail in the outside
+    world. But if, according to the measurement of undergraduates,
+    Emerson's ability as a poet was not conspicuous, it must also be
+    admitted that, in the judgment of persons old enough to know better,
+    he was not credited with that mastery of weighty prose which the
+    world has since accorded him. In our senior year the higher classes
+    competed for the Boylston prizes for English composition. Emerson
+    and I sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to
+    take the two prizes; but--Alas for the infallibility of academic
+    decisions! Emerson received the second prize. I was of course much
+    pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should
+    have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who
+    was to be the most original and influential writer born in America
+    was my unsuccessful competitor. But Emerson, incubating over deeper
+    matters than were dreamt of in the established philosophy of
+    elegant letters, seems to have given no sign of the power that was
+    fashioning itself for leadership in a new time. He was quiet,
+    unobtrusive, and only a fair scholar according to the standard of
+    the College authorities. And this is really all I have to say about
+    my most distinguished classmate."
+
+Barnwell, the first scholar in the class, delivered the Valedictory
+Oration, and Emerson the Poem. Neither of these performances was highly
+spoken of by Mr. Quincy.
+
+I was surprised to find by one of the old Catalogues that Emerson
+roomed during a part of his College course with a young man whom I well
+remember, J.G.K. Gourdin. The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard
+Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to
+Charleston, South Carolina. The "Southerners" were the reigning College
+_elegans_ of that time, the _merveilleux_, the _mirliflores_, of their
+day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the
+prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects
+of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help
+wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin
+together as room-mates.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+We get a few brief glimpses of Emerson during the years following his
+graduation. He writes in 1823 to a classmate who had gone from Harvard
+to Andover:--
+
+    "I am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of German
+    and Hebrew, Parkhurst and Jahn, and such other names as the memory
+    aches to think of, on foot at Andover. Meantime, Unitarianism will
+    not hide her honors; as many hard names are taken, and as much
+    theological mischief is planned, at Cambridge as at Andover. By the
+    time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will
+    not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly
+    he able to speak to one another, and there will be a Guelf and
+    Ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie."
+
+    "You can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city
+    needs the excitement and impulse of literary example. The sight of
+    broad vellum-bound quartos, the very mention of Greek and German
+    names, the glimpse of a dusty, tugging scholar, will wake you up to
+    emulation for a month."
+
+After leaving College, and while studying Divinity, Emerson employed a
+part of his time in giving instruction in several places successively.
+
+Emerson's older brother William was teaching in Boston, and Ralph Waldo,
+after graduating, joined him in that occupation. In the year 1825 or
+1826, he taught school also in Chelmsford, a town of Middlesex County,
+Massachusetts, a part of which helped to constitute the city of Lowell.
+One of his pupils in that school, the Honorable Josiah Gardiner Abbott,
+has favored me with the following account of his recollections:--
+
+The school of which Mr. Emerson had the charge was an old-fashioned
+country "Academy." Mr. Emerson was probably studying for the ministry
+while teaching there. Judge Abbott remembers the impression he made
+on the boys. He was very grave, quiet, and very impressive in his
+appearance. There was something engaging, almost fascinating, about him;
+he was never harsh or severe, always perfectly self-controlled, never
+punished except with words, but exercised complete command over the
+boys. His old pupil recalls the stately, measured way in which, for some
+offence the little boy had committed, he turned on him, saying only
+these two words: "Oh, sad!" That was enough, for he had the faculty of
+making the boys love him. One of his modes of instruction was to give
+the boys a piece of reading to carry home with them,--from some book
+like Plutarch's Lives,--and the next day to examine them and find out
+how much they retained from their reading. Judge Abbott remembers a
+peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to
+be in the field of vision. The whole impression left on this pupil's
+mind was such as no other teacher had ever produced upon him.
+
+Mr. Emerson also kept a school for a short time at Cambridge, and among
+his pupils was Mr. John Holmes. His impressions seem to be very much
+like those of Judge Abbott.
+
+My brother speaks of Mr. Emerson thus:--
+
+    "Calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre. Rather
+    stern in his very infrequent rebukes. Not inclined to win boys by a
+    surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice. Every inch
+    a king in his dominion. Looking back, he seems to me rather like a
+    captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny,
+    but not amused with its incongruities. He once recommended the use
+    of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items."
+
+In 1823, two years after graduating, Emerson began studying for the
+ministry. He studied under the direction of Dr. Charming, attending some
+of the lectures in the Divinity School at Cambridge, though not enrolled
+as one of its regular students.
+
+The teachings of that day were such as would now be called
+"old-fashioned Unitarianism." But no creed can be held to be a finality.
+From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to
+Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of
+a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain
+permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism. If the gates are
+not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill
+the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on
+the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to
+Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer,
+and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian
+Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the
+evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church.
+
+There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches. If De
+Tocqueville's account of Unitarian preaching in Boston at the time of
+his visit is true, the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau would have preached
+acceptably in some of our pulpits. In fact, the good Vicar might have
+been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians.
+
+At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism was the
+dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of
+the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University
+at Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry
+Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature,
+followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James
+Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in
+Boston. I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that
+the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly
+connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches. A Cambridge
+graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable
+in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose
+by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant
+talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which
+their light could shine before men.
+
+Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a
+reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his
+fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of
+a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from
+the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. It is
+hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned
+professions. His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling
+about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. His
+brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found
+his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the
+profession of Law. It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less
+exercised with the same questionings. He has said, speaking of his
+instructors: "If they had examined me, they probably would not have let
+me preach at all." His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not
+taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which
+accounted for his being excused from examination. In 1826, after three
+years' study, he was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association
+of Ministers. His health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he
+went in the following winter to South Carolina and Florida. During this
+absence he preached several times in Charleston and other places. On his
+return from the South he preached in New Bedford, in Northampton, in
+Concord, and in Boston. His attractiveness as a preacher, of which we
+shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his
+being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city
+clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a
+settled Minister in Boston.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+On the 11th of March, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague with
+the Reverend Henry Ware, Minister of the Second Church in Boston. In
+September of the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker.
+The resignation of his colleague soon after his settlement threw all the
+pastoral duties upon the young minister, who seems to have performed
+them diligently and acceptably. Mr. Conway gives the following brief
+account of his labors, and tells in the same connection a story of
+Father Taylor too good not to be repeated:--
+
+    "Emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of Boston.
+    He was on its School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State
+    Senate. He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and
+    helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. Father
+    Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave
+    an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when
+    establishing the Seaman's Mission in Boston. This was told me by
+    Father Taylor himself in his old age. I happened to be in his
+    company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the
+    Methodist Church; but when I spoke of the part Emerson had in it, he
+    softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend. I have
+    no doubt that if the good Father of Boston Seamen was proud of any
+    personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have
+    given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson.
+    Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to"--[the place
+    which a divine of Charles the Second's day said it was not good
+    manners to mention in church].--"'It does look so,' said Father
+    Taylor, 'but I am sure of one thing: if Emerson goes to'"--[that
+    place]--"'he will change the climate there, and emigration will set
+    that way.'"
+
+In 1830, Emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the
+Reverend H.B. Goodwin as Dr. Ripley's colleague. His address on giving
+the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his
+collected works.
+
+The fair prospects with which Emerson began his life as a settled
+minister were too soon darkened. In February, 1832, the wife of
+his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of
+consumption.
+
+He had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties,
+and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people. On
+the 9th of September, 1832, he preached a sermon on the Lord's Supper,
+in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against
+administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples
+were founded. This discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one
+which heralded a movement in New England theology which has never
+stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice. The sermon
+is in no sense "Emersonian" except in its directness, its sweet temper,
+and outspoken honesty. He argues from his comparison of texts in a
+perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor Peter Bulkeley might
+have done. It happened to that worthy forefather of Emerson that upon
+his "pressing a piece of _Charity_ disagreeable to the will of the
+_Ruling Elder_, there was occasioned an unhappy _Discord_ in the Church
+of _Concord_; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help
+of a _Council_ and the _Ruling Elder's_ Abdication." So says Cotton
+Mather. Whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in
+Emerson's days we need not try to determine. The sermon was only a more
+formal declaration of views respecting the Lord's Supper, which he had
+previously made known in a conference with some of the most active
+members of his church. As a committee of the parish reported resolutions
+radically differing from his opinion on the subject, he preached this
+sermon and at the same time resigned his office. There was no "discord,"
+there was no need of a "council." Nothing could be more friendly, more
+truly Christian, than the manner in which Mr. Emerson expressed himself
+in this parting discourse. All the kindness of his nature warms it
+throughout. He details the differences of opinion which have existed
+in the church with regard to the ordinance. He then argues from the
+language of the Evangelists that it was not intended to be a permanent
+institution. He takes up the statement of Paul in the Epistle to the
+Corinthians, which he thinks, all things considered, ought not to alter
+our opinion derived from the Evangelists. He does not think that we are
+to rely upon the opinions and practices of the primitive church. If that
+church believed the institution to be permanent, their belief does not
+settle the question for us. On every other subject, succeeding times
+have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of
+Christianity than was the practice of the early ages.
+
+"But, it is said, 'Admit that the rite was not designed to be
+perpetual.' What harm doth it?"
+
+He proceeds to give reasons which show it to be inexpedient to continue
+the observance of the rite. It was treating that as authoritative which,
+as he believed that he had shown from Scripture, was not so. It confused
+the idea of God by transferring the worship of Him to Christ. Christ is
+the Mediator only as the instructor of man. In the least petition to God
+"the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your
+mind than your brother or child." Again:--
+
+    "The use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the
+    modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and
+    unsuited to affect us. The day of formal religion is past, and we
+    are to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The Jewish
+    was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the
+    Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach
+    men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was
+    religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and
+    forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to that purpose;
+    and with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must
+    contend that it is a matter of vital importance,--really a duty to
+    commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be acceptable
+    to their understanding or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of
+    God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial?"
+
+To these objections he adds the practical consideration that it brings
+those who do not partake of the communion service into an unfavorable
+relation with those who do.
+
+The beautiful spirit of the man shows itself in all its noble sincerity
+in these words at the close of his argument:--
+
+    "Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this
+    institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither
+    should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I
+    not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of
+    my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it
+    stand to the end of the world if it please men and please Heaven,
+    and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces."
+
+He then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling
+in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor's duties to
+administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been
+confided to him.
+
+This is the only sermon of Mr. Emerson's ever published. It was
+impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his
+truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning.
+It was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations
+over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up
+entirely. And thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on
+both sides, Mr. Emerson left the pulpit of the Second Church and found
+himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section 1. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
+
+
+Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first
+time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief
+which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford
+him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled
+"English Traits." He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily,
+Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower
+Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning
+visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom
+he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the
+rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that
+one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together,
+or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was
+explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief
+persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he
+reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions
+incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his
+microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." Emerson
+hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look
+through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson
+says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the
+wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with
+these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further
+abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon,
+were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of
+Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom
+he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which,
+follows:--
+
+    "The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people
+    who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that
+    they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply
+    themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost
+    destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that
+    frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best
+    terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or
+    in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you
+    crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I
+    have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to
+    my first belief that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these
+    impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of
+    having been met, and a larger horizon."
+
+Emerson carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in Edinburgh,
+who, being unable to pay him all the desired attention, handed him over
+to Mr. Alexander Ireland, who has given a most interesting account of
+him as he appeared during that first visit to Europe. Mr. Ireland's
+presentation of Emerson as he heard him in the Scotch pulpit shows
+that he was not less impressive and attractive before an audience of
+strangers than among his own countrymen and countrywomen:--
+
+"On Sunday, the 18th of August, 1833, I heard him deliver a discourse in
+the Unitarian Chapel, Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly
+the effect which it produced on his hearers. It is almost needless to
+say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of
+them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts,
+the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the
+calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
+the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the
+least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not
+long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers,
+whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence
+carried, for the moment, all before them,--his audience becoming like
+clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant
+thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a
+greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of Chalmers. His
+voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever
+heard; nothing like it have I listened to since.
+
+  'That music in our hearts we bore
+  Long after it was heard no more.'"
+
+Mr. George Gilfillan speaks of "the solemnity of his manner, and the
+earnest thought pervading his discourse."
+
+As to the effect of his preaching on his American audiences, I find the
+following evidence in Mr. Cooke's diligently gathered collections. Mr.
+Sanborn says:--
+
+    "His pulpit eloquence was singularly attractive, though by no means
+    equally so to all persons. In 1829, before the two friends had met,
+    Bronson Alcott heard him preach in Dr. Channing's church on 'The
+    Universality of the Moral Sentiment,' and was struck, as he said,
+    with the youth of the preacher, the beauty of his elocution and the
+    direct and sincere manner in which he addressed his hearers."
+
+Mr. Charles Congdon, of New Bedford, well known as a popular
+writer, gives the following account of Emerson's preaching in his
+"Reminiscences." I borrow the quotation from Mr. Conway:--
+
+    "One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals,
+    with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the
+    first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was
+    a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after
+    Emerson's voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an
+    indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional
+    illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and
+    dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard. I could understand
+    them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse."
+
+Everywhere Emerson seems to have pleased his audiences. The Reverend Dr.
+Morison, formerly the much respected Unitarian minister of New Bedford,
+writes to me as follows:--
+
+    "After Dr. Dewey left New Bedford, Mr. Emerson preached there
+    several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who
+    heard him. The Society would have been glad to settle him as their
+    minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for
+    some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion
+    service. Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at
+    that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration
+    for Mr. Emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a
+    Christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his
+    friend, without any action by the Society."
+
+All this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable.
+But every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must
+have been as a preacher. In fact, we have all listened, probably, to
+many a passage from old sermons of his,--for he tells us he borrowed
+from those old sermons for his lectures,--without ever thinking of the
+pulpit from which they were first heard.
+
+Among the stray glimpses we get of Emerson between the time when he
+quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public
+as a lecturer is this, which I owe to the kindness of Hon. Alexander H.
+Rice. In 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with
+another boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being
+at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in
+the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice
+to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along,
+Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of
+thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and
+spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which
+had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after
+generation.
+
+When they parted at the house of young Rice's father, Emerson invited
+the boys to come and see him at the Allen farm, in the afternoon. They
+came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off.
+"Boys," said Emerson, "here we recognize the presence of the Universal
+Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d' ye do? How d'
+ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with
+our own How d' ye do? How d' ye do? And all the waving branches of
+the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the
+singing brook, and the insect and the bird,--every living thing and
+things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while
+they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the
+salutation of the Universal Spirit."
+
+We perceive the same feeling which pervades many of Emerson's earlier
+Essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences
+of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus
+unexpectedly favored. Governor Rice continues:--
+
+    "You know what a captivating charm there always was in Emerson's
+    presence, but I can never tell you how this line of thought then
+    impressed a country boy. I do not remember anything about the
+    remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day,--I
+    only remember that I went home wondering about that mystical dream
+    of the Universal Spirit, and about what manner of man he was under
+    whose influence I had for the first time come....
+
+    "The interview left impressions that led me into new channels of
+    thought which have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, I doubt
+    not, taught me somewhat how to distinguish between mere theological
+    dogma and genuine religion in the soul."
+
+In the summer of 1834 Emerson became a resident of Concord,
+Massachusetts, the town of his forefathers, and the place destined to
+be his home for life. He first lived with his venerable connection, Dr.
+Ripley, in the dwelling made famous by Hawthorne as the "Old Manse." It
+is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene
+of the Fight on the banks of the river. It was built for the Reverend
+William Emerson, his grandfather. In one of the rooms of this house
+Emerson wrote "Nature," and in the same room, some years later,
+Hawthorne wrote "Mosses from an Old Manse."
+
+The place in which Emerson passed the greater part of his life well
+deserves a special notice. Concord might sit for its portrait as an
+ideal New England town. If wanting in the variety of surface which
+many other towns can boast of, it has at least a vision of the distant
+summits of Monadnock and Wachusett. It has fine old woods, and noble
+elms to give dignity to its open spaces. Beautiful ponds, as they
+modestly call themselves,--one of which, Walden, is as well known in our
+literature as Windermere in that of Old England,--lie quietly in their
+clean basins. And through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges,
+a gentle, unsalted stream, like an English river, licking its grassy
+margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. This is the
+Musketaquid, or Meadow River, which, after being joined by the more
+restless Assabet, still keeps its temper and flows peacefully along by
+and through other towns, to lose itself in the broad Merrimac. The names
+of these rivers tell us that Concord has an Indian history, and there is
+evidence that it was a favorite residence of the race which preceded our
+own. The native tribes knew as well as the white settlers where were
+pleasant streams and sweet springs, where corn grew tall in the meadows
+and fish bred fast in the unpolluted waters.
+
+The place thus favored by nature can show a record worthy of its
+physical attractions. Its settlement under the lead of Emerson's
+ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, was effected in the midst of many
+difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble
+leader were successful in overcoming. On the banks of the Musketaquid
+was fired the first fatal shot of the "rebel" farmers. Emerson appeals
+to the Records of the town for two hundred years as illustrating the
+working of our American institutions and the character of the men of
+Concord:--
+
+    "If the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to
+    be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+    fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+    much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+What names that plain New England town reckons in the roll of its
+inhabitants! Stout Major Buttrick and his fellow-soldiers in the war of
+Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers
+and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter
+Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as
+the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as
+the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our
+stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and
+half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a
+school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in
+undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I
+need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning
+the women whose names have added to its distinction. It has long been an
+intellectual centre such as no other country town of our own land, if of
+any other, could boast. Its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted
+by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows are made holy by the
+dust that is covered by their turf.
+
+Such was the place which the advent of Emerson made the Delphi of New
+England and the resort of many pilgrims from far-off regions.
+
+On his return from Europe in the winter of 1833-4, Mr. Emerson began to
+appear before the public as a lecturer. His first subjects, "Water," and
+the "Relation of Man to the Globe," were hardly such as we should have
+expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical
+and physiological science. They were probably chosen as of a popular
+character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and
+entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him
+pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. These lectures are
+not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so
+far as I know. He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating
+the experiences of his recent tour in Europe. Having made himself at
+home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his
+taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics. In 1834
+he lectured on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund
+Burke. The first two of these lectures, though not included in his
+collected works, may be found in the "North American Review" for 1837
+and 1838. The germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in
+prose and verse may be found in these Essays.
+
+The _Cosmos_ of the Ancient Greeks, the _piu nel' uno_, "The Many in
+One," appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his
+"Nature." The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little
+poem entitled "Each and All." The "Rhodora," another brief poem, finds
+itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, "What is Beauty?" and its answer,
+"This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt.
+It may be produced. But it cannot be defined." And throughout this Essay
+the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is
+the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment.
+_Noscitur a sociis_ applies as well to a man's dead as to his living
+companions. A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on
+Plato. When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution,
+long remembered, "When you strike at a _King_, you must kill him."
+He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own
+intelligence. What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character
+chiefly interested him. He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble.
+Like his "Humble Bee," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," whom he speaks
+of as
+
+  "Wiser far than human seer,"
+
+and says of him,
+
+  "Aught unsavory or unclean
+  Hath my insect never seen,"
+
+he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is
+repulsive to dwell upon,
+
+  "Seeing only what is fair,
+  Sipping only what is sweet."
+
+Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his
+earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as
+printed in the Essay.
+
+    "He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race;
+    he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty
+    that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and
+    self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness."
+
+Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters
+they draw. One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will
+not take the color of his subject. He may force himself to picture that
+which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he
+delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he
+feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself. Let us
+try Emerson by this test in his "Essay on Milton:"--
+
+    "It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour
+    foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?)
+    of all men, in the power to _inspire_. Virtue goes out of him into
+    others." ... "He is identified in the mind with all select and holy
+    images, with the supreme interests of the human race."--"Better than
+    any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely,
+    to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of
+    posterity,--to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a
+    composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not
+    described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to
+    him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France, and
+    Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and
+    we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who
+    communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of
+    piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes."
+
+Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, "To raise the idea of man;"
+he had "the power _to inspire_" in a preeminent degree. If ever a man
+communicated those _vibrations_ he speaks of as characteristic of
+Milton, it was Emerson. In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is
+worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a
+school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for
+its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The
+similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into
+their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a
+revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost
+very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them
+in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many
+parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any
+man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer
+of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of
+audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as "an expert swordsman"
+like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive
+controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But
+though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have
+been conscious, like Milton, of "a certain niceness of nature, an honest
+haughtiness," which was as a shield about his inner nature. Charles
+Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the
+feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in
+the line he quotes:--
+
+  "The hand of Douglas is his own."
+
+It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was
+listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that
+of the divine singer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My friend, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a life-long friend of Emerson,
+who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the
+movement of which Emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has
+kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters:--
+
+    TO REV. JAMES F. CLARKE, LOUISVILLE, KY.
+
+    PLYMOUTH, MASS., March 12, 1834.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--As the day approaches when Mr. Lewis should leave
+    Boston, I seize a few moments in a friendly house in the first of
+    towns, to thank you heartily for your kindness in lending me the
+    valued manuscripts which I return. The translations excited me much,
+    and who can estimate the value of a good thought? I trust I am to
+    learn much more from you hereafter of your German studies, and much
+    I hope of your own. You asked in your note concerning Carlyle. My
+    recollections of him are most pleasant, and I feel great confidence
+    in his character. He understands and recognizes his mission. He is
+    perfectly simple and affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he
+    can well afford to be, in his communications. He expressed some
+    impatience of his total solitude, and talked of Paris as a
+    residence. I told him I hoped not; for I should always remember
+    him with respect, meditating in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was
+    cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read
+    with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and
+    when I specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from
+    the New Jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way;
+    whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears of
+    two or three years afterward.--He has many, many tokens of Goethe's
+    regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. If you should go to
+    Scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your
+    visit to Craigenputtock, in the parish of Dunscore, near Dumfries.
+    He told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in
+    the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for "Fraser's
+    Magazine." I therefore subscribed for that book, which he calls the
+    "Mud Magazine," but have seen nothing of his workmanship in the two
+    last numbers. The mail is going, so I shall finish my letter another
+    time.
+
+    Your obliged friend and servant,
+
+    R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+    CONCORD, MASS., November 25, 1834.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--Miss Peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece
+    on Goethe and Carlyle. I have read it with great pleasure and a
+    feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it
+    was not published. I have forgotten what reason you assigned for not
+    printing it; I cannot think of any sufficient one. Is it too late
+    now? Why not change its form a little and annex to it some account
+    of Carlyle's later pieces, to wit: "Diderot," and "Sartor Resartus."
+    The last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched
+    pamphlet. Whilst I see its vices (relatively to the reading public)
+    of style, I cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem,
+    reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour. And it
+    seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as
+    must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that
+    of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. If you still
+    retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid,
+    having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be
+    glad to know that he values his American readers very highly;
+    that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it
+    questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about
+    publishing a historical piece called "The Diamond Necklace," as a
+    part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French
+    Revolution. He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry,
+    could we tell it right. He adds, moreover, in a letter I have
+    recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he
+    might end in the western woods. Shall we not bid him come, and be
+    Poet and Teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd? Or,
+    as I sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to
+    become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to
+    spiritual influences of the higher kind? Have you read Sampson
+    Reed's "Growth of the Mind"? I rejoice to be contemporary with that
+    man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives;
+    there must be some oxygen yet, and La Fayette is only just dead.
+
+    Your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+    It occurs to me that 't is unfit to send any white paper so far as
+    to your house, so you shall have a sentence from Carlyle's letter.
+
+[This may be found in Carlyle's first letter, dated 12th August, 1834.]
+Dr. Le Baron Russell, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part
+of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication
+of "Sartor Resartus," which I will repeat in his own words:--
+
+    "It was just before the time of which I am speaking [that of
+    Emerson's marriage] that the 'Sartor Resartus' appeared in 'Fraser.'
+    Emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of 'Fraser,' to
+    Miss Jackson, and we all had the reading of them. The excitement
+    which the book caused among young persons interested in the
+    literature of the day at that time you probably remember. I was
+    quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that I
+    determined to publish an American edition. I consulted James Munroe
+    & Co. on the subject. Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to
+    a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication.
+    This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate,
+    William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing. When this was
+    accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no
+    part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (This is the
+    Preface which appears in the American edition, James Munroe & Co.,
+    1836. It was omitted in the third American from the second London
+    edition,[1] by the same publishers, 1840.) Before the first edition
+    appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, Munroe & Co.
+    offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and
+    to this I assented.
+
+    [Footnote 1: Revised and corrected by the author.]
+
+    "This American edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the
+    'Sartor' in either country, as a distinct edition. Some copies of
+    the sheets from 'Fraser,' it appears, were stitched together and sent
+    to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing
+    to take the responsibility of printing the book. This shows, I think,
+    how much more interest was taken in Carlyle's writings in this country
+    than in England."
+
+On the 14th of May, 1834, Emerson wrote to Carlyle the first letter of
+that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the
+careful editorship of Mr. Charles Norton. This correspondence lasted
+from the date mentioned to the 2d of April, 1872, when Carlyle wrote his
+last letter to Emerson. The two writers reveal themselves as being in
+strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of
+temperament and entirely opposite views of life. The hatred of unreality
+was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with
+Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers,
+find their counterparts in every thinking community. Carlyle did not
+weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments
+there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. The
+Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon; a _De_
+_Profundis_ answered by a _Sursum Corda_. "The ground of my existence
+is black as death," says Carlyle. "Come and live with me a year," says
+Emerson, "and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of
+these years; (when the 'History' has passed its ten editions, and been
+translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you."
+
+
+Section 2. In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia
+Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in the fine
+old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his
+sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. After their
+marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which
+he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their
+daughter still reside. This is the "plain, square, wooden house," with
+horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which
+has been so often described and figured. It is without pretensions, but
+not without an air of quiet dignity. A full and well-illustrated account
+of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in "Poets' Homes,"
+by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879.
+
+On the 12th of September, 1835, Emerson delivered an "Historical
+Discourse, at Concord, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of
+the Incorporation of the Town." There is no "mysticism," no
+"transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts
+are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became
+the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful,
+very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative
+Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson
+ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix.
+One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with
+a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with
+annotations, and trailing a supplement after it. Oracles are brief and
+final in their utterances. Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain
+what they say.
+
+It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies
+and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of
+rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation. The discourses delivered
+on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a
+clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and
+heroines. Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland
+towns of New England. Emerson has told its story in as painstaking,
+faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist. But with this
+fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque
+touches which reveal the poetic philosopher.
+
+    "I have read with care," he says, "the town records themselves.
+    They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively
+    agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search
+    after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of
+    a manifest love of justice. I find our annals marked with a uniform
+    good sense.--The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the
+    event. These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric
+    within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but
+    they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just
+    community." ... "The matters there debated (in town meetings) are
+    such as to invite very small consideration. The ill-spelled pages
+    of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for
+    confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and
+    private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as
+    proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are
+    approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the
+    good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be
+    suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+    fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+    much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+There was nothing in this Address which the plainest of Concord's
+citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure. In fact Mr.
+Emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a
+plain Concord citizen. His son tells me that he was a faithful attendant
+upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and
+careful listener to the debates on town matters. That respect for
+"mother-wit" and for all the wholesome human qualities which reveals
+itself all through his writings was bred from this kind of intercourse
+with men of sense who had no pretensions to learning, and in whom, for
+that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in
+their expression. He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their
+idiosyncrasies; Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the
+fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into
+a dream--peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who
+insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of
+idolaters and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. It would
+be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of
+self-government in a small community than is contained in this simple
+discourse, patient in detail, large in treatment, more effective than
+any unsupported generalities about the natural rights of man, which
+amount to very little unless men earn the right of asserting them by
+attending fairly to their natural duties. So admirably is the working of
+a town government, as it goes on in a well-disposed community, displayed
+in the history of Concord's two hundred years of village life, that
+one of its wisest citizens had portions of the address printed
+for distribution, as an illustration of the American principle of
+self-government.
+
+After settling in Concord, Emerson delivered courses of Lectures in
+Boston during several successive winters; in 1835, ten Lectures on
+English Literature; in 1836, twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of
+History; in 1837, ten Lectures on Human Culture. Some of these lectures
+may have appeared in print under their original titles; all of them
+probably contributed to the Essays and Discourses which we find in his
+published volumes.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1836, a meeting was held to celebrate the
+completion of the monument raised in commemoration of the Concord Fight.
+For this occasion Emerson wrote the hymn made ever memorable by the
+lines:--
+
+  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
+  And fired the shot heard round the world.
+
+The last line of this hymn quickens the heartbeats of every American,
+and the whole hymn is admirable in thought and expression. Until the
+autumn of 1838, Emerson preached twice on Sundays to the church at East
+Lexington, which desired him to become its pastor. Mr. Cooke says that
+when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of
+Emerson's whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied:
+"We are a very simple people, and can understand no one but Mr.
+Emerson." He said of himself: "My pulpit is the Lyceum platform."
+Knowing that he made his Sermons contribute to his Lectures, we need not
+mourn over their not being reported.
+
+In March, 1837, Emerson delivered in Boston a Lecture on War, afterwards
+published in Miss Peabody's "Aesthetic Papers." He recognizes war as one
+of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, to disappear
+with the advance of mankind:--
+
+    "At a certain stage of his progress the man fights, if he be of a
+    sound body and mind. At a certain high stage he makes no offensive
+    demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable
+    heart. At a still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness;
+    passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all
+    converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself,
+    and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity;
+    but being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one
+    engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an
+    individual, but to the common good of all men."
+
+In 1834 Emerson's brother Edward died, as already mentioned, in the West
+India island where he had gone for his health. In his letter to Carlyle,
+of November 12th of the same year, Emerson says: "Your letter, which
+I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened
+place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother
+in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong
+sorrow." It was of him that Emerson wrote the lines "In Memoriam," in
+which he says,--
+
+  "There is no record left on earth
+  Save on tablets of the heart,
+  Of the rich, inherent worth,
+  Of the grace that on him shone
+  Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit;
+  He could not frame a word unfit,
+  An act unworthy to be done."
+
+Another bereavement was too soon to be recorded. On the 7th of October,
+1835, he says in a letter to Carlyle:--
+
+    "I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one
+    too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles
+    Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I
+    believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on
+    all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure
+    pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two
+    gentlemen know each other."
+
+Alas for human hopes and prospects! In less than a year from the date of
+that letter, on the 17th of September, 1836, he writes to Carlyle:--
+
+    "Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your
+    first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I
+    have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the
+    inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well,
+    and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave
+    question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so
+    much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for
+    I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better
+    than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time
+    of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my
+    house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have
+    known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation.
+    He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of
+    man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He
+    postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so
+    that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But
+    some time I shall see you and speak of him."
+
+
+Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book
+of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no
+name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author,
+Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay
+with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. For it has
+proved for many,--I will not say a _pons asinorum_,--but a very narrow
+bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they
+must cross it, or one domain of Emerson's intellect will not be reached.
+
+It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. It
+talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning
+simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until,
+as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of
+his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words
+which "a certain poet sang" to him.
+
+This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was
+peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's
+"Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was
+vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves
+common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to
+travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very
+long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell
+five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats's
+
+          "doubtful tale from fairy-land
+  Hard for the non-elect to understand."
+
+The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.
+
+    "Whatever is too original," says De Quincey, "will be hated at the
+    first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance
+    of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a
+    counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering
+    against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William
+    Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was
+    the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since
+    then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the
+    echo of his name."
+
+No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than
+Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of "Nature," his
+first thoroughly characteristic Essay. There is the same thought in the
+Preface to "The Excursion" that we find in the Introduction to "Nature."
+
+    "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
+    we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
+    relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
+    philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
+    revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"
+
+                            "Paradise and groves
+      Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old
+      Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
+      A history only of departed things,
+      Or a mere fiction of what never was?"
+
+"Nature" is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters,
+which might almost as well have been called cantos.
+
+Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with
+which the aspects of nature inspired him. He had recently for the first
+time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the
+planetary influences above, beneath, around him. The air of the country
+intoxicated him. There are sentences in "Nature" which are as exalted
+as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been
+etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of
+his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. Yet underlying these
+excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured
+the anxious. The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and
+the stars shone again in quiet reflection.
+
+After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses
+himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes "part or particle of
+God," he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled _Commodity_, the
+ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing
+and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of
+Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," as he has
+called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural
+conveniences.
+
+But "a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love
+of _Beauty_" which is his next subject. There are some touches of
+description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and
+impressions for pictures.
+
+Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be
+found here. Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature. "What is
+common to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."--"Nothing
+is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."--"No
+reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." How easily
+these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems,
+"Each and All," and "The Rhodora." A good deal of his philosophy comes
+out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:--
+
+    "Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for
+    the universe; God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty are
+    but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not
+    ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not
+    alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a
+    part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of
+    Nature.".
+
+In the "Rhodora" the flower is made to answer that
+
+  "Beauty is its own excuse for being."
+
+In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse
+itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper
+than itself.
+
+He passes next to a consideration of _Language_. Words are signs of
+natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular
+spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very
+profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in
+which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become
+transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature.
+
+    "A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual
+    processes, will find that always a material image, more or less
+    luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought,
+    which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and
+    brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories."
+
+From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful
+mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material
+images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves
+when great exigencies call for them.
+
+    "The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been
+    nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year,
+    without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson
+    altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long
+    hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in
+    the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their
+    morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the
+    passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again
+    the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and
+    the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
+    infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of
+    power, are put into his hands."
+
+It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say
+that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of
+Wordsworth:--
+
+               "These beauteous forms,
+  Through a long absence, have not been to me
+  As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
+  But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
+  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
+  In hours of weariness sensations sweet
+  Felt in the blood and felt along the heart."
+
+It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may
+have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the
+comparison.
+
+In _Discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence
+of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will.
+Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp,
+because
+
+    "Time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"The moral
+    law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the
+    circumference."--"All things with which we deal preach to us.
+    What is a farm but a mute gospel?"--"From the child's successive
+    possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'Thy
+    will be done!' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under
+    his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the
+    whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character."
+
+The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to.
+He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. When a
+friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with
+sweet and solid wisdom "it is a sign to us that his office is closing,
+and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time." This
+thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles,
+which occurred a few months before "Nature" was published. He had
+already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some
+recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "To a man
+laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
+Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has
+just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down
+over less worth in the population." This was the first effect of the
+loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders
+events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first.
+
+The chapter on _Idealism_ must be read by all who believe themselves
+capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment
+of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the
+existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical
+inquiries." The most essential statement is this:--
+
+    "It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World,
+    that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a
+    certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon,
+    man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test
+    the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the
+    impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what
+    difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or
+    some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?"
+
+We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like
+that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which
+cheat the senses by false appearances.
+
+The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities
+between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The
+philosopher pursues Truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones
+the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought."
+Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature
+and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts
+Nature."--"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"Michael Angelo said of
+external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses
+the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not
+undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed
+understanding." "I have no hostility to Nature," he says, "but a
+child's love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and
+melons."--But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is
+phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the
+world in God,"--as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant
+eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
+
+The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the
+next chapter, which has for its title _Spirit_.
+
+Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the
+demands of the spirit. "It leaves God out of me."--Of these three
+questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory
+answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a
+substance.
+
+    "But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many
+    truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn
+    that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread
+    universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or
+    power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all
+    things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that
+    behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is
+    one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from
+    without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through
+    ourselves."--"As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the
+    bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at
+    his need, inexhaustible power."
+
+Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a
+"creator in the finite."
+
+    "As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more
+    evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from
+    God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer
+    run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us."
+
+All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next
+chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.
+
+This next and last chapter is entitled _Prospects_. He begins with
+a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction,
+undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught
+sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the
+"imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In
+a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for
+the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all--or most of us,
+certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more
+of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and
+to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the
+realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert's
+"Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air
+of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature
+which a certain poet sang to me."--"A man is a god in ruins."--"Man is
+the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He
+filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the
+sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--But he no longer
+fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop."
+Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct."
+Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England
+Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the
+Mount: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect."
+The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us,
+"Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to
+the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." The
+seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, "There
+shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." The sage of
+Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "A correspondent revolution in
+things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable
+appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons,
+enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New
+Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the "Revelation." He
+found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. Yet,
+considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble
+imagery and wonderful beauty. "Nature" is the Book of Revelation of our
+Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a
+poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its
+pantheistic character, as Wordsworth's "Lines composed near Tintern
+Abbey" had been long before. But here and there it found devout readers
+who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical
+beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the "Democratic Review" in
+terms of enthusiastic admiration.
+
+Mr. Bowen, the Professor of Natural Theology and Moral Philosophy
+in Harvard University, treated this singular semi-philosophical,
+semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "Christian Examiner,"
+headed "Transcendentalism," and published in the January number for
+1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his
+subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the
+acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations
+between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article.
+The professor turns the book over and over,--inspects it from plastron
+to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes
+successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound
+philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by
+obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more
+than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after
+some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily
+agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:--
+
+    "On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the
+    criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only
+    allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in
+    itself."
+
+Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837:--
+
+    "Your little azure-colored 'Nature' gave me true satisfaction. I
+    read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a
+    sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back.
+    You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it
+    rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build
+    whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the
+    true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a
+    man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look
+    out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear
+    for the _Ewigen Melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and
+    utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to
+    be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a
+    kind of attempt to write down."
+
+The first edition of "Nature" had prefixed to it the following words
+from Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last
+thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not
+know." This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:--
+
+  "A subtle chain of countless rings
+  The next unto the farthest brings;
+  The eye reads omens where it goes,
+  And speaks all languages the rose;
+  And striving to be man, the worm
+  Mounts through all the spires of form."
+
+The copy of "Nature" from which I take these lines, his own, of course,
+like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was
+printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin's
+"Origin of Species," twenty years and more before the publication of
+"The Descent of Man." But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844,
+had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems
+as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does
+not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to
+catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in
+the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than
+the naturalist's theory that the progenitor of the human race was an
+acephalous mollusk. "I will not be sworn," says Benedick, "but love may
+transform me to an oyster." For "love" read science.
+
+Unity in variety, "_il piu nell uno_" symbolism of Nature and its
+teachings, generation of phenomena,--appearances,--from spirit, to
+which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and
+elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may
+be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an
+aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome,--a
+stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of New England
+scholastic intelligence. But here and there it found a reader to whom it
+was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation,--
+
+                   "The golden key
+  Which opes the palace of eternity,"
+
+inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth,
+because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through
+the purification of their own souls.
+
+Next to "Nature" in the series of his collected publications comes "The
+American Scholar. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+at Cambridge, August 31, 1837."
+
+The Society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the
+uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that
+philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the
+annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many
+distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual
+addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest.
+Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any
+former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured
+in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded
+and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what
+enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"
+
+Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas
+found expression in it. This was to be expected in an address delivered
+before such an audience. Every real thinker's world of thought has its
+centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle
+round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and
+then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through
+those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture;
+for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become
+atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It
+begins with a note like a trumpet call.
+
+    "Thus far," he says, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign
+    of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to
+    give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
+    indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when
+    it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard
+    intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and
+    fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better
+    than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our
+    long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
+    close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot
+    always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events,
+    actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can
+    doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in
+    the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers
+    announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?"
+
+Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was
+in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into
+fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. The fable covers the
+doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial
+manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole
+man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many
+faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is
+one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and
+strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach,
+an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing,
+into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute
+book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship."
+
+This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted
+by omnivorous old Burton: "_Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes
+hominis_." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making.
+It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing
+the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled
+in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a
+fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's
+time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found
+cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when
+in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special
+acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of
+men's thoughts and working faculties.
+
+    "In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
+    intellect. In the right state he is _Man thinking_. In the
+    degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a
+    mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
+    In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is
+    continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory
+    pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites."
+
+Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature
+upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his
+previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of
+the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence.
+"Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is
+hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is
+just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to
+give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel.
+
+    "Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation
+    for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
+    this."
+
+When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to
+become an object of idolatrous regard.
+
+    "Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The
+    sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the
+    incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this
+    book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged.
+    Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not
+    by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set
+    out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle.
+    Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to
+    accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given;
+    forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in
+    libraries when they wrote these books.--One must he an inventor to
+    read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth
+    of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'--When the
+    mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book
+    we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is
+    doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the
+    world."
+
+It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of
+books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him.
+
+    "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.
+    Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen
+    into truth.--The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action
+    past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the
+    intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this
+    by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is
+    converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours."
+
+Emerson does not use the words "unconscious cerebration," but these
+last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. The beautiful
+paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration
+of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so
+Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were
+his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with
+him, at least through the pages of this discourse. The reader shall have
+the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to.
+
+    "There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not,
+    sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by
+    soaring from our body into the empyrean.
+
+    "Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and
+    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;
+he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is
+to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of
+humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather
+confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:--
+
+    "The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
+    ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the
+    hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We
+    have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of
+    the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative,
+    tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of
+    this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There
+    is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant."
+
+The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted.
+
+    "What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young
+    men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not
+    yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his
+    instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."
+
+Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was
+created to bear.
+
+   "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
+    we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first
+    time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the
+    Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
+
+This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence.
+Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel
+Adams supported the affirmative of the question, "Whether it be lawful
+to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be
+preserved." It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there.
+The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was
+startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the
+firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts
+suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic
+illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the
+grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so
+stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet
+had been proclaiming to them "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever
+forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker
+it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more
+like that of immediate inspiration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody.
+
+
+Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an
+Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,
+which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a
+controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus
+when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest
+and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual
+consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for
+the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.
+
+He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the
+change of an expression:--
+
+    "In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath
+    of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with
+    fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and
+    sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new
+    hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
+    Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost
+    spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge
+    globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and
+    prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn."
+
+How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear,
+and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased
+attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed
+the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and
+milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the
+smell of Lebanon." And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when
+it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did
+not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from
+the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of
+Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But "when
+Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and
+cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was
+consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." Such was probably the fate
+of many a copy of this famous discourse.
+
+It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of
+Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been
+applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this
+new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this
+alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the
+theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that
+it is read as calmly to-day as a common "Election Sermon," if such are
+ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the
+reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and
+its tendencies.
+
+The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty,
+deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws
+which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and
+illustration of this mind. What am I? What is?--are questions always
+asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.
+
+But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man
+is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and
+weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
+presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately
+stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in
+each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The
+intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of
+the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we
+associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,
+the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into
+hell."
+
+These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the
+world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one
+mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of
+the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks
+good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being
+shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute
+badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms
+him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then
+deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom."
+
+    "This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively
+    creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest
+    in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in
+    Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt,
+    in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental
+    genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men
+    found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
+    mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the
+    history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
+    infusion."
+
+But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition.
+What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject
+it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the
+church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the
+doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of
+voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul."
+
+The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity
+and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by
+the discourse:--
+
+    "Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with
+    open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,
+    ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
+    Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was
+    true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in
+    man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.
+    He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through
+    me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
+    thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion
+    did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
+    following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear
+    to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this
+    high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This
+    was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say
+    he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his
+    rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not
+    built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a
+    Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He
+    spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and
+    all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the
+    character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian
+    churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one
+    with the blowing clover and the falling rain."
+
+He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of
+historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive,
+the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the
+Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us.
+"To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The
+preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies;
+they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and
+peculiarity.
+
+Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of
+Christ is that the Moral Nature--the Law of Laws--is not explored as the
+fountain of the established teaching in society. "Men have come to speak
+of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were
+dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its
+fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the
+assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is
+closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing
+him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our
+theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not
+was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like
+Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost."
+
+When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the
+"practical application," some of his young hearers must have been
+startled at the style of his address.
+
+    "Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all
+    conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it
+    first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and
+    money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that
+    you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the
+    immeasurable mind."
+
+Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of
+Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and
+secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but
+with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed
+an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed
+as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was
+assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom
+generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity,
+rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same
+divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with
+whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words
+carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the
+spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must
+have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses
+they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one
+having authority, and not as the Scribes.'"
+
+Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its
+doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ
+of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed
+and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in
+which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson's
+discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of
+Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer:--
+
+    "What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I
+    might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known
+    opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time,
+    and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and
+    presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of
+    dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is
+    perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse,
+    and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very
+    important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the
+    nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my
+    opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would
+    rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise.
+    Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as
+    it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not,
+    be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished
+    by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the
+    'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I
+    heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and
+    love."
+
+Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of
+September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the
+idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson's philosophy, and
+sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of
+which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings
+of that most excellent and truly apostolic man.
+
+To this letter Emerson sent the following reply:--
+
+    CONCORD, October 8, 1838.
+
+    "MY DEAR SIR,--I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter
+    of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right
+    manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it
+    assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps I am not so quick to see it
+    as writers generally,--certainly I did not feel any disposition
+    to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your
+    thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think
+    of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men
+    at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of
+    criticism. I have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical
+    writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to
+    rail,--lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed
+    near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the
+    notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated
+    fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no
+    scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I
+    could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not
+    possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on
+    which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments
+    are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in
+    telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it
+    is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see
+    that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the
+    present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly
+    raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I
+    advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make
+    good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such
+    thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have
+    always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the
+    page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing
+    whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the
+    same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that
+    my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society,
+    loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my
+    conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in
+    motley,--and so I am your affectionate servant," etc.
+
+The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no
+part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his
+office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just
+given,--"Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see." But among his
+listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution,
+not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose
+voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the
+long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--Theodore
+Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the
+conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present
+day.
+
+In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course
+of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten
+Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV.
+Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty;
+X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false
+with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life."
+Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures
+or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in "Lectures
+and Biographical Sketches;" and "The Comic" in "Letters and Social
+Aims."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my
+kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke.
+
+The first letter was accompanied by the Poem "The Humble-bee," which
+was first published by Mr. Clarke in the "Western Messenger," from the
+autograph copy, which begins "Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has
+a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected
+works.
+
+    CONCORD, December 7, 1838.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my
+    friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me
+    in the spring if I hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. I
+    remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of
+    yours that the verses, "Take, O take those lips away," were not
+    Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both
+    together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that
+    stanza. I know it is in "Rollo," but it is in "Measure for Measure"
+    also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and
+    critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and
+    those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all
+    for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not,
+    and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we _who_
+    sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and
+    servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
+
+    CONCORD, February 27, 1839.
+
+    MY DEAR SIR,--I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an
+    answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are
+    quite welcome to the lines "To the Rhodora;" but I think they need
+    the superscription ["Lines on being asked 'Whence is the Flower?'"].
+    Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world," etc] I send you a
+    corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them
+    that I think you must read them once again with your critical
+    spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years
+    ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury
+    called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper
+    than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and
+    am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic
+    date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry,
+    and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any
+    verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these
+    juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses,
+    that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up
+    old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely
+    as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to
+    music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe
+    I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than
+    _afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I
+    may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my
+    MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of
+    a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily
+    treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a
+    year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard
+    to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I
+    remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it;
+    but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall
+    have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself
+    of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle
+    Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent
+    spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he
+    writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring
+    lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind
+    enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done
+    by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to
+    betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any
+    line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the
+    universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the
+    old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you
+    will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every
+    possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I
+    heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year,
+    and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men
+    are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted
+    service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that
+    concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail,
+    of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to
+    trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad
+    to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson's
+    new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers,
+    aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along
+    the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but
+    I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.
+
+    Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery
+of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an
+Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor
+of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have
+been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to
+which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of
+Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious
+old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or
+questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which
+they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous
+repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy
+old dogmatists as dry as ever.
+
+Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling
+at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the
+speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his
+audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of
+the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen,
+provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of
+the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver.
+Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental
+conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place
+and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the
+sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony
+between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary
+colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side
+that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go
+anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief
+from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner,
+such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to
+quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.
+
+The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the
+same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence
+as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem
+misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these
+discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his
+complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned
+its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which
+freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and
+all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find
+some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative
+illustration.
+
+"Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a
+prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and
+earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet,
+he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled
+the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are
+indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery
+productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought."
+For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie
+all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his
+confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual
+independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history
+and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits
+a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:--
+
+    "An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
+    injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
+    possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything
+    that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that
+    he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a
+    grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny
+    to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is
+    piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_
+    annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him
+    talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved."
+
+But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of
+their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be
+forever blighted.
+
+From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his
+tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied.
+"Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of
+Nature to us is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I
+give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" And in the same way he would
+have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to
+the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution
+of things. "He must embrace solitude as a bride." Not superstitiously,
+but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all
+that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of
+the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst
+of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it:--
+
+    "You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear
+    that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What
+    is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask, with
+    derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore
+    truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say,
+    'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early
+    visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and
+    romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then
+    dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and
+    poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand
+    thousand men.--Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from
+    every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to
+    show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you
+    renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for
+    the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has
+    its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world,
+    and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as
+    shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all
+    men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."
+
+The next Address Emerson delivered was "The Method of Nature," before
+the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11,
+1841.
+
+In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: "As usual at this
+season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an
+oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges
+nine days hence.... My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches
+acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done,
+what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent,
+sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and
+stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted
+the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced
+in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.
+
+The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is
+"The Method of Nature." He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments
+and promises of this literary Anniversary.
+
+    "The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the
+    foundations of the castle."--"We hear too much of the results of
+    machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle
+    folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid
+    wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the
+    incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes
+    of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the
+    bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the
+    farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and
+    feature of man."--"While the multitude of men degrade each other,
+    and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a
+    bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself."
+
+I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than
+in any of those which preceded it.
+
+    "Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this
+    saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with
+    whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think
+    meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his
+    ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?"
+
+That there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true
+wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it,
+that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force,"
+that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into
+character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in
+this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how
+far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few
+broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn.
+We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this
+discourse on "The Method of Nature," as the pictorial beauty of
+their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson's
+speculations is well shown in this paragraph:--
+
+    "We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not
+    thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for
+    our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring
+    reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the
+    receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy."--"It is God
+    in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In
+    the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this
+    fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are
+    mine; and all mine are thine.'"
+
+We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same
+paragraph, "I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so
+sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his
+tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond
+explanation."
+
+    "We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency
+    appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is
+    growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else;
+    is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be
+    man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring,
+    a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit
+    and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that
+    it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends,
+    but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no
+    private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by
+    one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life
+    which in conscious beings we call ecstasy."
+
+Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for
+the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.
+
+    "The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify
+    the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of
+    stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!
+    thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning
+    and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry
+    of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of
+    right and wrong."
+
+His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the
+extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:--
+
+    "We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
+    that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
+    house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal
+    activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a
+    natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this
+    one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist,
+    cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that
+    they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they
+    were."
+
+It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity
+recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which
+is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many
+expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and
+vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history
+of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was
+only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold
+benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would
+feel that they lost by his counsels.
+
+    "The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
+    Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
+    generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
+    themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to
+    which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if
+    pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence
+    to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
+    objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible
+    to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never
+    touched; always giving health."
+
+Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses
+and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many
+organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their
+views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their
+special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in
+the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the
+Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he
+preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have
+a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--That he cannot give up
+labor without suffering some loss of power. "How can the man who has
+learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall
+we say all we think?--Perhaps with his own hands.--Let us learn the
+meaning of economy.--Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast
+fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house
+with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I
+may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and
+road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is
+frugality for gods and heroes."
+
+This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This "house with one
+apartment" was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April
+of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on
+intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him
+that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or
+whether this idea was working in Thoreau's mind and was suggested to
+Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed
+so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau
+entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the
+philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others
+carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common
+sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the
+conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to
+prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends
+"Teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more
+commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.
+
+"The Americans have many virtues," he says in this Address, "but they
+have not Faith and Hope." Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the
+burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by "a
+great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual
+and the actual world.
+
+In the "Lecture on the Times" he shows very clearly the effect which a
+nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves
+Reformers had upon him.
+
+    "The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice,
+    but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are
+    quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no
+    more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they
+    reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal
+    and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness
+    that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who
+    are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of
+    mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as
+    the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work
+    of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him;
+    but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done
+    in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management,
+    by tactics and clamor."
+
+All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by
+the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson
+had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser
+and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in
+view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination
+and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts
+that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes
+it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the
+dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who
+sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any
+rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of
+those daring images which defy the critics.
+
+    "As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain,
+    the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall
+    eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we
+    shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds."
+
+He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in
+his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get
+rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been
+accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence
+covers with its soothing tribute!
+
+    "All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame
+    what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but
+    of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment
+    man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised
+    and discredited angels."
+
+The Lecture called "The Transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at
+with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly
+applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples.
+It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and
+accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together
+very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this
+comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson
+explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of
+thoughts cast in a new mould.
+
+    "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism:
+    Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever
+    divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class
+    founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
+    beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class
+    perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us
+    representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they
+    cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the
+    force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on
+    the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
+    individual culture."
+
+    "The materialist takes his departure from the external world,
+    and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his
+    departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an
+    appearance.--His thought, that is the Universe."
+
+The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of
+"Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the
+periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were
+in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of
+it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these "same
+Transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "The Dial," which was
+their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than
+from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any
+other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and
+the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best
+witness.
+
+In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he sketches
+in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the
+development of the "new views" above mentioned. "There are always two
+parties," he says, "the party of the Past and the party of the Future;
+the Establishment and the Movement."
+
+About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity
+manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in
+literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the
+genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early
+causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance
+to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who
+returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward
+Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus
+Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great
+orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life
+in a few old men's memories. It is therefore with delight that one who
+remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his
+full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant,
+grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal
+vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the
+harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the
+glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is
+enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but
+many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great
+master of academic oratory.
+
+Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to
+the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of
+science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the
+influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate
+community, the writings of Channing,--he left it to others to say of
+Emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it
+so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the
+ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at
+organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came
+together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins
+Warren's,--Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full
+of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on
+smoothly enough with the usual small talk,--
+
+    "When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster
+    supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before
+    Dr. Warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to
+    establish aesthetic society in Boston.
+
+    "Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs.
+    Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies
+    and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.--Margaret Fuller,
+    George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr.
+    Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others
+    gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at
+    each other's houses in a serious conversation."
+
+With them was another, "a pure Idealist,--who read Plato as an
+equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were
+intellectual." He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to
+say:--
+
+    "I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston
+    that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain
+    opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy,
+    and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite
+    innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or
+    three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual
+    vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge
+    and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and
+    sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but
+    had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary.
+    I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or
+    sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody
+    knows by whom, or when it was applied."
+
+Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to
+suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.
+
+    "In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human
+    thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any
+    presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts
+    it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this
+    largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist, who thanks
+    no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his
+    conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its
+    reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has
+    done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
+
+    "These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no
+    compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one
+    compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
+    exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
+    in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
+    friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
+    what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
+    service to the race of man."
+
+The person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in
+nature," is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known
+colloquially as a "crank." The person who does not thank, by word or
+look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or
+water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a
+churl.
+
+Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or
+churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some
+of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing
+machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed
+more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that
+their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What
+forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What
+great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you
+performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little
+real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock
+and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled
+no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist"
+dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as
+that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.
+
+In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious
+persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader
+must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and
+not a scoffer:--
+
+    "They are not good citizens, not good members of society:
+    unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens;
+    they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public
+    religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions,
+    foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the
+    temperance society. They do not even like to vote."
+
+After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual
+beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this
+is what they have to say:--
+
+    "'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you
+    want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the
+    labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust:
+    but we do not like your work.'
+
+    'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'
+
+    'We have none.'
+
+    'What will you do, then?' cries the world.
+
+    'We will wait.'
+
+    'How long?'
+
+    'Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.'
+
+    'But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.'
+
+    'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but
+    I will not move until I have the highest command.'"
+
+And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his
+reasons for doing nothing.
+
+It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is
+easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the
+subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life
+and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of
+themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress
+for indolence than "the Everlasting No." The chimney-corner is the true
+arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their
+all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among
+his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a
+fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow.
+Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on
+the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was
+picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of
+themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of
+thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.
+
+Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that
+delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he
+makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.
+
+    "Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must
+    behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet
+    accrue from them to the state. Besides our coarse implements, there
+    must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and
+    telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers,
+    there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges
+    and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct,
+    who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the
+    by-stander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and
+    monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the
+    electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks
+    the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not
+    be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare
+    and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and
+    verify our bearings from superior chronometers."
+
+It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which
+Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were
+naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle,
+and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical
+judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew
+a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:--
+
+    "There has sprung up in Boston," says Dickens, in his "American
+    Notes," "a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On
+    inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I
+    was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be
+    certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this
+    elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the
+    Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I
+    should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+    This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much
+    that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying
+    so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold.
+    Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has
+    not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not
+    least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to
+    detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe.
+    And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a
+    Transcendentalist."
+
+In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The
+Conservative." It was a time of great excitement among the members of
+that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson
+show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more
+beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference
+to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the
+conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as
+well as that of the other. "Conservatism tends to universal seeming and
+treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers
+govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will
+fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a
+general law without a particular application,--law for all that does
+not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine
+resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated
+self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining
+and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so,
+whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed
+of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an
+impossible whole."
+
+He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair
+play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be
+unjust to the present or the past.
+
+We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that
+Dr. Charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because
+he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue
+a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a
+spiritual philosophy." Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in
+a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this
+country, Emerson says:--
+
+    "It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which
+    we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would
+    do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be
+    made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned
+    to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called 'The
+    Transcendentalist;' or, 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like....
+    Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous
+    contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured."
+
+The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to
+know as "The Dial!" A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry
+old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be
+content with Carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as
+thus:--
+
+    "'The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it
+    may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be
+    things not dreamt of over in that _Transoceanic_ parish! I shall
+    certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure
+    forerunner of things better."
+
+There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the
+Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the
+close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest
+which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more
+deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a
+possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm.
+They were to a certain extent synchronous,--the Magazine beginning in
+July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in
+1841, and breaking up in 1847.
+
+"The Dial" was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by
+Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse,
+among them "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "Chardon Street
+and Bible Convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "The
+Problem," "Woodnotes," "The Sphinx," "Fate." The other principal writers
+were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman
+Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot
+Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs.
+Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the
+contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest.
+It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and
+enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard
+a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and
+curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond
+the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number.
+Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her
+part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with
+his "trip-hammer" in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems
+in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others,
+whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are
+still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent
+contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to "The Dial," with all its
+crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the "Anthology."
+Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the
+pledge of a better season.
+
+We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence
+between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before
+the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge
+of our _young people_ than any he has had. It is true that unfledged
+writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more
+interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth
+of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that
+intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the
+inspiration of these "young people" to whom Emerson refers. He has to
+apologize for the first number. "It is not yet much," he says; "indeed,
+though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should
+be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake
+of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--The
+Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and
+whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know." They did
+print "The Problem." There were also some fragments of criticism from
+the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called "The Last
+Farewell," by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson's
+"May-day and other Pieces."
+
+On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple
+of months, Emerson writes:--
+
+    "Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism;
+    and the _Dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains
+    scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored
+    by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least
+    betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public."
+
+Carlyle finds the second number of "The Dial" better than the first, and
+tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with
+his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson's
+readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for
+the most part. "But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only
+a body, which want means a great deal." And again, "'The Dial,' too, it
+is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_
+body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man_, with color in the
+cheeks of him and a coat on his back?"
+
+Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the "dubious
+approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he
+found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object
+of tenderness and religion." So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the
+end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. "I
+cannot bid you quit 'The Dial,'" says Carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is
+Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge_, nevertheless."
+
+In the next letter he says:--
+
+    "I love your 'Dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem
+    to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present
+    Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage,
+    and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such
+    like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of
+    perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what
+    impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the
+    fore-hoof."
+
+A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not
+always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.
+
+To all Carlyle's complaints of "The Dial's" short-comings Emerson did
+not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty,
+with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.
+
+    "For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write
+    as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of
+    these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary
+    history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite
+    ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make
+    confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish
+    to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and
+    evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they
+    reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer
+    in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come,
+    who will easily do the unknown deed."
+
+"All the bright boys and girls in New England," and "'The Dial' dying of
+inanition!" In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:--
+
+    "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social
+    reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his
+    waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live
+    cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and
+    scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.
+    One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and
+    another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on
+    the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope."
+
+Mr. Ripley's project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better
+known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this
+undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would
+have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a
+moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "It was a noble and
+generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better
+living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without
+centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual
+sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our
+educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts."
+The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm
+experiment in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," its founder,
+and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential
+relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "Historic
+Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the
+ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the
+sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he
+says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and
+lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to
+the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in
+ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen
+without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward
+laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest
+humorists?
+
+This is his benevolent summing up:--
+
+    "The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made
+    what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All
+    comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of
+    residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine,
+    variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means
+    of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade,
+    did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine.
+    There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the
+    associates, education; to many, the most important period of their
+    life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with
+    the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of
+    letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were
+    always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room.
+    It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of
+    Reason in a patty-pan."
+
+The public edifice called the "Phalanstery" was destroyed by fire
+in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon
+afterwards it was dissolved.
+
+
+Section 2. Emerson's first volume of his collected Essays was published
+in 1841. In the reprint it contains the following Essays: History;
+Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence;
+Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. "The Young American,"
+which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844.
+
+Once accustomed to Emerson's larger formulae we can to a certain extent
+project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. But we
+cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious
+illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the
+Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by
+the teachable disciple. The reader must be prepared for occasional
+extravagances. Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays,
+for instance. "Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts,
+namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative,
+history is to be read and written." When we come to the application,
+in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such
+discourse as this? The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one
+upon the other, but their sense is continuous.
+
+    "I hold an actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall,
+    see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on
+    the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these
+    worlds of life?--How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and
+    Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are
+    Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?
+    Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau
+    seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the
+    stevedore, the porter?"
+
+The connection of ideas is not obvious. One can hardly help being
+reminded of a certain great man's Rochester speech as commonly reported
+by the story-teller. "Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall
+a hundred and fifty feet high! Greece in her palmiest days never had a
+waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on! No
+people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty
+feet high!"
+
+We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome
+and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux. But the underlying idea of the
+interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous.
+Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that "every history should
+be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and
+looked at facts as symbols."
+
+We have become familiar with his doctrine of "Self-Reliance," which is
+the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he
+always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks
+authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom.
+It is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme
+self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his
+proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.
+
+    "Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the
+    common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a
+    task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
+    that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
+    that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is
+    to others!"
+
+"Compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be
+praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from
+a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that
+judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful,
+and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John
+Bunyan's view:--
+
+  "A Christian man is never long at ease,
+  When one fright's gone, another doth him seize."
+
+Emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and
+trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble
+scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which
+would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.
+
+The Essay on "Spiritual Laws" is full of pithy sayings:--
+
+    "As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as
+    there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect
+    virtue.--A man passes for that he is worth.--The ancestor of every
+    action is a thought.--To think is to act.--Let a man believe in
+    God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul
+    incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some
+    Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour
+    floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and
+    scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top
+    and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms;
+    until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some
+    other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and
+    head of all living nature."
+
+This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud
+of George Herbert's. The Essay on "Love" is poetical, but the three
+poems, "Initial," "Daemonic," and "Celestial Love" are more nearly equal
+to his subject than his prose.
+
+There is a passage in the Lecture on "Friendship" which suggests
+some personal relation of Emerson's about which we cannot help being
+inquisitive:--
+
+    "It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
+    friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
+    other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
+    not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
+    wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
+    reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
+    companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of
+    treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness,
+    a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for
+    infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both."
+
+Was he thinking of his relations with Carlyle? It is a curious subject
+of speculation what would have been the issue if Carlyle had come to
+Concord and taken up his abode under Emerson's most hospitable roof.
+"You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house." How could
+they have got on together? Emerson was well-bred, and Carlyle was
+wanting in the social graces. "Come rest in this bosom" is a sweet air,
+heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season
+of close proximity, by that other strain,--
+
+  "No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole!
+  Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!"
+
+But Emerson may have been thinking of some very different person,
+perhaps some "crude and cold companion" among his disciples, who was not
+equal to the demands of friendly intercourse.
+
+He discourses wisely on "Prudence," a virtue which he does not claim for
+himself, and nobly on "Heroism," which was a shining part of his own
+moral and intellectual being.
+
+The points which will be most likely to draw the reader's attention are
+the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America,
+for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our
+love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all
+one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of
+sad sincerity painful to recognize.
+
+    "Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates
+    Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and
+    forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of
+    humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the
+    good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the
+    natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of
+    his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that
+    will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death
+    impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps
+    of absolute and inextinguishable being."
+
+In the following Essay, "The Over-Soul," Emerson has attempted the
+impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his
+rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his
+readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of
+reaching, he says,--
+
+    "Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to
+    those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare
+    not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall
+    short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
+    their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising
+    of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use
+    sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what
+    hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of
+    the Highest Law."
+
+"The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-_flow_ of a spiritual
+imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous,
+God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms
+borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute
+in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those
+applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols,
+varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual
+intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts
+and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to
+Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according
+to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words,
+and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving
+in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of
+consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea,
+which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision.
+Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon
+Him whom "no man can see and live."
+
+But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled
+"Circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against
+utterances which he will not defend. There can be no doubt that he would
+have confessed as much with reference to "The Over-Soul" as he has
+confessed with regard to "Circles," the Essay which follows "The
+Over-Soul."
+
+    "I am not careful to justify myself.... But lest I should mislead
+    any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the
+    reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value
+    on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
+    pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all
+    things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply
+    experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back."
+
+Perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of Emerson, we might
+borrow Goethe's language about Spinoza, as expressing the feeling with
+which we are left.
+
+    "I am reading Spinoza with Frau von Stein. I feel myself very near
+    to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine.
+
+    "I cannot say that I ever read Spinoza straight through, that at any
+    time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has
+    stood clear in view before me. But when I look into him I seem to
+    understand him,--that is, he always appears to me consistent with
+    himself, and I can always gather from him very salutary influences
+    for my own way of feeling and acting."
+
+Emerson would not have pretended that he was always "consistent with
+himself," but these "salutary influences," restoring, enkindling,
+vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess,
+like Dr. Walter Channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these,
+as he listened to them in a lecture, "made his head ache."
+
+The three essays which follow "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect,"
+"Art," would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we
+should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom.
+
+    "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
+    all things are at risk."
+
+    "God enters by a private door into every individual."
+
+    "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
+    which you please,--you can never have both."
+
+    "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must
+    carry it with us, or we find it not."
+
+But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from
+Babylon.
+
+Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to
+Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838.
+
+    "I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's
+    earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty
+    young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for
+    comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe,
+    $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no
+    other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which
+    was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a
+    rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have
+    food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich
+    no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise
+    man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend,
+    because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not
+    wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife
+    Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and
+    keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest,
+    most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal
+    preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and
+    sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and
+    three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my
+    household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system,
+    and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+    result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely
+    repellent particle."
+
+A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his
+life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: "My little boy
+is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love."
+
+Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once
+more:--
+
+    "My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages
+    by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little
+    boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You
+    can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such
+    a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a
+    very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to
+    tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace
+    and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a
+    perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever
+    child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by
+    scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one
+    girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I
+    shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I
+    should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so
+    gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible
+    and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet
+    sustain."
+
+This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic
+of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody,"--a lament not unworthy of comparison
+with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's
+well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the
+place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.[1]--Publication of the Second
+Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.--Character.
+--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist and Realist.--New
+England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second Visit to England.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: These two addresses are to be found in the first and
+eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of
+Emerson's works, namely, "Nature, Addresses, and Lectures," and
+"Miscellanies."]
+
+Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and
+feeling; American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism; American, so
+far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. He believed in
+American institutions, he trusted the future of the American race. In
+the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered
+February 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent
+patriot could ask. Not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the
+significance of the following contrast.
+
+    "The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest
+    history in the world; but they need all and more than all the
+    resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that
+    country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of
+    society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to
+    avoid it.... It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only
+    say, Let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal
+    institutions.... If only the men are employed in conspiring with the
+    designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we
+    shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others' censures,
+    out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social
+    state than history has recorded."
+
+Thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are
+taken was delivered. The "Young American" of that day is the more than
+middle-aged American of the present. The intellectual independence of
+our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was
+written. But the social alliance between certain classes of Americans
+and English is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the
+wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes
+of the old world. It is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly
+acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired
+fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which
+its representatives are unworthy. The plain and wholesome language of
+Emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. His
+words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following
+the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic,
+bracing, strengthening to the American, who requires to be reminded of
+his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties.
+
+On the first day of August, 1844, Emerson delivered in Concord an
+address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the
+British West India Islands. This discourse would not have satisfied the
+Abolitionists. It was too general in its propositions, full of humane
+and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate
+method of action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson's second series of Essays was published in 1844. There are
+many sayings in the Essay called "The Poet," which are meant for the
+initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read:--
+
+    "All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is
+    the principal event in chronology."
+
+Does this sound wild and extravagant? What were the political ups and
+downs of the Hebrews,--what were the squabbles of the tribes with each
+other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to
+whom we owe the Psalms,--the sweet singer whose voice is still the
+dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind?
+
+The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this
+eloquent apostrophe:--
+
+    "Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or
+    water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight,
+    wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
+    wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
+    into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is
+    Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st
+    walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition
+    inopportune or ignoble."
+
+"Experience" is, as he says himself, but a fragment. It bears marks of
+having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other
+essays. His most important confession is this:--
+
+    "All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I
+    would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly
+    love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my
+    heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in
+    success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from
+    the Eternal."
+
+The Essay on "Character" requires no difficult study, but is well worth
+the trouble of reading. A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone
+and doctrine.
+
+    "Character is Nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it,
+    or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance and of
+    persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all
+    emulation."
+
+    "There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long
+    intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they
+    have been unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an
+    accumulation of that power we consider.
+
+    "The history of those gods and saints which the world has written,
+    and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have
+    exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and
+    who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality
+    of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death
+    which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol
+    for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest
+    fact."
+
+In his Essay on "Manners," Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:--
+
+    "The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and
+    expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner
+    dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions.
+    Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes
+    good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then
+    gentleness.--Power first, or no leading class.--God knows that
+    all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in
+    strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point
+    at original energy.--The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of
+    this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio,
+    Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very
+    carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to
+    value any condition at a high rate.--I could better eat with one
+    who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and
+    unpresentable person.--The person who screams, or uses the
+    superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms
+    to flight.--I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it
+    excels in woman."
+
+So writes Emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which
+seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme.
+
+This essay is plain enough for the least "transcendental" reader.
+Franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of
+many of the qualities which go to the Emersonian ideal of good manners,
+a typical American, equal to his position, always as much so in the
+palaces and salons of Paris as in the Continental Congress, or the
+society of Philadelphia.
+
+"Gifts" is a dainty little Essay with some nice distinctions and some
+hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse:--
+
+    "The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.
+    Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the
+    farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the
+    painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing."
+
+    "Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because
+    they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the
+    utilities of the world.--Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they
+    are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being
+    attached to them."
+
+    "It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning
+    from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very
+    onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally
+    wishes to give you a slap."
+
+Emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the
+tingling effect of a witty over-statement.
+
+We have recognized most of the thoughts in the Essay entitled "Nature,"
+in the previous Essay by the same name, and others which we have passed
+in review. But there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure.
+
+    Here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar:--
+    "Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought
+    again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated,
+    and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of
+    free thought."
+
+And here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this
+Essay:--
+
+    "They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from
+    the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of
+    our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration
+    of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's
+    life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow."
+
+This is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the
+prediction, M. Jules Verne would be the best authority to consult. Poets
+are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative Frenchman
+gave it a name, he would probably call _Onditologie_.
+
+It is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be
+satisfied with the condition of the American political world at the
+present time, or when the Essay on "Politics" was written, some years
+before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many
+respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters
+of the old parties unchanged. This is Emerson's view of them as they
+then were:--
+
+    "Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share
+    the nation between them, I should say that one has the best
+    cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the
+    poet, or the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote
+    with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the
+    abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating
+    in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources
+    of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the
+    so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these
+    liberties. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of
+    democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
+    radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no
+    ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and
+    selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of
+    the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is
+    timid, and merely defensive of property. It indicates no right, it
+    aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous
+    policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor
+    foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor
+    emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the
+    immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any
+    benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate
+    with the resources of the nation."
+
+The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the
+famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find
+a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled "Nominalism and
+Realism." But there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering
+and considering. We have the complaint of the Cambridge "Phi Beta
+Kappa Oration," reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a
+collection of fragmentary men.
+
+As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side
+were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously.
+
+    "In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good
+    deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they
+    round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living.
+
+    "Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in
+    household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees
+    them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind
+    drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion.
+    Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and
+    insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
+    particulars."
+
+_New England Reformers_.--Would any one venture to guess how Emerson
+would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism,
+his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous,
+too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears,
+in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng
+of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites
+many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin?
+
+We must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on
+a Sunday in the year 1844. The Brook Farm experiment was an index of the
+state of mind among one section of the Reformers of whom he was writing.
+To remodel society and the world into a "happy family" was the aim
+of these enthusiasts. Some attacked one part of the old system, some
+another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old
+church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was
+for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was
+meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart
+in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had
+the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he
+was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the
+unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the
+lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and
+women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities.
+He describes these Reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical
+way:--
+
+    "They defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a
+    realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable.
+    What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One
+    apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no
+    man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil;
+    another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink
+    damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death
+    to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made
+    yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he
+    does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element
+    in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No,
+    they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment.
+    Stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us
+    scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of
+    agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny
+    of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox
+    must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the
+    hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk
+    wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect
+    world was to be defended,--that had been too long neglected, and a
+    society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes
+    was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts
+    of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and
+    their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles!"
+
+We have already seen the issue of the famous Brook Farm experiment,
+which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation.
+
+Emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he
+had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing
+impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of
+which he was in no sense responsible.
+
+He says in the lecture we are considering:--
+
+    "These new associations are composed of men and women of superior
+    talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such
+    a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the
+    good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of
+    superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the
+    association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an
+    asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the
+    strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of
+    men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some
+    compromise."
+
+His sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too
+well to believe in a Noah's ark full of idealists.
+
+All this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of
+lectures in Boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in
+and out of New England.
+
+His letters to Carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how
+punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. He
+was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to
+play the part of an accountant.
+
+He speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and
+that some of this company exacted much time and attention,--more than he
+could spare,--is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in
+his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered
+in prose.
+
+In 1846 Emerson's first volume of poems was published. Many of the poems
+had been long before the public--some of the best, as we have seen,
+having been printed in "The Dial." It is only their being brought
+together for the first time which belongs especially to this period,
+and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in
+connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the
+title, "May-Day and other Pieces."
+
+In October, 1847, he left Concord on a second visit to England, which
+will be spoken of in the following chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" Visit to Europe.--England.
+--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published. I. Uses
+of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli."
+
+
+A new periodical publication was begun in Boston in 1847, under the name
+of the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." Emerson wrote the "Editor's
+Address," but took no further active part in it, Theodore Parker being
+the real editor. The last line of this address is characteristic: "We
+rely on the truth for aid against ourselves."
+
+On the 5th of October, 1847, Emerson sailed for Europe on his second
+visit, reaching Liverpool on the 22d of that month. Many of his admirers
+were desirous that he should visit England and deliver some courses of
+lectures. Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions
+during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit
+have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. Mr. Conway
+quotes passages from a letter of Emerson's which show that he had some
+hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be
+heard by the English audiences favorably disposed towards him.
+
+"I feel no call," he said, "to make a visit of literary propagandism in
+England. All my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at
+home." He does not like the idea of "coaxing" or advertising to get
+him an audience. He would like to read lectures before institutions or
+friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. He has had a good many
+decisive tokens of interest from British men and women, but he doubts
+whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps
+in London. It proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire
+to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of
+the kingdom.
+
+From Liverpool he proceeded immediately to Manchester, where Mr. Ireland
+received him at the Victoria station. After spending a few hours with
+him, he went to Chelsea to visit Carlyle, and at the end of a week
+returned to Manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements
+which had been arranged for him. Mr. Ireland's account of Emerson's
+visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons
+is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons
+visited by Emerson. He lectured at Edinburgh, where his liberal way of
+thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. But he
+did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. A young student, Mr. George
+Cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by Mr.
+Ireland, I borrow a single sentence,--one only, but what could a critic
+say more?
+
+Speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he
+says: "In this respect, I take leave to think that Emerson is the most
+mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared."
+Emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never
+addicted. But what would youth be without its extravagances,--its
+preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and
+unstinted admiration?
+
+I need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other
+notabilities whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought "the
+two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and
+De Quincey." His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon
+him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe
+that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of
+his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy
+behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles
+Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous
+vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric
+rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never
+forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long
+endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter,"
+which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would
+have been discordant to Emerson's ears, which were offended by such
+noisy manifestations.
+
+During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished
+him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but
+never printed.
+
+From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for
+publication. These make up the volume entitled "Representative Men,"
+which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its
+contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and
+conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a
+good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical,
+and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men
+considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own
+affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography,
+no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of
+his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not
+Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest
+us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and
+Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we
+see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally,
+unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first
+to recognize.
+
+Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation.
+Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of
+all great men: "The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we
+are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to
+which also Plato was debtor."
+
+Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes "rough and
+smooth," "scourges of God," and "darlings of the human race." He likes
+Julius Caesar, Charles the Fifth, of Spain, Charles the Twelfth, of
+Sweden, Richard Plantagenet, and Bonaparte.
+
+    "I applaud," he says, "a sufficient man, an officer equal
+    to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master
+    standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome,
+    eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination
+    into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff,
+    or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the
+    world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and
+    all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of
+    persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our
+    thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the
+    potentate is nothing.--
+
+    "The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
+    qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less,
+    and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--All that
+    respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the
+    individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a
+    catholic existence."
+
+No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But
+Plato takes the first place in Emerson's gallery of six great personages
+whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says:--
+
+    "Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical
+    compliment to the Koran, when he said, 'Burn the libraries; for
+    their value is in this book.' Out of Plato come all things that are
+    still written and debated among men of thought."--
+
+    "In proportion to the culture of men they become his
+    scholars."--"How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up
+    out of night to be _his men_!--His contemporaries tax him with
+    plagiarism.--But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are
+    praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and
+    Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and
+    every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone
+    quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."
+
+The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when
+he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his
+storehouses.
+
+A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of
+the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples.
+
+The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest
+expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the
+Indian Scriptures. "'The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu,
+who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as
+not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor
+coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are
+others, others; nor am I, I.' As if he had said, 'All is for the soul,
+and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings;
+and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is
+imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" All of which we see
+reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."--"The country of unity, of
+immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in
+abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of
+a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith
+in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius
+of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its
+philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade,
+freedom."--"Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of
+each."
+
+But Emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of
+another,--"The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell
+what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides
+of every great question from him."
+
+The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of
+holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform
+soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,--are
+fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called
+"Plato: New Readings."
+
+Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or,
+the Mystic." The believers in his special communion as a revealer of
+divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The
+believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence
+at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching
+themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,
+which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in
+its bosom." The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims
+put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer.
+"Philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called
+them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will
+not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen
+with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the
+poets, they can take their choice of Emerson's poetical or prose
+estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In
+"The Test," the Muse says:--
+
+  "I hung my verses in the wind,
+  Time and tide their faults may find;
+  All were winnowed through and through,
+  Five lines lasted good and true ...
+  Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
+  Nor time unmake what poets know.
+  Have you eyes to find the five
+  Which five hundred did survive?"
+
+In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets
+referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, _Swedenborg_, and Goethe.
+
+And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that "his
+books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead
+prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird
+ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so
+transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a
+beautiful person, is a kind of warning." Yet Emerson says of him that
+"He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue
+to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature."
+
+Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer,
+he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.
+
+"Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned
+Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for
+Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other
+reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes
+him as being.
+
+    "There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never
+    a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never
+    insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that
+    he cares for.
+
+    "The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.
+    I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the
+    language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and
+    they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.--
+
+    "Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and
+    himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests,
+    or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish
+    to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or
+    time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes
+    pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we
+    pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he
+    rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones
+    underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration;
+    contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.
+    There is but one exception,--in his love for Socrates. In speaking
+    of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion."
+
+The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same
+characteristics. Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he
+must have found a great relief in getting into "the middle of the road"
+with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often
+led him round to the point from which he started.
+
+As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative
+and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the
+Essay itself.
+
+In writing of "Shakespeare; or, the Poet," Emerson naturally gives
+expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of
+poetry.
+
+"Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
+originality." A poet has "a heart in unison with his time and
+country."--"There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production,
+but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions,
+and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of
+in his times."
+
+When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of
+amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and
+library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd
+of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a
+great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time
+to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: "A great poet who
+appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which
+is anywhere radiating." Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was
+their wit. "Chaucer is a huge borrower." Emerson gives a list of authors
+from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have
+learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury's which I have had the
+privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us.
+
+The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing,
+especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough.
+He was arguing in his own cause,--not defending himself, as if there
+were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim
+of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their
+acquisitions.
+
+    "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
+    tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us."--"Shakespeare is as
+    much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the
+    crowd. A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and
+    think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of
+    doors."
+
+After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare,
+he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares "the
+halfness and imperfection of humanity."
+
+    "He converted the elements which waited on his command into
+    entertainment. He was master of the revels to mankind."
+
+And so, after this solemn verdict on Shakespeare, after looking at the
+forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet,
+Israelite, German, and Swede, he says: "It must be conceded that these
+are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet-priest, who
+shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves
+with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with
+equal inspiration."
+
+It is not to be expected that Emerson should have much that is new to
+say about "Napoleon; or, the Man of the World."
+
+The stepping-stones of this Essay are easy to find:--
+
+    "The instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle
+    class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate
+    democrat.--
+
+    "Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his
+    fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers." As Plato borrowed,
+    as Shakespeare borrowed, as Mirabeau "plagiarized every good
+    thought, every good word that was spoken in France," so Napoleon is
+    not merely "representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other
+    minds."
+
+He was "a man of stone and iron,"--equipped for his work by nature as
+Sallust describes Catiline as being. "He had a directness of action
+never before combined with such comprehension. Here was a man who in
+each moment and emergency knew what to do next. He saw only the object;
+the obstacle must give way."
+
+"When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and
+satisfied."--
+
+"I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern
+society.--He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the
+internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the
+opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse."
+
+But he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and
+finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson
+gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation
+superfluous:--
+
+    "In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power
+    and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but
+    with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
+    Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
+
+    "So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the
+    power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry
+    of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; '_Assez de
+    Bonaparte_.'"
+
+    It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death
+    we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible
+    satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by
+    her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks
+    and ruins.
+
+    But after all, Carlyle's "_carriere ouverte aux talens_" is the
+    expression for Napoleon's great message to mankind.
+
+"Goethe; or, the Writer," is the last of the Representative Men who
+are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the
+fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in
+the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that
+he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could
+hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found
+the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with
+side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds
+an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his
+author. "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"He has
+said the best things about nature that ever were said.--He flung into
+literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has
+been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the
+Prometheus.--He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and
+sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not
+spiritualist.--I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives
+of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of
+conventions,--two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have
+severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for
+this time and for all time."
+
+This must serve as an _ex pede_ guide to reconstruct the Essay which
+finishes the volume.
+
+In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which
+Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took
+a part. Emerson's account of her conversation and extracts from
+her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his
+interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid
+portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written
+of her than by anything she ever wrote herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1858-1858. AEt. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club."
+
+
+After Emerson's return from Europe he delivered lectures to different
+audiences,--one on Poetry, afterwards published in "Letters and Social
+Aims," a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of
+which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many
+others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of
+Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same
+year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York.
+His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the
+planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is
+the only practical course, and is innocent." It would cost two thousand
+millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there
+ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would
+be?"
+
+His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph
+from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could
+not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free
+Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project
+for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in
+1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in
+steel and not in gold:--
+
+  "Pay ransom to the owner,
+    And fill the bag to the brim.
+  Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
+    And ever was. Pay him."
+
+His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with
+indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at
+Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the
+front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode
+inscribed to W.H. Channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of
+the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the
+cause of all the trouble.
+
+  "The over-god
+  Who marries Right to Might,
+  Who peoples, unpeoples,--
+  He who exterminates
+  Races by stronger races,
+  Black by white faces,--
+  Knows to bring honey
+  Out of the lion."
+
+Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he
+refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where
+
+  "Things are of the snake."
+
+The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to
+borrow Mr. Cooke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men
+took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a
+heartier assent to the outward methods adopted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a
+lecture read to the "Woman's Rights Convention" in 1855, he takes bold,
+and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in
+the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way
+in which he expresses himself:
+
+    "I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in
+    public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it.
+    Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous
+    impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be
+    equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a
+    church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do
+    theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish
+    a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse
+    them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our
+    Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.--The new movement
+    is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may
+    proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to
+    desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish."
+
+Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor,
+that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord
+before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He
+afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for "Putnam's Magazine," from
+which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch
+concluded:--
+
+    "He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make
+    what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an
+    impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is
+    an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class
+    remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are
+    native."
+
+The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough
+for an Elizabethan monumental inscription.
+
+  "With beams December planets dart
+  His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
+  July was in his sunny heart,
+  October in his liberal hand."
+
+Emerson's "English Traits," forming one volume of his works, was
+published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not
+a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired
+the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the
+wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is
+indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic
+characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final;
+they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less
+sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded,
+sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence
+made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him
+well-disposed to all the world.
+
+A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which
+Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal
+portion of his record. Only one _place_ is given as the heading of a
+chapter,--_Stonehenge_. The other eighteen chapters have general titles,
+_Land, Race, Ability, Manners_, and others of similar character.
+
+He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the
+British Aristocracy:--
+
+    "Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the
+    House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy
+    and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything
+    they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and
+    killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin.
+    Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent
+    and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy
+    thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by
+    assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and
+    snake, which they severally resembled."
+
+The race preserves some of its better characteristics.
+
+    "They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age.
+    The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin,
+    a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the
+    island."
+
+English "Manners" are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck,
+vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself,
+safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly,
+and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and
+religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.
+
+    "They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and
+    mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the
+    cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They
+    hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use
+    a studied plainness."
+
+    "In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,
+    but the dinner is the capital institution."
+
+    "They confide in each other,--English believes in English."--"They
+    require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in
+    public men."
+
+    "As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented.
+    Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy."
+
+Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly
+two hundred years ago.
+
+    "_New England_, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing
+    and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless
+    instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those
+    _Melancholy Indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all
+    service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby
+    to lay _Violent Hands_ upon themselves at the last. These are among
+    the _unsearchable Judgments_ of God."
+
+If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the
+Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the
+likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.
+
+    "They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of
+    waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run
+    into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly
+    carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense;
+    leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew
+    hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock
+    in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every
+    secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic;
+    they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why
+    she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the
+    inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate
+    and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from
+    shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror
+    they cause."
+
+This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to
+Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.
+
+    "A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the
+    curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first
+    deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them
+    justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and
+    low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a
+    savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The
+    stability of England is the security of the modern world."
+
+Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than
+the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted,
+and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism
+and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English
+civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating
+castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their
+colonies."
+
+In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or
+the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain,
+or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust
+doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if
+they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a
+generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not
+grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson
+saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England.
+A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a
+field of mushrooms.
+
+The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and
+fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flashes of light
+that have not come through its stained windows.
+
+    "The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on
+    the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's
+    chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed
+    hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him,
+    and the religion of a gentleman.
+
+    "The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing
+    left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and
+    reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to
+    take wine with him."
+
+Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told
+a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from
+nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an
+archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but Sydney Smith
+would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch
+of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his
+little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose
+unwieldy bulk he is playing.
+
+Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established
+Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with
+soft-spoken words.
+
+    "Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake
+    the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde,
+    et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in
+    England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson,
+    and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame."
+
+"English Traits" closes with Emerson's speech at Manchester, at the
+annual banquet of the "Free Trade Athenaeum." This was merely an
+occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had
+sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up
+in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in
+their utterance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated
+by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people,
+tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with
+Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all
+this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations
+of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine
+admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its
+playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a
+self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and
+mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not
+be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame
+Tussaud's exhibition, the Lord-Mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if
+one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American
+traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went
+up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the
+little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through
+the wide-awake town of Concord.
+
+In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing
+the name of "The Atlantic Monthly." Professor James Russell Lowell
+was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the
+originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old
+contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them
+Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of
+them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh
+volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as "The
+Romany Girl," "Days," "Brahma," "Waldeinsamkeit," "The Titmouse,"
+"Boston Hymn," "Saadi," and "Terminus."
+
+At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association,
+which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club," the members
+dining together on the last Saturday of every month.
+
+The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present
+day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic
+connection, and the "Atlantic Club" has been spoken of as if there was
+or had been such an institution, but it never existed.
+
+Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality
+before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic
+idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of
+crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the
+habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House"
+of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a
+club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its
+first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as
+visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat
+Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable
+rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always
+pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's
+conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust,
+sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger
+who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the
+table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana,
+Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar,
+eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical
+critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion
+of freedom, Andrew, "the great War Governor" of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe,
+the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy
+of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of
+the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured
+utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental
+phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular
+attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at
+its table, until within a year or two of his death.
+
+Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed
+unrecorded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+1858-1863: AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Worship; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions.
+
+
+The Essay on Persian Poetry, published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in
+1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the
+influence of Oriental poetry on Emerson's verse. In many of the shorter
+poems and fragments published since "May-Day," as well as in the
+"Quatrains" and others of the later poems in that volume, it is
+sometimes hard to tell what is from the Persian from what is original.
+
+On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held
+at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the
+poet's birth. He spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such
+beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as
+one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers
+was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that "every word seemed to have just
+dropped down to him from the clouds." Judge Hoar, who was another of his
+hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his
+time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself
+present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these
+gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His
+words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most
+natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with,
+but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his
+inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.
+
+I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed
+to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most
+devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:--
+
+
+CONCORD, May 13, 1859.
+
+Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these
+lines, which I will hasten to finish. Louis Napoleon will not bayonet
+you the while,--keep him at the door. So long I have promised to
+write! so long I have thanked your long suffering! I have let pass the
+unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with
+Gisela von Arnim (Bettina's daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and
+Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,--wandering in
+Europe with hope of meeting you,--yet met. This contumacy of mine I
+shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer
+first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when
+once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are
+drawn.--Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and
+coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you
+did not like Germany. Where then did Goethe find his lovers? Do all the
+women have bad noses and bad mouths? And will you stop in England, and
+bring home the author of "Counterparts" with you? Or did----write the
+novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them? How
+strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret! I think
+our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent.
+But----is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him.
+I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than
+mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the
+first day. The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and
+creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the
+irresistibility of our bias. Still this is only science, and must remain
+science. Our _praxis_ is never altered for that. We must forever hold
+our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed.
+
+I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an
+immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new
+stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer
+no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in
+our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good
+understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or
+pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but
+from a more convenient nature. But 'tis almost chemistry at last, though
+a meta-chemistry. I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer,
+however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth,
+that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of
+peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in
+the most passive acceptance,--if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out
+around me at this moment the new June,--the leaves say June, though the
+calendar says May,--and we must needs hail our young relatives again,
+though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters
+receiving a late-born brother or sister. Nature herself seems a little
+ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game
+again without a new bract or sepal. But you will think me incorrigible
+with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this
+summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers. My children scan
+curiously your E.'s drawings, as they have seen them.
+
+The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours!
+
+R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke
+of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor
+to his memory. Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in
+the Music Hall to Mr. Parker's society after his death. In 1862, he lost
+his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for August of the same year. Thoreau
+had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson
+is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the
+canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
+
+The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston
+in September, 1862. The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the
+following extract:--
+
+    "Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the
+    earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see
+    Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold
+    them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart
+    with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the
+    melioration of our planet:--
+
+  "'Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
+  And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.'"
+
+The "Conduct of Life" was published in 1860. The chapter on "Fate" might
+leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what
+he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that
+his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in
+adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. But let
+him hold fast to this reassuring statement:--
+
+    "If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm
+    liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty,
+    the power of character.--We are sure, that, though we know not how,
+    necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world,
+    my polarity with the spirit of the times."
+
+But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the
+mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the
+limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are
+illustrated.
+
+    "Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must
+    see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a
+    man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.--The
+    way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider,
+    the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the
+    crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these
+    are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just
+    dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
+    the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive
+    races,--race living at the expense of race.--Let us not deny it up
+    and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its
+    end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
+    instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a
+    clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity."
+
+Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he
+believed in so fully:--
+
+    "They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a
+    lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear."
+
+But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic
+predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who
+dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words,
+which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the
+delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:--
+
+    "People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine
+    brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with
+    high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to
+    distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that
+    a free-soiler."
+
+Let us see what Emerson has to say of "Power:"--
+
+    "All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were
+    _causationists_. They believed that things went not by luck, but by
+    law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that
+    joins the first and the last of things.
+
+    "The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young
+    orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--Imbecility; imbecility
+    in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in
+    all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and
+    fear. This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no
+    habit of self-reliance or original action.--
+
+    "We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_
+    condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of
+    main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found
+    in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the
+    supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive,
+    yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and
+    absorbents provided to take off its edge."
+
+The "two economies which are the best _succedanea"_ for deficiency of
+temperament are concentration and drill. This he illustrates by example,
+and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which "Poor
+Richard" would have cheerfully approved. He might have accepted also the
+Essay on "Wealth" as having a good sense so like his own that he could
+hardly tell the difference between them.
+
+    "Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and
+    wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet
+    water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress
+    when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick
+    lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross
+    the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in
+    books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and
+    auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it
+    added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day,
+    and knowledge and good will. Wealth begins with these articles of
+    necessity.--
+
+    "To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and
+    chief men of each race.--
+
+    "The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the
+    thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their
+    word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush
+    to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest
+    civilization should be undone."
+
+Who can give better counsels on "Culture" than Emerson? But we must
+borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. All kinds of
+secrets come out as we read these Essays of Emerson's. We know something
+of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet.
+It is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite
+portraits Mr. Galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as
+follows:--
+
+    "The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism
+    is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong
+    necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual
+    attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such
+    necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely
+    overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and
+    disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which
+    each individual persists to be what he is.
+
+    "The antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and
+    variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world,
+    with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with
+    eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and
+    religion: books, travel, society, solitude."
+
+    "We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they
+    must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their
+    best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for
+    occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude,
+    the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the
+    cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it
+    farther than suns and stars."
+
+We must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. Try the
+rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth
+knowing. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims
+high, must dread an easy home and popular manners."
+
+Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble
+career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least.
+But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he
+respected. It was "the hand of Douglas" again,--the same feeling that
+Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the
+introduction to this volume.
+
+Here are a few good sayings about "Behavior."
+
+    "There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an
+    egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke
+    of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage."
+
+Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of "Manners" in his Essay under the
+above title.
+
+    "The basis of good manners is self-reliance.--Manners require time,
+    as nothing is more vulgar than haste.--
+
+    "Men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first
+    time,--and every time they meet.--
+
+    "It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his
+    talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that
+    stands by himself, the universe stands by him also."
+
+In his Essay on "Worship," Emerson ventures the following prediction:--
+
+    "The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming
+    ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind
+    must have a faith which is science.--There will be a new church
+    founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a
+    manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church
+    of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will
+    have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol
+    and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture,
+    poetry."
+
+It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and
+unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the
+established facts of science and history when these last reach it in
+their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science
+more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date
+than "Beauty," or "Illusions." But accidental circumstances made such
+confusion in the strata of Emerson's published thought that one is often
+at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer
+layer.
+
+We come to "Considerations by the Way." The common-sense side of
+Emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical
+intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher
+of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth.
+
+    "Franklin said, 'Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they
+    begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it
+    discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'"
+
+"Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the
+minority, surely." Here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant,"
+which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered
+lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this
+matter of the _vox populi_. "Leave this hypocritical prating about the
+masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and
+need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede
+anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
+draw individuals out of them."
+
+Pere Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer
+in due time. After reading what Emerson says about "the masses," one is
+tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and
+be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not
+make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great
+necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which
+he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often
+discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the
+Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble
+ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather
+than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something
+of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing
+in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens,
+entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses
+his listeners and readers.
+
+The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the
+following passage:--
+
+    "The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of
+    everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left
+    their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My
+    boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors,
+    and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the
+    intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word
+    has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my
+    stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box!
+    I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to
+    sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy
+    in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact,
+    which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days
+    so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the
+    imagination."
+
+One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce
+of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day
+memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if
+often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A
+coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a
+Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification.
+Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something
+could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he
+cannot lift the object he would fain idealize.
+
+The habitual readers of Emerson do not mind an occasional
+over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them
+amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two
+always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up
+as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no
+one should venture upon Emerson. If he had seen the lecturer's smile
+as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact
+unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found
+a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never
+show him.
+
+The Essay on "Illusions" has little which we have not met with, or shall
+not find repeating itself in the Poems.
+
+During this period Emerson contributed many articles in prose and
+verse to the "Atlantic Monthly," and several to "The Dial," a second
+periodical of that name published in Cincinnati. Some of these have
+been, or will be, elsewhere referred to.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of Abraham Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus."
+
+
+The "Boston Hymn" was read by Emerson in the Music Hall, on the first
+day of January, 1863. It is a rough piece of verse, but noble from
+beginning to end. One verse of it, beginning "Pay ransom to the owner,"
+has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it:--
+
+  "I cause from every creature
+    His proper good to flow:
+  As much as he is and doeth
+    So much shall he bestow.
+
+  "But laying hands on another
+    To coin his labor and sweat,
+  He goes in pawn to his victim
+    For eternal years in debt.
+
+  "To-day unbind the captive,
+    So only are ye unbound:
+  Lift up a people from the dust,
+    Trump of their rescue, sound!"
+
+"Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is
+more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than
+the plain song of the "Boston Hymn."
+
+  "But best befriended of the God
+  He who, in evil times,
+  Warned by an inward voice,
+  Heeds not the darkness and the dread,
+  Biding by his rule and choice,
+  Feeling only the fiery thread
+  Leading over heroic ground,
+  Walled with mortal terror round,
+  To the aim which him allures,
+  And the sweet heaven his deed secures.
+  Peril around, all else appalling,
+  Cannon in front and leaden rain
+  Him duly through the clarion calling
+  To the van called not in vain."
+
+It is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they
+were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand
+years:--
+
+  "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+  So near is God to man,
+  When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
+  The youth replies, _I can_."
+
+"Saadi" was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1864, "My Garden" in
+1866, "Terminus" in 1867. In the same year these last poems with many
+others were collected in a small volume, entitled "May-Day, and
+Other Pieces." The general headings of these poems are as follows:
+May-Day.--The Adirondacs.--Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces.--Nature
+and Life.--Elements.--Quatrains.--Translations.--Some of these poems,
+which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous
+pages. "The Adirondacs" is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared
+for its poetical character with "May-Day," one passage from which,
+beginning,
+
+  "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. In this volume will be found
+"Brahma," "Days," and others which are well known to all readers of
+poetry.
+
+Emerson's delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and
+sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham
+Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the
+homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth and delicacy:--
+
+    "Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor;
+    the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four
+    years,--four years of battle-days,--his endurance, his fertility
+    of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found
+    wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his
+    fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the
+    centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American
+    people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow
+    with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true
+    representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of
+    his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart,
+    the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue."
+
+In his "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association,"
+Emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and
+sufficiently "transcendental" way: intelligibly for those who wish to
+understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept
+the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, "The Sphinx."
+
+    --"As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within
+    his own mind,--is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds
+    with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to
+    face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the
+    power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste,
+    all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a
+    religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the
+    private action."
+
+Nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the
+suggestive remark,--
+
+    --"What I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by
+    which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true
+    Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure
+    benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of
+    active duty, that worship finds expression.--The interests that grow
+    out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the
+    old eternal duties."
+
+    In a later address before the same association, Emerson says:--
+    "I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous
+    dispensation,--certainly not to the _doctrine_ of Christianity.--If
+    you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a
+    thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of
+    nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on
+    the teachings."
+
+The "Progress of Culture" was delivered as a Phi Beta Kappa oration just
+thirty years after his first address before the same society. It is very
+instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a
+whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in
+1867, at the age of sixty-four. Both are hopeful, but the second is more
+sanguine than the first. He recounts what he considers the recent gains
+of the reforming movement:--
+
+    "Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or
+    adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an
+    honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil
+    status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she
+    controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her
+    share in power."
+
+He enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of
+intelligence,--"All, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary,
+teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and
+superseding kings."
+
+He repeats some of his fundamental formulae.
+
+    "The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral
+    sentiment.
+
+    "Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any
+    material force, that thoughts rule the world.
+
+    "Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter."
+
+And most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in
+1867,--especially in the view of future possibilities. "Bad kings and
+governors help us, if only they are bad enough." _Non tali auxilio_, we
+exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these
+concluding words: "I read the promise of better times and of greater
+men."
+
+In the year 1866, Emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as
+the "grand climacteric." In that year Harvard University conferred upon
+him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest honor in its gift.
+
+In that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips,
+he met his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, at the Brevoort House, in New
+York. Then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in his second volume, under the
+title "Terminus." This was the first time that Dr. Emerson recognized
+the fact that his father felt himself growing old. The thought, which
+must have been long shaping itself in the father's mind, had been so far
+from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly
+avowed. The poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes
+about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. The
+reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a
+particular purpose, but here is the whole poem:--
+
+  TERMINUS.
+
+  It is time to be old,
+  To take in sail:--
+  The god of bounds,
+  Who sets to seas a shore,
+  Came to me in his fatal rounds,
+  And said: "No more!
+  No farther shoot
+  Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
+  Fancy departs: no more invent;
+  Contract thy firmament
+  To compass of a tent.
+  There's not enough for this and that,
+  Make thy option which of two;
+  Economize the failing river,
+  Not the less revere the Giver,
+  Leave the many and hold the few,
+  Timely wise accept the terms,
+  Soften the fall with wary foot;
+  A little while
+  Still plan and smile,
+  And,--fault of novel germs,--
+  Mature the unfallen fruit.
+  Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
+  Bad husbands of their fires,
+  Who when they gave thee breath,
+  Failed to bequeath
+  The needful sinew stark as once,
+  The baresark marrow to thy bones,
+  But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
+  Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
+  Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
+  Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.
+
+  "As the bird trims her to the gale
+  I trim myself to the storm of time,
+  I man the rudder, reef the sail,
+  Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
+  'Lowly faithful, banish fear,
+  Right onward drive unharmed;
+  The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
+  And every wave is charmed.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication
+of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return.
+
+
+During three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a
+series of Lectures at Harvard University on the "Natural History of the
+Intellect." These Lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a
+great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or
+reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an
+extract from Prof. Thayer's "Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." He is
+there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics.
+It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms
+employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words "subject and
+object" with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin
+shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions.
+Once he ventures on the _not me_, but in the main he uses plain English
+handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ.
+
+"Society and Solitude" was published in 1870. The first Essay in the
+volume bears the same name as the volume itself.
+
+In this first Essay Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims
+of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of
+solitude. We are driven "as with whips into the desert." But there is
+danger in this seclusion. "Now and then a man exquisitely made can live
+alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.--Here again, as
+so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and
+our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.--The
+conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our
+sympathy."
+
+The Essay on "Civilization" is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a
+very agreeable way. The framed or stone-house in place of the cave or
+the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting,
+and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful
+combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the
+press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with
+special brilliancy:--
+
+    "Right position of woman in the State is another index.--Place the
+    sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality
+    gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that
+    is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and
+    learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that I have
+    thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of
+    good women."
+
+My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader
+will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:--
+
+    "The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and
+    compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart,
+    longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven
+    by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from
+    home,--
+
+  "'The pulses of her iron heart
+      Go beating through the storm.'"
+
+I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be
+an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "The
+Steamboat:"
+
+  "The beating of her restless heart
+    Still sounding through the storm."
+
+It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer
+lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his
+verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's
+special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that
+
+    'tis better to be quoted wrong
+  Than to be quoted not at all.
+
+This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy
+to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How
+could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly
+announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that
+he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having
+any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and
+doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:--
+
+    "Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,
+    to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods
+    themselves."--
+
+    "'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that
+    the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON
+    TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and
+    bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find
+    all their teams going the other way,--Charles's Wain, Great Bear,
+    Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those
+    interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love,
+    freedom, knowledge, utility."--
+
+Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the
+same constellation; the _Dipper_ is what our people often call it, and
+the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the
+North Star.
+
+I find in the Essay on "Art" many of the thoughts with which we are
+familiar in Emerson's poem, "The Problem." It will be enough to cite
+these passages:--
+
+    "We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in
+    hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had
+    a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in
+    the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the
+    artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work
+    of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.--
+
+    --"The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the
+    tragedies of Aeschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals,
+    the plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but
+    in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.--
+
+    --"The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest
+    and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid
+    every stone.--
+
+    "Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake,
+    whose melody is sweeter than he knows."
+
+The discourse on "Eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial,
+than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its
+general purport:--
+
+    "Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards,
+    it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,
+    speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it
+    must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.--
+
+    "He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion
+    must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on
+    character and insight.--
+
+    --"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.--
+
+    --"Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their
+    integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they
+    toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a
+    reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or
+    morals, as above the whole world and themselves also."
+
+"Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it
+sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of
+the goblet which holds some tonic draught:--
+
+    "Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in
+    his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the
+    soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham
+    and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations
+    when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,
+    the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to
+    swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful
+    and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that
+    all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more
+    charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching
+    than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--All day,
+    between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,
+    sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he
+    fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before
+    him."
+
+Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about
+"Farming." Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an
+address before the "Middlesex Agricultural Society," and printed in the
+"Transactions" of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and
+the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some
+general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:--
+
+    "The farmer's office is precise and important, but you must not try
+    to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to
+    fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.--This hard work will
+    always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor
+    by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men
+    of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and
+    timely."
+
+Emerson's chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are
+correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his
+imaginative presentation. He tells the commonest facts so as to make
+them almost a surprise:--
+
+    "By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have
+    found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting
+    the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that
+    Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises
+    to pay a better rent than all the superstructure."
+
+In "Works and Days" there is much good reading, but I will call
+attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest
+of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson's assertions and
+predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of
+"the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables
+a man to change his blood as often as his linen!" And once more,
+
+"We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the
+air."
+
+Possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on
+wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles.
+
+The other point I have marked is that we find in this Essay a prose
+version of the fine poem, printed in "May-Day" under the title "Days." I
+shall refer to this more particularly hereafter.
+
+It is wronging the Essay on "Books" to make extracts from it. It is all
+an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the
+public libraries. If I commit the wrong I have spoken of, it is under
+protest against myself. Every word of this Essay deserves careful
+reading. But here are a few sentences I have selected for the reader's
+consideration:--
+
+    "There are books; and it is practicable to read them because they
+    are so few.--
+
+    "I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go
+    there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is
+    already within the four walls of my study at home.--
+
+    "The three practical rules which I have to offer are, 1. Never read
+    any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books.
+    3. Never read any but what you like, or, in Shakspeare's phrase,--
+
+      "'No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en;
+        In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.'"
+
+Emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his Essay on
+"Clubs," but nothing very notable on the special subject of the Essay.
+Perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the
+"Saturday Club," of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself
+around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. But he
+was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of
+talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and
+remembered more. He was hardly what Dr. Johnson would have called a
+"clubable" man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he
+would never have come from Concord so regularly to attend them. He gives
+two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which I have
+been speaking:--
+
+    "I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in
+    their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to
+    an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion
+    shall have its just influence on public questions of education and
+    politics."
+
+    "A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means
+    of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage."
+
+I do not think "public questions of education and politics" were very
+prominent at the social meetings of the "Saturday Club," but "worthy
+foreigners," and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the
+meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and
+callings.
+
+All that Emerson has to say about "Courage" is worth listening to, for
+he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more
+cowards than are found in the battle-field. He spoke his convictions
+fearlessly; he carried the spear of Ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate
+save that which protects him
+
+  "Whose armor is his honest thought,
+    And simple truth his utmost skill."
+
+He mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of
+mankind: 1. Disinterestedness; 2. Practical Power; 3. Courage. "I need
+not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank.
+They forgive everything to it. And any man who puts his life in peril in
+a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men."--There are
+good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this Essay or Lecture,
+which closes with the spirited ballad of "George Nidiver," written "by a
+lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known."
+
+Men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its
+subject, like the one now before me, "Success." Emerson complains of the
+same things in America which Carlyle groaned over in England:--
+
+    "We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing
+    advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is
+    lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.--
+
+    "Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to
+    all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for
+    success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take
+    Michael Angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something
+    of worth and value.'"
+
+Reading about "Success" is after all very much like reading in old books
+of alchemy. "How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and
+treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and
+the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate
+directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into
+Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. "Success" in its
+vulgar sense,--the gaining of money and position,--is not to be reached
+by following the rules of an instructor. Our "self-made men," who govern
+the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by
+adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were
+placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "Poor Richard," or any
+other moralist or economist.--For such as these is meant the cheap
+cynical saying quoted by Emerson, "_Rien ne reussit mieux que le
+succes_."
+
+But this is not the aim and end of Emerson's teaching:--
+
+    "I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition
+    in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public
+    opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one
+    feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly,
+    and the other hospitality of mind."
+
+And so, though there is no alchemy in this Lecture, it is profitable
+reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character,
+the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the
+market-place.
+
+The Essay on "Old Age" has a special value from its containing two
+personal reminiscences: one of the venerable Josiah Quincy, a brief
+mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825,
+Emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-President John Adams,
+soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is enough to
+allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all.
+
+But many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. He
+recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has
+weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so
+that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling
+that he has found expression,--that his condition, in particular and in
+general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing
+his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future:--
+
+    "When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well
+    spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works
+    that belong to these. But the central wisdom which was old in
+    infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions,
+    leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard
+    that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that
+    whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is
+    announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles
+    our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the
+    inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving
+    skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the
+    inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment."
+
+Other literary labors of Emerson during this period were the
+Introduction to "Plutarch's Morals" in 1870, and a Preface to William
+Ellery Channing's Poem, "The Wanderer," in 1871. He made a speech at
+Howard University, Washington, in 1872.
+
+In the year 1871 Emerson made a visit to California with a very pleasant
+company, concerning which Mr. John M. Forbes, one of whose sons married
+Emerson's daughter Edith, writes to me as follows. Professor James B.
+Thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an
+account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow Mr. Forbes's
+letter:--
+
+    BOSTON, February 6, 1884.
+
+    MY DEAR DR.,--What little I can give will be of a very rambling
+    character.
+
+    One of the first memories of Emerson which comes up is my meeting
+    him on the steamboat at returning from Detroit East. I persuaded him
+    to stop over at Niagara, which he had never seen. We took a carriage
+    and drove around the circuit. It was in early summer, perhaps in
+    1848 or 1849. When we came to Table Rock on the British side, our
+    driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage.
+    We passed on by rail, and the next day's papers brought us the
+    telegraphic news that Table Rock had fallen over; perhaps we were
+    among the last persons on it!
+
+    About 1871 I made up a party for California, including Mr. Emerson,
+    his daughter Edith, and a number of gay young people. We drove with
+    B----, the famous Vermont coachman, up to the Geysers, and then made
+    the journey to the Yosemite Valley by wagon and on horseback. I wish
+    I could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at
+    this time. With the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes
+    drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently
+    indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes
+    of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. I especially
+    remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his
+    reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse's mouth,
+    without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding
+    Pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was
+    he, at the moment, of his surroundings.
+
+    In San Francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers,
+    in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were
+    deposited the stupefied Mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of
+    humanity to be found in the world. The contrast between them and
+    the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all
+    beholders.
+
+    When we reached Salt Lake City on our way home he made a point of
+    calling on Brigham Young, then at the summit of his power. The
+    Prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of
+    hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. He did not seem
+    to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so
+    doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast
+    between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces.
+
+    I regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and
+    other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of Professor
+    J.B. Thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you
+    some notes that would be valuable.
+
+    Perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is
+    his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at Naushon, no
+    doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost
+    none of their value from being transferred to his pages. Next to
+    his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable
+    recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs
+    which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor
+    which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which
+    you and I know he possessed in a marked degree.
+
+    Yours always,
+
+    J.M. FORBES.
+
+Professor James B. Thayer's little book, "A Western Journey with Mr.
+Emerson," is a very entertaining account of the same trip concerning
+which Mr. Forbes wrote the letter just given. Professor Thayer kindly
+read many of his notes to me before his account was published, and
+allows me to make such use of the book as I see fit. Such liberty must
+not be abused, and I will content myself with a few passages in which
+Emerson has a part. No extract will interest the reader more than the
+following:--
+
+    "'How _can_ Mr. Emerson,' said one of the younger members of the
+    party to me that day, 'be so agreeable, all the time, without
+    getting tired!' It was the _naive_ expression of what we all had
+    felt. There was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was
+    always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and
+    there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom
+    he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own
+    estimation. One thing particularly impressed me,--the sense that he
+    seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It
+    was the behavior of one who really _believed_ in an immortal life,
+    and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and
+    grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they
+    were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual
+    charm of our gracious friend. Years afterwards, on that memorable
+    day of his funeral at Concord, I found that a sentence from his own
+    Essay on Immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself
+    all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power:
+    'Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of
+    eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and Nature also, and gave
+    grandeur to the passing hour.'"
+
+This extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the
+same subject.
+
+    "The next evening, Sunday, the twenty-third, Mr. Emerson read his
+    address on 'Immortality,' at Dr. Stebbins's church. It was the first
+    time that he had spoken on the Western coast; never did he speak
+    better. It was, in the main, the same noble Essay that has since
+    been printed.
+
+    "At breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the 'Alta
+    California.' It gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it
+    warmly, and closed with the following observations: 'All left the
+    church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative
+    genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the
+    English language had contributed to that end.'"
+
+The story used to be told that after the Reverend Horace Holley had
+delivered a prayer on some public occasion, Major Ben. Russell, of ruddy
+face and ruffled shirt memory, Editor of "The Columbian Centinel,"
+spoke of it in his paper the next day as "the most eloquent prayer ever
+addressed to a Boston audience."
+
+The "Alta California's" "elegant tribute" is not quite up to this
+rhetorical altitude.
+
+    "'The minister,' said he, 'is in no danger of losing his position;
+    he represents the moral sense and the humanities.' He spoke of his
+    own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that 'some one had
+    lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the
+    name of Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty
+    about it. When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a
+    Republican, he welcomed it. It did not bind him to what he did
+    not like. What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of
+    negation?'"
+
+    "I made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent
+    course of lectures at Cambridge, 'The Natural History of the
+    Intellect.' This opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas!
+    I could recall but little of it,--little more than the mere hintings
+    of what he said. He cared very little for metaphysics. But he
+    thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own
+    mind,--about memory, for example. These he had set down from time
+    to time. As for making any methodical history, he did not undertake
+    it."
+
+Emerson met Brigham Young at Salt Lake City, as has been mentioned, but
+neither seems to have made much impression upon the other. Emerson spoke
+of the Mormons. Some one had said, "They impress the common people,
+through their imagination, by Bible-names and imagery." "Yes," he said,
+"it is an after-clap of Puritanism. But one would think that after this
+Father Abraham could go no further."
+
+The charm of Boswell's Life of Johnson is that it not merely records
+his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser
+peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and
+shades to a portrait on canvas. We are much obliged to Professor Thayer
+therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been
+good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take
+leave of his agreeable little volume:--
+
+    "At breakfast we had, among other things, pie. This article at
+    breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson's weaknesses. A pie stood before
+    him now. He offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and
+    then one or two others, who also declined; and then Mr.----; he too
+    declined. 'But Mr.----!' Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous
+    emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting
+    the entire weight of his character into his manner,--'but Mr.----,
+    _what is pie for_?'"
+
+A near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with Emerson, and
+when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very
+desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace. Presently
+he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in
+the other,--such a wedge! She could hardly have been more dismayed
+if one of Caesar's _cunei_, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge
+against her.
+
+Yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good
+creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees. In
+semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate
+stomachs. But here was Emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never,
+so far as I remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other
+side, was Carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with
+indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness
+habitually centred beneath his diaphragm.
+
+Like his friend Carlyle and like Tennyson, Emerson had a liking for a
+whiff of tobacco-smoke:--
+
+    "When alone," he said, "he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar. But
+    in company it was singular to see how different it was. To one who
+    found it difficult to meet people, as he did, the effect of a cigar
+    was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as silent as he likes, and
+    yet be good company. And so Hawthorne used to say that he found it.
+    On this journey Mr. Emerson generally smoked a single cigar after
+    our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both. This
+    was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with
+    him at home."
+
+Professor Thayer adds in a note:--
+
+    "Like Milton, Mr. Emerson 'was extraordinary temperate in his Diet,'
+    and he used even less tobacco. Milton's quiet day seems to have
+    closed regularly with a pipe; he 'supped,' we are told, 'upon ...
+    some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water
+    went to bed.'"
+
+As Emerson's name has been connected with that of Milton in its nobler
+aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like Milton, indulging in
+this semi-philosophical luxury.
+
+One morning in July, 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson woke to find their room
+filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the
+room over them. The alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did
+their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was
+destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to Emerson,
+including his father's sermons. Emerson got wet and chilled, and it
+seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory
+which came over his declining years.
+
+His kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve
+his temporary needs. A study was made ready for him in the old Court
+House, and the "Old Manse," which had sheltered his grandfather, and
+others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant.
+
+On the 15th of October he spoke at a dinner given in New York in honor
+of James Anthony Froude, the historian, and in the course of this same
+month he set out on his third visit to Europe, accompanied by his
+daughter Ellen. We have little to record of this visit, which was
+suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted
+for him. He went to Egypt, but so far as I have learned the Sphinx had
+no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself
+upon the mysterious and dream-compelling Nile it may be suspected that
+the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision,--that,
+as to his Humble-bee,
+
+  "All was picture as he passed."
+
+But while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him. The
+sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound. It did not
+confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement
+organized itself almost without effort. If any such had been needed, the
+attached friend whose name is appended to the Address to the Subscribers
+to the Fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house would have been as
+energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring
+the reprint of "Sartor Resartus." I have his kind permission to publish
+the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily
+carried out.
+
+    _To the Subscribers to the Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson's
+    House, after the Fire of July_ 24, 1872:
+
+    The death of Mr. Emerson has removed any objection which may have
+    before existed to the printing of the following correspondence. I
+    have now caused this to be done, that each subscriber may have the
+    satisfaction of possessing a copy of the touching and affectionate
+    letters in which he expressed his delight in this, to him, most
+    unexpected demonstration of personal regard and attachment, in the
+    offer to restore for him his ruined home.
+
+    No enterprise of the kind was ever more fortunate and successful in
+    its purpose and in its results. The prompt and cordial response to
+    the proposed subscription was most gratifying. No contribution was
+    solicited from any one. The simple suggestion to a few friends of
+    Mr. Emerson that an opportunity was now offered to be of service
+    to him was all that was needed. From the first day on which it was
+    made, the day after the fire, letters began to come in, with cheques
+    for large and small amounts, so that in less than three weeks I
+    was enabled to send to Judge Hoar the sum named in his letter as
+    received by him on the 13th of August, and presented by him to Mr.
+    Emerson the next morning, at the Old Manse, with fitting words.
+
+    Other subscriptions were afterwards received, increasing the amount
+    on my book to eleven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. A part
+    of this was handed directly to the builder at Concord. The balance
+    was sent to Mr. Emerson October 7, and acknowledged by him in his
+    letter of October 8, 1872.
+
+    All the friends of Mr. Emerson who knew of the plan which was
+    proposed to rebuild his house, seemed to feel that it was a
+    privilege to be allowed to express in this way the love and
+    veneration with which he was regarded, and the deep debt of
+    gratitude which they owed to him, and there is no doubt that a much
+    larger amount would have been readily and gladly offered, if it had
+    been required, for the object in view.
+
+    Those who have had the happiness to join in this friendly
+    "conspiracy" may well take pleasure in the thought that what they
+    have done has had the effect to lighten the load of care and anxiety
+    which the calamity of the fire brought with it to Mr. Emerson, and
+    thus perhaps to prolong for some precious years the serene and noble
+    life that was so dear to all of us.
+
+    My thanks are due to the friends who have made me the bearer of this
+    message of good-will.
+
+    LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+    BOSTON, May 8, 1882.
+
+
+    BOSTON, August 13, 1872.
+
+    DEAR MR. EMERSON:
+
+    It seems to have been the spontaneous desire of your friends, on
+    hearing of the burning of your house, to be allowed the pleasure of
+    rebuilding it.
+
+    A few of them have united for this object, and now request your
+    acceptance of the amount which I have to-day deposited to your order
+    at the Concord Bank, through the kindness of our friend, Judge Hoar.
+    They trust that you will receive it as an expression of sincere
+    regard and affection from friends, who will, one and all, esteem it
+    a great privilege to be permitted to assist in the restoration of
+    your home.
+
+    And if, in their eagerness to participate in so grateful a work,
+    they may have exceeded the estimate of your architect as to what
+    is required for that purpose, they beg that you will devote the
+    remainder to such other objects as may be most convenient to you.
+
+    Very sincerely yours,
+
+    LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+
+    CONCORD, August 14, 1872.
+
+    DR. LE B. RUSSELL:
+
+    _Dear Sir_,--I received your letters, with the check for ten
+    thousand dollars inclosed, from Mr. Barrett last evening. This
+    morning I deposited it to Mr. Emerson's credit in the Concord
+    National Bank, and took a bank book for him, with his little balance
+    entered at the top, and this following, and carried it to him with
+    your letter. I told him, by way of prelude, that some of his friends
+    had made him treasurer of an association who wished him to go to
+    England and examine Warwick Castle and other noted houses that
+    had been recently injured by fire, in order to get the best ideas
+    possible for restoration, and then to apply them to a house which
+    the association was formed to restore in this neighborhood.
+
+    When he understood the thing and had read your letter, he seemed
+    very deeply moved. He said that he had been allowed so far in life
+    to stand on his own feet, and that he hardly knew what to say,--that
+    the kindness of his friends was very great. I said what I thought
+    was best in reply, and told him that this was the spontaneous act of
+    friends, who wished the privilege of expressing in this way their
+    respect and affection, and was done only by those who thought it a
+    privilege to do so. I mentioned Hillard as you desired, and also
+    Mrs. Tappan, who, it seems, had written to him and offered any
+    assistance he might need, to the extent of five thousand dollars,
+    personally.
+
+    I think it is all right, but he said he must see the list of
+    contributors, and would then say what he had to say about it. He
+    told me that Mr. F.C. Lowell, who was his classmate and old friend,
+    Mr. Bangs, Mrs. Gurney, and a few other friends, had already sent
+    him five thousand dollars, which he seemed to think was as much as
+    he could bear. This makes the whole a very gratifying result, and
+    perhaps explains the absence of some names on your book.
+
+    I am glad that Mr. Emerson, who is feeble and ill, can learn what a
+    debt of obligation his friends feel to him, and thank you heartily
+    for what you have done about it. Very truly yours,
+
+    E.R. HOAR.
+
+
+    CONCORD, August 16, 1872.
+
+    MY DEAR LE BARON:
+
+    I have wondered and melted over your letter and its accompaniments
+    till it is high time that I should reply to it, if I can. My
+    misfortunes, as I have lived along so far in this world, have been
+    so few that I have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of
+    good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has
+    come to me. And this late calamity, however rude and devastating,
+    soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins,
+    so that I can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment
+    with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished
+    me. But I cannot read your letter or think of its message without
+    delight, that my companions and friends bear me so noble a
+    good-will, nor without some new aspirations in the old heart toward
+    a better deserving. Judge Hoar has, up to this time, withheld from
+    me the names of my benefactors, but you may be sure that I shall not
+    rest till I have learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at
+    night and at morning.
+
+    Your affectionate friend and debtor,
+
+    R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+    DR. LE BARON RUSSELL
+
+    CONCORD, October 8, 1872.
+
+    MY DEAR DOCTOR LE BARON:
+
+    I received last night your two notes, and the cheque, enclosed in
+    one of them, for one thousand and twenty dollars.
+
+    Are my friends bent on killing me with kindness? No, you will say,
+    but to make me live longer. I thought myself sufficiently loaded
+    with benefits already, and you add more and more. It appears that
+    you all will rebuild my house and rejuvenate me by sending me in my
+    old days abroad on a young man's excursion.
+
+    I am a lover of men, but this recent wonderful experience of their
+    tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts day by day. Now that
+    I have all or almost all the names of the men and women who have
+    conspired in this kindness to me (some of whom I have never
+    personally known), I please myself with the thought of meeting each
+    and asking, Why have we not met before? Why have you not told me
+    that we thought alike? Life is not so long, nor sympathy of thought
+    so common, that we can spare the society of those with whom we best
+    agree. Well, 'tis probably my own fault by sticking ever to my
+    solitude. Perhaps it is not too late to learn of these friends a
+    better lesson.
+
+    Thank them for me whenever you meet them, and say to them that I am
+    not wood or stone, if I have not yet trusted myself so far as to go
+    to each one of them directly.
+
+    My wife insists that I shall also send her acknowledgments to them
+    and you.
+
+    Yours and theirs affectionately,
+
+    R.W. EMERSON.
+
+    DR. LE BARON KUSSELL.
+
+
+The following are the names of the subscribers to the fund for
+rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house:--
+
+Mrs. Anne S. Hooper.
+Miss Alice S. Hooper.
+Mrs. Caroline Tappan.
+Miss Ellen S. Tappan.
+Miss Mary A. Tappan.
+Mr. T.G. Appleton.
+Mrs. Henry Edwards.
+Miss Susan E. Dorr.
+Misses Wigglesworth.
+Mr. Edward Wigglesworth.
+Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.
+Mrs. Sarah S. Russell.
+Friends in New York and Philadelphia, through Mr. Williams.
+Mr. William Whiting.
+Mr. Frederick Beck.
+Mr. H.P. Kidder.
+Mrs. Abel Adams.
+Mrs. George Faulkner.
+Hon. E.R. Hoar.
+Mr. James B. Thayer.
+Mr. John M. Forbes.
+Mr. James H. Beal.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lodge.
+Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge.
+Mr. H.H. Hunnewell.
+Mrs. S. Cabot.
+Mr. James A. Dupee.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lowell.
+Mrs. M.F. Sayles.
+Miss Helen L. Appleton.
+J.R. Osgood & Co.
+Mr. Richard Soule.
+Mr. Francis Geo. Shaw.
+Dr. R.W. Hooper.
+Mr. William P. Mason.
+Mr. William Gray.
+Mr. Sam'l G. Ward.
+Mr. J.I. Bowditch.
+Mr. Geo. C. Ward.
+Mrs. Luicia J. Briggs.
+Mr. John E. Williams.
+Dr. Le Baron Russell.
+
+In May, 1873, Emerson returned to Concord. His friends and
+fellow-citizens received him with every token of affection and
+reverence. A set of signals was arranged to announce his arrival.
+Carriages were in readiness for him and his family, a band greeted him
+with music, and passing under a triumphal arch, he was driven to his
+renewed old home amidst the welcomes and the blessings of his loving and
+admiring friends and neighbors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and
+Originality.--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--
+Greatness.--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems.
+
+
+In December, 1874, Emerson published "Parnassus," a Collection of Poems
+by British and American authors. Many readers may like to see his
+subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together.
+They are as follows: "Nature."--"Human Life."--"Intellectual."
+--"Contemplation."--"Moral and Religious."--"Heroic."--"Personal."
+--"Pictures."--"Narrative Poems and Ballads."--"Songs."--"Dirges and
+Pathetic Poems."--"Comic and Humorous."--"Poetry of Terror."--"Oracles
+and Counsels."
+
+I have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of Mr. George Willis
+Cooke's "Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy," that
+I am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his
+excellent work.
+
+"This collection," he says,
+
+    "was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying
+    into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. Many
+    of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on
+    the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost
+    everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet
+    Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious
+    poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections.
+    With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional
+    poems which have attracted devout souls.--His poetical sympathies
+    are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the
+    seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any
+    other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. The
+    names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently
+    appear. Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to
+    Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make
+    up the list of favorites. Many little known pieces are included, and
+    some whose merit is other than poetical.--This selection of poems
+    is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. I
+    not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and
+    introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general
+    reader. The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of
+    the poems and poets appearing in these selections."
+
+I will only add to Mr. Cooke's criticism these two remarks: First, that
+I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look
+for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies
+at least, there was no paged index where each author's pieces were
+collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss
+of time and patience, under various heads, "imitating the careful search
+that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris." The other remark is that
+each one of Emerson's American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted
+would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of
+his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some
+specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen
+fit to indulge us.
+
+In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among
+the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector. He
+received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was
+elected. He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling:--
+
+    "I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen
+    on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in
+    the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my
+    too partial advocate."
+
+Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to "Letters and Social Aims,"
+that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the
+collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the
+illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of
+mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case
+have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. Sentences, even
+whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what
+even he would have tolerated:--
+
+    "There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his
+    full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and
+    arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely
+    to the matter."
+
+This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just
+enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is
+that entitled "Poetry and Imagination." I have room for little more than
+the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these
+it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are "Introductory;"
+"Poetry;" "Imagination;" "Veracity;" "Creation;" "Melody, Rhythm, Form;"
+"Bards and Trouveurs;" "Morals;" "Transcendency." Many thoughts with
+which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this
+Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his
+leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh
+in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score of pointed
+sayings, striking images, large generalizations. Some of these we find
+repeated in his verse. Thus:--
+
+    "Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and
+    makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a
+    mortal man!"
+
+And so in the well remembered lines of "The Problem":--
+
+  "Himself from God he could not free."
+
+"He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his thought made him,
+and made the sun and stars."
+
+  "Art might obey but not surpass.
+  The passive Master lent his hand
+  To the vast soul that o'er him planned."
+
+Hope is at the bottom of every Essay of Emerson's as it was at the
+bottom of Pandora's box:--
+
+    "I never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the
+    immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology,
+    symbols, religion of our own.
+
+    --"Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every
+    fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song."
+
+Under the title "Social Aims" he gives some wise counsel concerning
+manners and conversation. One of these precepts will serve as a
+specimen--if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear:--
+
+    "Shun the negative side. Never worry people with; your contritions,
+    nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness;
+    even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of
+    unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it."
+
+We have had one Essay on "Eloquence" already. One extract from this new
+discourse on the same subject must serve our turn:--
+
+    "These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain
+    speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but
+    we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your
+    fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes
+    of sincerity. Speak what you know and believe; and are personally in
+    it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to_
+    _translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the
+    person to whom you speak_."
+
+The italics are Emerson's.
+
+If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth
+before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and
+strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson's
+Essay on "Resources":--
+
+    "A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching
+    pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds,
+    and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than
+    sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being
+    odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives;
+    if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what
+    man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic;
+    that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man
+    is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to
+    nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has
+    experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put into genial and
+    working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and
+    gratitude to the Cause of Causes."
+
+The Essay or Lecture on "The Comic" may have formed a part of a series
+he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. Two or three sayings
+in it will show his view sufficiently:--
+
+    "The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or
+    well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to
+    be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of
+    performance.
+
+    "If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect
+    between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why
+    we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest
+    than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by
+    stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic
+    seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It
+    appears to be an essential element in a fine character.--A rogue
+    alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost,
+    his fellow-men can do little for him."
+
+These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by
+well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very
+recent date.
+
+"Quotation and Originality" furnishes the key to Emerson's workshop. He
+believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not
+in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king
+borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and
+superscription.
+
+    "All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every
+    moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two
+    strands.--We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences,
+    religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses,
+    tables and chairs by imitation.--
+
+    "The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and
+    stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his
+    invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.
+
+    "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of
+    it."--
+
+--"The Progress of Culture," his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has
+already been mentioned.
+
+--The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating,
+is repeated and enforced in the Essay on "Greatness."
+
+    "There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree.
+    Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.--Stick to
+    your own; don't inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national
+    crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of
+    heaven for you to walk in.
+
+    "Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own,
+    differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this
+    specialty the _bias_ of each individual. And none of us will ever
+    accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens
+    to this whisper which is heard by him alone."
+
+If to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is
+concentration.--To the bias of the individual mind must be added the
+most catholic receptivity for the genius of others.
+
+    "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every
+    man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of
+    him."--
+
+    "The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded
+    the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself governed others;
+    sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his
+    cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be
+    himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it is whom we
+    seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall
+    he found."
+
+What has Emerson to tell us of "Inspiration?"
+
+    "I believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by
+    inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury.--
+
+    "How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our
+    affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of
+    these."
+
+I will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to
+reproduce his comments on each:--
+
+1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed
+sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the
+faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially
+the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude
+of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel
+in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means
+chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader.
+
+    "Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working
+    mood."
+
+What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on "Immortality"? It is
+to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation
+to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed
+in this discourse,--what does it mean? We must tack together such
+sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:--
+
+    "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction,
+    namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall
+    continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we,
+    if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so."
+
+This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the
+possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues:--
+
+    "Schiller said, 'What is so universal as death must be benefit.'"
+
+He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu
+thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror
+of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two
+skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of
+years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure
+to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in
+permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created
+things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last
+plainly:--
+
+    "Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the
+    world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma."
+
+But turn over a few pages and we may read:--
+
+    "I confess that everything connected with our personality fails.
+    Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a
+    complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We
+    have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to
+    which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The
+    soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not
+    to be good. 'If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,'
+    said one of the old saints, 'and these by any man's suffering are
+    enlarged and enthroned.'"
+
+Once more we get a dissolving view of Emerson's creed, if such a word
+applies to a statement like the following:--
+
+    --"I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are
+    better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for.
+    The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down
+    in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's 'Ode' is the best modern
+    essay on the subject."
+
+Wordsworth's "Ode" is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more?
+The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an
+early period of Emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge
+into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The
+eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs
+to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of
+reason.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the "Fight at
+the Bridge," Emerson delivered a short Address at the unveiling of the
+statue of "The Minute-Man," erected at the place of the conflict, to
+commemorate the event. This is the last Address he ever wrote, though he
+delivered one or more after this date. From the manuscript which lies
+before me I extract a single passage:--
+
+    "In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England,
+    but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had
+    arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play
+    its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine
+    Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the
+    Colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England
+    was so dear to us that the Colonies could only be absolutely
+    disunited by violence from England, and only one man could compel
+    the resort to violence. Parliament wavered, Lord North wavered, all
+    the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he
+    was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent,
+    America was instantly united, and the Nation born."
+
+There is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written
+at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary
+labors.
+
+Emerson's collected "Poems" constitute the ninth volume of the recent
+collected edition of his works. They will be considered in a following
+chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies."
+
+
+The decline of Emerson's working faculties went on gently and gradually,
+but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. His faithful daughter,
+Ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding
+his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an
+echo before the voice whose words it was to shape for him when his mind
+faltered and needed a momentary impulse.
+
+With her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time
+to read a paper before a select audience. Thus, March 30, 1878, he
+delivered a Lecture in the Old South Church,--"Fortune of the Republic."
+On the 5th of May, 1879, he read a Lecture in the Chapel of Divinity
+College, Harvard University,--"The Preacher." In 1881 he read a paper on
+Carlyle before the Massachusetts Historical Society.--He also published
+a paper in the "North American Review," in 1878,--"The Sovereignty of
+Ethics," and one on "Superlatives," in "The Century" for February, 1882.
+
+But in these years he was writing little or nothing. All these papers
+were taken from among his manuscripts of different dates. The same
+thing is true of the volumes published since his death; they were
+only compilations from his stores of unpublished matter, and their
+arrangement was the work of Mr. Emerson's friend and literary executor,
+Mr. Cabot. These volumes cannot be considered as belonging to any single
+period of his literary life.
+
+Mr. Cabot prefixes to the tenth volume of Emerson's collected works,
+which bears the title, "Lectures and Biographical Sketches," the
+following:--
+
+"NOTE.
+
+"Of the pieces included in this volume the following, namely, those from
+'The Dial,' 'Character,' 'Plutarch,' and the biographical sketches of
+Dr. Ripley, of Mr. Hoar, and of Henry Thoreau, were printed by Mr.
+Emerson before I took any part in the arrangement of his papers. The
+rest, except the sketch of Miss Mary Emerson, I got ready for his use
+in readings to his friends, or to a limited public. He had given up
+the regular practice of lecturing, but would sometimes, upon special
+request, read a paper that had been prepared for him from his
+manuscripts, in the manner described in the Preface to 'Letters and
+Social Aims,'--some former lecture serving as a nucleus for the new.
+Some of these papers he afterwards allowed to be printed; others,
+namely, 'Aristocracy,' 'Education,' 'The Man of Letters,' 'The Scholar,'
+'Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,' 'Mary Moody
+Emerson,' are now published for the first time."
+
+Some of these papers I have already had occasion to refer to. From
+several of the others I will make one or two extracts,--a difficult
+task, so closely are the thoughts packed together.
+
+From "Demonology":--
+
+    "I say to the table-rappers
+
+                                   'I will believe
+      Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,'
+      And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!"
+
+    "Meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the
+    supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away
+    all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments
+    which haunt us. Willingly I too say Hail! to the unknown, awful
+    powers which transcend the ken of the understanding."
+
+I will not quote anything from the Essay called "Aristocracy." But let
+him who wishes to know what the word means to an American whose life has
+come from New England soil, whose ancestors have breathed New England
+air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation
+of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation.
+
+"Perpetual Forces" is one of those prose poems,--of his earlier epoch,
+I have no doubt,--in which he plays with the facts of science with
+singular grace and freedom.
+
+What man could speak more fitly, with more authority of "Character,"
+than Emerson? When he says, "If all things are taken away, I have
+still all things in my relation to the Eternal," we feel that such an
+utterance is as natural to his pure spirit as breathing to the frame in
+which it was imprisoned.
+
+We have had a glimpse of Emerson as a school-master, but behind and far
+above the teaching drill-master's desk is the chair from which he speaks
+to us of "Education." Compare the short and easy method of the wise man
+of old,--"He that spareth his rod hateth his son," with this other, "Be
+the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of
+his virtue,--but no kinsman of his sin."
+
+"The Superlative" will prove light and pleasant reading after these
+graver essays. [Greek: Maedhen agan]--_ne quid nimis_,--nothing in
+excess, was his precept as to adjectives.
+
+Two sentences from "The Sovereignty of Ethics" will go far towards
+reconciling elderly readers who have not forgotten the Westminster
+Assembly's Catechism with this sweet-souled dealer in spiritual
+dynamite:--
+
+    "Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the
+    pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the
+    pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.--
+
+    "If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of
+    Platonism, or of Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more
+    truly, have not yet their own legitimate force."
+
+So, too, this from "The Preacher":--
+
+    "All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation
+    against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and
+    its use.--The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the
+    substantial benefit endures."
+
+The special interest of the Address called "The Man of Letters" is, that
+it was delivered during the war. He was no advocate for peace where
+great principles were at the bottom of the conflict:--
+
+    "War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral
+    aspects at once.--War ennobles the age.--Battle, with the sword,
+    has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and
+    West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie."
+
+"The Scholar" was delivered before two Societies at the University of
+Virginia so late as the year 1876. If I must select any of its wise
+words, I will choose the questions which he has himself italicized to
+show his sense of their importance:--
+
+    "For all men, all women, Time, your country, your condition, the
+    invisible world are the interrogators: _Who are you? What do you?
+    Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your consciousness?
+    Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any soul_?
+
+    "Can he answer these questions? Can he dispose of them? Happy if you
+    can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life!
+    Happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer
+    them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general
+    mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all
+    who know them."
+
+The Essay on "Plutarch" has a peculiar value from the fact that Emerson
+owes more to him than to any other author except Plato, who is one of
+the only two writers quoted oftener than Plutarch. _Mutato nomine_, the
+portrait which Emerson draws of the Greek moralist might stand for his
+own:--
+
+    "Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in
+    character, in institutions, in science--natural, moral, or
+    metaphysical, or in memorable sayings drew his attention and came to
+    his pen with more or less fulness of record.
+
+    "A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an
+    intellectual co-perception. Plutarch's memory is full and his
+    horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his.
+
+    "Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends
+    him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his
+    moral sentiment is always pure.--
+
+    "I do not know where to find a book--to borrow a phrase of Ben
+    Jonson's--'so rammed with life,' and this in chapters chiefly
+    ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental.--His
+    vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an
+    incident.--
+
+    "In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to
+    discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents.--'Tis all
+    Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this
+    emperor.
+
+    "It is in consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I
+    confess that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a
+    faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but
+    he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a
+    necessity for completing his studies.
+
+    "He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like
+    another Berkeley, 'Matter is itself privation.'--
+
+    "Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the
+    method. He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and
+    prefers to sit as a scholar with Plato than as a disputant.
+
+    "His natural history is that of a lover and poet, and not of a
+    physicist.
+
+    "But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature
+    and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of
+    character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to
+    the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his
+    rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the
+    soul. La Harpe said that 'Plutarch is the genius the most naturally
+    moral that ever existed.'
+
+    "Plutarch thought 'truth to be the greatest good that man can
+    receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give.'
+
+    "All his judgments are noble. He thought with Epicurus that it is
+    more delightful to do than to receive a kindness.
+
+    "Plutarch was well-born, well-conditioned--eminently social, he was
+    a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and
+    knew the high value of good conversation.--
+
+    "He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its
+    victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities
+    of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental
+    associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially
+    marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the
+    intellect by the force of morals."
+
+How much, of all this would have been recognized as just and true if it
+had been set down in an obituary notice of Emerson!
+
+I have already made use of several of the other papers contained in this
+volume, and will merely enumerate all that follow the "Plutarch." Some
+of the titles will be sure to attract the reader. They are "Historic
+Notes of Life and Letters in New England;" "The Chardon Street
+Convention;" "Ezra Ripley, D.D.;" "Mary Moody Emerson;" "Samuel Hoar;"
+"Thoreau;" "Carlyle."--
+
+Mr. Cabot prefaces the eleventh and last volume of Emerson's writings
+with the following "Note":--
+
+    "The first five pieces in this volume, and the 'Editorial Address'
+    from the 'Massachusetts Quarterly Review,' were published by Mr.
+    Emerson long ago. The speeches at the John Brown, the Walter Scott,
+    and the Free Religious Association meetings were published at the
+    time, no doubt with his consent, but without any active co-operation
+    on his part. The 'Fortune of the Republic' appeared separately in
+    1879; the rest have never been published. In none was any change
+    from the original form made by me, except in the 'Fortune of the
+    Republic,' which was made up of several lectures for the occasion
+    upon which it was read."
+
+The volume of "Miscellanies" contains no less than twenty-three pieces
+of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects. The
+five referred to as having been previously published are, "The Lord's
+Supper," the "Historical Discourse in Concord," the "Address at the
+Dedication of the Soldiers' Monument in Concord," the "Address on
+Emancipation in the British West Indies," and the Lecture or Essay on
+"War,"--all of which have been already spoken of.
+
+Next in order comes a Lecture on the "Fugitive Slave Law." Emerson says,
+"I do not often speak on public questions.--My own habitual view is to
+the well-being of scholars." But he leaves his studies to attack the
+institution of slavery, from which he says he himself has never suffered
+any inconvenience, and the "Law," which the abolitionists would always
+call the "Fugitive Slave _Bill_." Emerson had a great admiration for
+Mr. Webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the
+seventh of March, just four years before the delivery of this Lecture.
+He warns against false leadership:--
+
+    "To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all
+    foolish trust in others.--He only who is able to stand alone is
+    qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which
+    a soul exists in this world,--to be himself the counter-balance of
+    all falsehood and all wrong.--The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and
+    strong and selfish.--England maintains trade, not liberty."
+
+Cowper had said long before this:--
+
+                    "doing good,
+  Disinterested good, is not our trade."
+
+And America found that England had not learned that trade when, fifteen
+years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free
+and slave states threatened the ruin of the great Republic, and England
+forgot her Anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of "a great
+empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth."
+
+It must be remembered that Emerson had never been identified with the
+abolitionists. But an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp
+point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long:--
+
+    "The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us
+    the lessons of centuries. I do not see how a barbarous community and
+    a civilized community can constitute one State. I think we must get
+    rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom."
+
+These were his words on the 26th of May, 1856, in his speech on "The
+Assault upon Mr. Sumner." A few months later, in his "Speech on the
+Affairs of Kansas," delivered almost five years before the first gun
+was fired at Fort Sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and
+commanding words:--
+
+    "The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough.
+    A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be
+    than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. I think the
+    American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new,
+    it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the
+    enemy three thousand miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic
+    interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a
+    net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war.
+
+    "Fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic,
+    I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves
+    into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning
+    from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the
+    sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the
+    country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no
+    country to return to. Come home and stay at home while there is a
+    country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any
+    who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes
+    and depart to some land where freedom exists."
+
+Two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of
+the family of John Brown, on the 18th of November, 1859, the other after
+his execution:--
+
+    "Our blind statesmen," he says, "go up and down, with committees of
+    vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy.
+    They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its
+    birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the
+    arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah
+    Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before
+    Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it."
+
+From his "Discourse on Theodore Parker" I take the following vigorous
+sentence:--
+
+    "His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond
+    all men in pulpits,--I cannot think of one rival,--that the essence
+    of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or
+    it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with
+    ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or
+    private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or
+    unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier
+    nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the
+    high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants,--it is
+    hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious
+    music, or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of
+    Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are."
+
+The Lecture on "American Civilization," made up from two Addresses, one
+of which was delivered at Washington on the 31st of January, 1862, is,
+as might be expected, full of anti-slavery. That on the "Emancipation
+Proclamation," delivered in Boston in September, 1862, is as full of
+"silent joy" at the advent of "a day which most of us dared not hope
+to see,--an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and
+uncertainties."
+
+From the "Remarks" at the funeral services for Abraham Lincoln, held
+in Concord on the 19th of April, 1865, I extract this admirably drawn
+character of the man:--
+
+    "He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by
+    step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening
+    his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an
+    entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty
+    millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds
+    articulated by his tongue."
+
+The following are the titles of the remaining contents of this volume:
+"Harvard Commemoration Speech;" "Editor's Address: Massachusetts
+Quarterly Review;" "Woman;" "Address to Kossuth;" "Robert Burns;"
+"Walter Scott;" "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious
+Association;" "Speech at the Annual Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association;" "The Fortune of the Republic." In treating of the
+"Woman Question," Emerson speaks temperately, delicately, with perfect
+fairness, but leaves it in the hands of the women themselves to
+determine whether they shall have an equal part in public affairs. "The
+new movement," he says, "is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and
+woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart
+is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to
+accomplish."
+
+It is hard to turn a leaf in any book of Emerson's writing without
+finding some pithy remark or some striking image or witty comment which
+illuminates the page where we find it and tempts us to seize upon it for
+an extract. But I must content myself with these few sentences from "The
+Fortune of the Republic," the last address he ever delivered, in which
+his belief in America and her institutions, and his trust in the
+Providence which overrules all nations and all worlds, have found
+fitting utterance:--
+
+    "Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here
+    let there be what the earth waits for,--exalted manhood. What this
+    country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its
+    materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall
+    serve man, and not man corn.
+
+    "They who find America insipid,--they for whom London and Paris have
+    spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. I
+    not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for
+    more than there is in the world.
+
+    "Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course
+    of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little
+    wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows
+    the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to
+    their good."
+
+With this expression of love and respect for his country and trust
+in his country's God, we may take leave of Emerson's prose writings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+EMERSON'S POEMS.
+
+
+The following "Prefatory Note" by Mr. Cabot introduces the ninth volume
+of the series of Emerson's collected works:--
+
+    "This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS
+    and MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876 Mr. Emerson published a
+    selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many.
+    Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the
+    expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some
+    pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix, on
+    various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Emerson's approval,
+    but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it
+    seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their
+    completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished
+    doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of
+    these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify
+    their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been
+    admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts
+    found in the Essays.
+
+    "In coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole
+    preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the
+    opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of
+    time.
+
+    "As was stated in the Preface to the first volume of this edition of
+    Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the "Selected
+    Poems" have not always been followed here, but in some cases
+    preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in
+    fuller strength than at the time of the last revision.
+
+    "A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of "May-Day," in the
+    part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as
+    bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature."
+
+Emerson's verse has been a fertile source of discussion. Some have
+called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of
+the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize
+its true claims. His prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is
+something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his
+prose. An illustration presently to be given will make this point clear.
+
+Poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to
+the plainer garments of the household and the street. Full dress, as
+we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the
+redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet.
+
+It reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its
+drapery and ornaments. A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet
+excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the
+fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we
+should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon
+by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under
+the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,--the flowers
+and jewels of his vocabulary.
+
+Here is a prose sentence from Emerson's "Works and Days:"--
+
+    "The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go
+    like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party;
+    but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring,
+    they carry them as silently away."
+
+Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference
+between prose and poetry:--
+
+  "DAYS.
+
+  "Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
+  Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
+  And marching single in an endless file,
+  Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
+  To each they offer gifts after his will,
+  Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all.
+  I, in my pleached garden watched the pomp,
+  Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
+  Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
+  Turned and departed silent. I too late
+  Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."
+
+--Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball! The
+full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like
+bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives
+like edges of embroidery. That one word _pleached,_ an heir-loom from
+Queen Elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and
+charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. But mark that now the
+poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first
+extract. It is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he
+now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. It
+is himself who is the object of scorn. Self-revelation of beauty
+embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation
+in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. Passion
+that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic
+utterance. And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which
+shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm
+that "_In_ vino _veritas_" is not truer than _In_ carmine _veritas_.
+As a further illustration of what has just been said of the
+self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson's verse more
+especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily
+presence and infirmities in his poetry,--subjects he never referred to
+in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.
+
+Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so
+many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip
+on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was
+shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the
+metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract
+of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of
+survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds
+his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration.
+
+Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?
+
+    "The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to
+    them, of all men, the severest criticism is due."
+
+These are Emerson's words in the Preface to "Parnassus."
+
+His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They
+lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems
+to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited
+from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but
+with the context. Milton had been speaking of "Logic" and of "Rhetoric,"
+and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple,
+sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be
+forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used
+absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be
+very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the
+poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some
+of the best of Milton's own.
+
+In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson
+was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet
+or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the
+term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat
+at eighty degrees of Reaumur is a very different matter. The rank of
+poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to
+our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to
+this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular
+poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the
+popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered
+passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry.
+Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a
+great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that
+length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is
+crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation.
+And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in
+the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope's "Essay on
+Man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "Paradise Lost" and
+"Paradise Regained" both together? For all that, we know there is a
+school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of
+poet.
+
+It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in
+a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and
+conversation. It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those
+authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. And
+after all, few will dare assert that "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is
+greater as a poem than Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's "Ode
+to a Nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so
+often quoted as
+
+  "To point a moral or adorn a tale."
+
+We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson's poetry
+with Emerson's own self-estimate. He says in a fit of humility, writing
+to Carlyle:--
+
+    "I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of
+    literature, the reporters, suburban men."
+
+But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland:--
+
+    "He once said to me, 'I am not a great poet--but whatever is of me
+    _is a poet_.'"
+
+These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and
+different periods.
+
+Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his
+self-distrust and his consciousness of the "vision," if not "the
+faculty, divine," are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic
+confessional:--
+
+  "A dull uncertain brain,
+  But gifted yet to know
+  That God has cherubim who go
+  Singing an immortal strain,
+  Immortal here below.
+  I know the mighty bards,
+  I listen while they sing,
+  And now I know
+  The secret store
+  Which these explore
+  When they with torch of genius pierce
+  The tenfold clouds that cover
+  The riches of the universe
+  From God's adoring lover.
+  And if to me it is not given
+  To fetch one ingot thence
+  Of that unfading gold of Heaven
+  His merchants may dispense,
+  Yet well I know the royal mine
+    And know the sparkle of its ore,
+  Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,--
+    Explored, they teach us to explore."
+
+These lines are from "The Poet," a series of fragments given in the
+"Appendix," which, with his first volume, "Poems," his second, "May-Day,
+and other Pieces," form the complete ninth volume of the new series.
+These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be
+found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of
+Emerson's self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had
+most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading "The Poet."
+
+Emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this
+passage from "Merlin" sufficiently shows:--
+
+  "Thy trivial harp will never please
+  Or fill my craving ear;
+  Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
+  Free, peremptory, clear.
+  No jingling serenader's art
+  Nor tinkling of piano-strings
+  Can make the wild blood start
+  In its mystic springs;
+  The kingly bard
+  Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
+  As with hammer or with mace;
+  That they may render back
+  Artful thunder, which conveys
+  Secrets of the solar track,
+  Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Great is the art,
+  Great be the manners of the bard.
+  He shall not his brain encumber
+  With the coil of rhythm and number;
+  But leaving rule and pale forethought
+  He shall aye climb
+  For his rhyme.
+  'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say,
+  'In to the upper doors,
+  Nor count compartments of the floors,
+  But mount to paradise
+  By the stairway of surprise.'"
+
+And here is another passage from "The Poet," mentioned in the quotation
+before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater
+miracles than those ascribed to Orpheus:--
+
+  "A Brother of the world, his song
+  Sounded like a tempest strong
+  Which tore from oaks their branches broad,
+  And stars from the ecliptic road.
+  Time wore he as his clothing-weeds,
+  He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.
+  As melts the iceberg in the seas,
+  As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,
+  As snow-banks thaw in April's beam,
+  The solid kingdoms like a dream
+  Resist in vain his motive strain,
+  They totter now and float amain.
+  For the Muse gave special charge
+  His learning should be deep and large,
+  And his training should not scant
+  The deepest lore of wealth or want:
+  His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
+  Every maxim of dreadful Need;
+  In its fulness he should taste
+  Life's honeycomb, but not too fast;
+  Full fed, but not intoxicated;
+  He should be loved; he should be hated;
+  A blooming child to children dear,
+  His heart should palpitate with fear."
+
+We look naturally to see what poets were Emerson's chief favorites. In
+his poems "The Test" and "The Solution," we find that the five whom
+he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe.
+
+Here are a few of his poetical characterizations from "The Harp:"--
+
+  "And this at least I dare affirm,
+  Since genius too has bound and term,
+  There is no bard in all the choir,
+  Not Homer's self, the poet-sire,
+  Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,
+  Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure,
+  Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,
+  Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,
+  Scott, the delight of generous boys,
+  Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,--
+  Not one of all can put in verse,
+  Or to this presence could rehearse
+  The sights and voices ravishing
+  The boy knew on the hills in spring."--
+
+In the notice of "Parnassus" some of his preferences have been already
+mentioned.
+
+Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the
+one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of
+criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman
+amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a
+violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of
+description are not odious.
+
+The difference between Emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries
+with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and
+arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and
+infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular.
+The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something
+definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols
+used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is
+a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days
+and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that
+hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not
+provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day
+use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are
+too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated
+terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that
+he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual
+life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught
+quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly
+known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that
+he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the
+hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor
+Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using
+the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of
+nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments,--he
+reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates
+undertook to "hew Mount Athos to the shape of man" in the likeness of
+Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes
+"Cheshire's haughty hill" stand before us an impersonation of kingly
+humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked.
+
+This is the fascination of Emerson's poetry; it moves in a world of
+universal symbolism. The sense of the infinite fills it with its
+majestic presence. It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the
+every-day aspects of nature. But he looks always with the eye of a poet,
+never with that of the man of science. The law of association of ideas
+is wholly different in the two. The scientific man connects objects in
+sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective
+resemblances. His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and
+contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws
+that govern, the subjects of his study. The poet links the most remote
+objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of
+fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by
+his instinct for the beautiful. The man of science clings to his object,
+as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full
+as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head
+up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens
+above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a
+Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. The
+poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are
+examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet
+is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of
+Fraunhofer's lines to the man of science.
+
+Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the
+best sense of that word. But his realities reached to the highest
+heavens: like Milton,--
+
+  "He passed the flaming bounds of place and time;
+  The living throne, the sapphire blaze
+  Where angels tremble while they gaze,
+  HE SAW"--
+
+Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. If Galileo had been
+a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse
+thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson.
+
+Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors
+of his imagination. He was ready to see beauty everywhere:--
+
+  "Thou can'st not wave thy staff in air,
+  Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
+  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
+  And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
+
+He called upon the poet to
+
+  "Tell men what they knew before;
+  Paint the prospect from their door."
+
+And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life
+with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or
+into a milking-pail.
+
+This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted
+moods he would have us
+
+  "Give to barrows, trays and pans
+  Grace and glimmer of romance."
+
+But in his Lecture on "Poetry and Imagination," he says:--
+
+    "What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound
+    of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps
+    Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet."
+
+The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are
+forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He
+himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the
+prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists"
+have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr.
+Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if
+they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader
+a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of
+selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy
+Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all
+stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page
+of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and
+exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as
+he might see fit.
+
+French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the
+slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that
+
+  "In the mud and scum of things
+  There alway, alway something sings."
+
+Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even
+there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected
+districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the
+genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they
+disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too
+wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du
+Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments,
+and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless
+circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not
+for a mere sensational effect.
+
+What a range of subjects from "The Problem" and "Uriel" and
+"Forerunners" to "The Humble-Bee" and "The Titmouse!" Nor let the reader
+who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the
+singularly impressive home-poem, "Hamatreya," beginning with the names
+of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord,--probably the
+same he owned after the last of them:--
+
+    "Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,"
+
+and ending with the austere and solemn "Earth-Song."
+
+Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical
+expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part
+of metrical composition. His muse picked her way as his speech did in
+conversation and in lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with
+rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born
+singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with
+"Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make
+rhyme without actual verbicide:--
+
+  "Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
+  And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are!
+
+And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this?
+
+  "In Adirondac lakes
+  At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed."
+
+It was surely not difficult to say--
+
+  "At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide."
+And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we
+like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more
+neatly and disposed more nicely. When he is at his best, his lines flow
+with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and
+sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs
+against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over.
+
+There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often,
+indulges in. This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line.
+It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. Shakespeare, the
+supreme artist, and Milton, the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,"
+knew how to use it effectively. Shelley employed it freely. Bryant
+indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of
+the "North American Review" in defence of its use. Willis was fond of
+it. As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,--may even
+have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse.
+But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. A humpback
+may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many
+humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. Can any ear
+reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson's?
+
+  "Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship
+  Of minds that each can stand against the world
+  By its own meek and incorruptible will?"
+
+These lines that lift their backs up in the middle--span-worm lines, we
+may call them--are not to be commended for common use because some great
+poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our
+recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson
+has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his
+leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood.
+
+As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared
+of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have
+tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in
+triolets, or attempt any cat's-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand.
+
+If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless
+versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something
+in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. Who
+would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking
+_lagena_?--Read his poem to the Aeolian harp ("The Harp") and his model
+betrays itself:--
+
+  "These syllables that Nature spoke,
+  And the thoughts that in him woke
+  Can adequately utter none
+  Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
+  Therein I hear the Parcae reel
+  The threads of man at their humming wheel,
+  The threads of life and power and pain,
+  So sweet and mournful falls the strain.
+  And best can teach its Delphian chord
+  How Nature to the soul is moored,
+  If once again that silent string,
+  As erst it wont, would thrill and ring."
+
+There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar
+to most true lovers of poetry. Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians
+by placing "The Sphinx" at the entrance of his temple of song. This poem
+was not fitted to attract worshippers. It is not easy of comprehension,
+not pleasing in movement. As at first written it had one verse in it
+which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed
+upon to omit it in the later versions. There are noble passages in it,
+but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. A commonplace young
+person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come
+by and by to the verse:--
+
+  "Have I a lover
+    Who is noble and free?--
+  I would he were nobler
+    Than to love me."
+
+The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think _c'est
+magnifique, mais ce n'est pas_--_l'amour_.
+
+The third poem in the volume, "The Problem," should have stood first in
+order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson's poems. All his earlier
+verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst
+of song in a poetic nature. "Each and All," "The Humble-Bee," "The
+Snow-Storm," should be read before "Uriel," "The World-Soul," or
+"Mithridates." "Monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for
+Emerson's poetry, and after this "Woodnotes."
+
+In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their
+descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is
+like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of
+descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ His subtle
+selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants,
+as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for
+its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different
+conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its
+descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the
+imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the
+pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes
+with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then
+mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the
+poem called "Destiny":--
+
+  "Alas! that one is born in blight,
+  Victim of perpetual slight:
+  When thou lookest on his face,
+  Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways!
+  None shall ask thee what thou doest,
+  Or care a rush for what thou knowest.
+  Or listen when thou repliest,
+  Or remember where thou liest,
+  Or how thy supper is sodden;'
+  And another is born
+  To make the sun forgotten."
+
+Of all Emerson's poems the "Concord Hymn" is the most nearly complete
+and faultless,--but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a
+poem as Collins might have written,--it has the very movement and
+melody of the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," and of the "Dirge in
+Cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one
+conspicuous line,
+
+  "And fired the shot heard round the world,"
+
+must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little
+poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn,
+musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records
+the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power
+that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom
+and her martyrs.
+
+These poems of Emerson's find the readers that must listen to them and
+delight in them, as the "Ancient Mariner" fastened upon the man who must
+hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them,
+and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the
+question, let him read the paragraph of "May-Day," beginning,--
+
+  "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+"Sea-shore," the fine fragments in the "Appendix" to his published
+works, called, collectively, "The Poet," blocks bearing the mark of
+poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct,
+and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the
+"Threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has
+the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with
+all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's
+picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in
+the language,--with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis,"
+leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as of wider scope and
+larger pattern.
+
+Many critics will concede that there is much truth in Mr. Arnold's
+remark on the want of "evolution" in Emerson's poems. One is struck
+with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical
+workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of
+poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot
+help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete "Christabel," and his
+"Abyssinian Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of.
+We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm
+of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which
+Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we
+go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which
+the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away
+half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of
+sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other
+apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest
+a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be
+something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic
+and artistic anaemia and insufficiency,--the opposite of what we find
+showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on
+the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault. Life seemed lustier
+in Old England than in New England to Emerson, to Hawthorne, and to
+that admirable observer, Mr. John Burroughs. Perhaps we require another
+century or two of acclimation.
+
+Emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties.
+He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal
+respiratory measure,--octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration
+is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal
+facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and
+also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and
+labor. I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had
+been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he
+habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought.
+
+Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. The
+golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their
+way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair
+belonged to their personalities. So with the poets; for Wordsworth the
+air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between
+storm and sunshine. Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist
+that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot. Without its own
+characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by
+
+    "The light that never was on sea or land,"
+
+we may have good verse but no true poem. In his poetry there is not
+merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon.
+
+Emerson's poetry is eminently subjective,--if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the
+word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two
+of his own chapters in his "Modern Painters." These are the chapter
+on "The Pathetic Fallacy," and the one which follows it "On Classical
+Landscape." In these he treats of the transfer of a writer's mental or
+emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. He
+asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by
+the singular name mentioned, "the pathetic fallacy," because, he says,
+"he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the
+landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern
+painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature,
+imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval
+painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual
+qualities of the object itself."
+
+Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" may be found almost
+anywhere in Emerson's poems. Here is one which offers itself without
+search:--
+
+  "Daily the bending skies solicit man,
+  The seasons chariot him from this exile,
+  The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,
+  The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
+  Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
+  Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home."
+
+The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with
+a defect. If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the
+_sympathetic illusion_, his readers might have looked upon it more
+justly.
+
+It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the
+resemblances between Emerson's poetry and that of other poets. Two or
+three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others
+may be mentioned.
+
+In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at
+least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of
+that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. Both
+are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates
+himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged
+to him.
+
+  "Good-by, proud world,"
+
+recalls Spenser and Raleigh. "The Humble-Bee" is strongly marked by the
+manner and thought of Marvell. Marvell's
+
+  "Annihilating all that's made
+  To a green thought in a green shade,"
+
+may well have suggested Emerson's
+
+  "The green silence dost displace
+  With thy mellow, breezy bass."
+
+"The Snow-Storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of
+Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by
+comparison with either.
+
+"Woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been
+found in Milton's "Comus;" this, for instance:--
+
+  "All constellations of the sky
+  Shed their virtue through his eye.
+  Him Nature giveth for defence
+  His formidable innocence."
+
+Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of
+his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were
+original.
+
+So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many
+moods, but with one pervading spirit:--
+
+  "Melting matter into dreams,
+  Panoramas which I saw,
+  And whatever glows or seems
+  Into substance, into Law."
+
+We think in reading his "Poems" of these words of Sainte-Beuve:--
+
+    "The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who
+    suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious,
+    and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to
+    complete in your turn."
+
+Just what he shows himself in his prose, Emerson shows himself in his
+verse. Only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of
+his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is
+higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and
+pour in continuous streams. Where they came from, or whither they flow
+to empty themselves, we cannot always say,--it is enough to enjoy them
+as they flow by us.
+
+Incompleteness--want of beginning, middle, and end,--is their too common
+fault. His pages are too much like those artists' studios all hung round
+with sketches and "bits" of scenery. "The Snow-Storm" and "Sea-Shore"
+are "bits" out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far
+as they go, but forcing us to ask, "Where is the painting for which
+these scraps are studies?" or "Out of what great picture have these
+pieces been cut?"
+
+We do not want his fragments to be made wholes,--if we did, what hand
+could be found equal to the task? We do not want his rhythms and rhymes
+smoothed and made more melodious. They are as honest as Chaucer's,
+and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any
+versifying drill-sergeant,--if we wanted them reshaped whom could we
+trust to meddle with them?
+
+His poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws
+on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its
+air is full of Aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze
+wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and
+from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden
+brilliancy.
+
+After all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons,
+we have to recognize that there is a charm in Emerson's poems
+which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a
+hyacinth,--any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from
+all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its
+articulating representatives should call us by name.
+
+All our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery
+of _style_. "The style is of [a part of] the man himself," said Buffon,
+and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, "The style is the
+man."
+
+The "personal equation" which differentiates two observers is not
+confined to the tower of the astronomer. Every human being is
+individualized by a new arrangement of elements. His mind is a safe with
+a lock to which only certain letters are the key. His ideas follow in
+an order of their own. His words group themselves together in special
+sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the
+total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with
+his individuality. We may not be able to assign the reason of the
+fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. But
+this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought;
+that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the
+accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and
+eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity
+of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and
+phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own,
+with a _curiosa felicitas_ which captivates and enthrals the reader who
+comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all
+he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and
+moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as
+a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding
+of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues,
+shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the
+Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services.
+
+
+Mr. Conway gives the following account of two visits to Emerson after
+the decline of his faculties had begun to make itself obvious:--
+
+    "In 1875, when I stayed at his house in Concord for a little time,
+    it was sad enough to find him sitting as a listener before those
+    who used to sit at his feet in silence. But when alone with him he
+    conversed in the old way, and his faults of memory seemed at
+    times to disappear. There was something striking in the kind of
+    forgetfulness by which he suffered. He remembered the realities
+    and uses of things when he could not recall their names. He would
+    describe what he wanted or thought of; when he could not recall
+    'chair' he could speak of that which supports the human frame, and
+    'the implement that cultivates the soil' must do for plough.--
+
+    "In 1880, when I was last in Concord, the trouble had made heavy
+    strides. The intensity of his silent attention to every word that
+    was said was painful, suggesting a concentration of his powers to
+    break through the invisible walls closing around them. Yet his face
+    was serene; he was even cheerful, and joined in our laughter at some
+    letters his eldest daughter had preserved, from young girls, trying
+    to coax autograph letters, and in one case asking for what price he
+    would write a valedictory address she had to deliver at college. He
+    was still able to joke about his 'naughty memory;' and no complaint
+    came from him when he once rallied himself on living too long.
+    Emerson appeared to me strangely beautiful at this time, and the
+    sweetness of his voice, when he spoke of the love and providence at
+    his side, is quite indescribable."--
+
+One of the later glimpses we have of Emerson is that preserved in the
+journal of Mr. Whitman, who visited Concord in the autumn of 1881. Mr.
+Ireland gives a long extract from this journal, from which I take the
+following:--
+
+    "On entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to
+    several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle
+    pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one,
+    remained silent through the whole talk and discussion. And so, there
+    Emerson sat, and I looking at him. A good color in his face, eyes
+    clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old
+    clear-peering aspect quite the same."
+
+Mr. Whitman met him again the next day, Sunday, September 18th, and
+records:--
+
+    "As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the
+    eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best
+    suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost
+    always with a smile."
+
+Dr. Le Baron Russell writes to me of Emerson at a still later period:--
+
+    "One incident I will mention which occurred at my last visit
+    to Emerson, only a few months before his death. I went by Mrs.
+    Emerson's request to pass a Sunday at their house at Concord towards
+    the end of June. His memory had been failing for some time, and his
+    mind as you know was clouded, but the old charm of his voice and
+    manner had never left him. On the morning after my arrival Mrs.
+    Emerson took us into the garden to see the beautiful roses in which
+    she took great delight. One red rose of most brilliant color she
+    called our attention to especially; its 'hue' was so truly 'angry
+    and brave' that I involuntarily repeated Herbert's line,--
+
+      'Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,'--
+
+    from the verses which Emerson had first repeated to me so long ago.
+    Emerson looked at the rose admiringly, and then as if by a sudden
+    impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low bow, 'I take off
+    my hat to it.'"
+
+Once a poet, always a poet. It was the same reverence for the beautiful
+that he had shown in the same way in his younger days on entering the
+wood, as Governor Rice has told us the story, given in an earlier
+chapter.
+
+I do not remember Emerson's last time of attendance at the "Saturday
+Club," but I recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words
+had become well marked. "My memory hides itself," he said. The last time
+I saw him, living, was at Longfellow's funeral. I was sitting opposite
+to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked
+intently upon the face of the dead poet. A few minutes later he rose
+again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently
+remembering that he had just done so. Mr. Conway reports that he said to
+a friend near him, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I
+have entirely forgotten his name."
+
+Dr. Edward Emerson has very kindly furnished me, in reply to my request,
+with information regarding his father's last years which will interest
+every one who has followed his life through its morning and midday to
+the hour of evening shadows.
+
+"May-Day," which was published in 1867, was made up of the poems written
+since his first volume appeared. After this he wrote no poems, but with
+some difficulty fitted the refrain to the poem "Boston," which had
+remained unfinished since the old Anti-slavery days. "Greatness," and
+the "Phi Beta Kappa Oration" of 1867, were among his last pieces of
+work. His College Lectures, "The Natural History of the Intellect,"
+were merely notes recorded years before, and now gathered and welded
+together. In 1876 he revised his poems, and made the selections from
+them for the "Little Classic" edition of his works, then called
+"Selected Poems." In that year he gave his "Address to the Students of
+the University of Virginia." This was a paper written long before, and
+its revision, with the aid of his daughter Ellen, was accomplished with
+much difficulty.
+
+The year 1867 was about the limit of his working life. During the last
+five years he hardly answered a letter. Before this time it had become
+increasingly hard for him to do so, and he always postponed and thought
+he should feel more able the next day, until his daughter Ellen was
+compelled to assume the correspondence. He did, however, write some
+letters in 1876, as, for instance, the answer to the invitation of the
+Virginia students.
+
+Emerson left off going regularly to the "Saturday Club" probably in
+1875. He used to depend on meeting Mr. Cabot there, but after Mr. Cabot
+began to come regularly to work on "Letters and Social Aims," Emerson,
+who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings.
+The trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his
+staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a
+part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and
+readings and to church. His hearing was very slightly impaired, and his
+sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled,
+and that "M's" and "N's" troubled him to read. He recognized the members
+of his own family and his _old_ friends; but, as I infer from this
+statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new
+acquaintances, as is common with old persons.
+
+He continued the habit of reading,--read through all his printed works
+with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and
+endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. In these Dr. Emerson found
+written "Examined 1877 or 1878," but he found no later date.
+
+In the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his
+table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a
+child. He liked to look over the "Advertiser," and was interested in the
+"Nation." He enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to
+guests.
+
+All this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of Dr.
+Emerson in answer to my questions. The twilight of a long, bright day
+of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and
+gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing
+and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to
+the very verge of its earthly existence.
+
+But darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. From
+these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of
+the worn-out bodily frame.
+
+In April, 1882, Emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he
+could hardly speak. When his son, Dr. Edward Emerson, called to see him,
+he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression
+than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. As he lay on his couch he
+pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of Carlyle "the
+good man,--my friend." His son told him that he had seen Carlyle, which
+seemed to please him much. On the following day the unequivocal signs of
+pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. He still recognized
+those around him, among the rest Judge Hoar, to whom he held out his
+arms for a last embrace. A sharp pain coming on, ether was administered
+with relief. And in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him
+and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. He lived very nearly to the
+completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born May 25, 1803, and
+his death occurring on the 27th of April, 1882.
+
+Mr. Ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for
+the most part, taken the following extracts:--
+
+    "The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson took place
+    at Concord on the 30th of April. A special train from Boston carried
+    a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted
+    by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church
+    where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town
+    bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with
+    other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped,
+    and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at
+    the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman.
+
+    "The services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred
+    at 2.30, and were conducted by Rev. W.H. Furness of Philadelphia, a
+    kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. They were simple in
+    character, and only Dr. Furness took part in them. The body lay in
+    the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and
+    close friends of the deceased. The only flowers were contained in
+    three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and
+    white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were filled
+    with friends and neighbors.
+
+    "At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival
+    of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was
+    packed. In front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of
+    pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow
+    jonquils, the gift of Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Among the floral
+    tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the Emerson
+    school. By the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums
+    and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath.
+
+    "Before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut
+    coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid was turned back,
+    and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small
+    bouquet of roses. While the coffin was being carried in, 'Pleyel's
+    Hymn' was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the
+    deceased. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge
+    E. Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the
+    congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his
+    voice many times trembling with emotion."
+
+I subjoin this most impressive "Address" entire, from the manuscript
+with which Judge Hoar has kindly favored me:--
+
+    "The beauty of Israel is fallen in its high place! Mr. Emerson
+    has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing
+    company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his
+    grave,--to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our
+    parting tribute of memory and love.
+
+    "There is nothing to mourn for him. That brave and manly life was
+    rounded out to the full length of days. That dying pillow was
+    softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to
+    the sleep which the Lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the
+    face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the
+    opening heavens.
+
+    "Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his
+    fame is established and secure. Throughout this great land and from
+    beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great
+    public loss. But we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was
+    _ours_. He was descended from the founders of the town. He chose our
+    village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. It was
+    to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was
+    our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and
+    the elders with reverence. He was our ornament and pride.
+
+                    "'He is gone--is dust,--
+      He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished!
+      For him there is no longer any future.
+      His life is bright--bright without spot it was
+      And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour
+      Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap.
+      Far off is he, above desire and fear;
+      No more submitted to the change and chance
+      Of the uncertain planets.--
+
+      "'The bloom is vanished from my life,
+      For, oh! he stood beside me like my youth;
+      Transformed for me the real to a dream,
+      Clothing the palpable and the familiar
+      With golden exhalations of the dawn.
+      Whatever fortunes wait my future toils,
+      The _beautiful_ is vanished and returns not.'
+
+    "That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high
+    aspirations,--those lips of eloquent music,--that great soul, which
+    trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality,--that large
+    heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,--that
+    hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no
+    repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,--oh,
+    friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there
+    no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and
+    farewell!"
+
+Judge Hoar's remarks were followed by the congregation singing the
+hymns, "Thy will be done," "I will not fear the fate provided by Thy
+love." The Rev. Dr. Furness then read selections from the Scriptures.
+
+The Rev. James Freeman Clarke then delivered an "Address," from which I
+extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any
+that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their
+subject,--for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or
+write of Emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not
+wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion.
+
+    "The saying of the Liturgy is true and wise, that 'in the midst of
+    life we are in death.' But it is still more true that in the midst
+    of death we are in life. Do we ever believe so much in immortality
+    as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a
+    few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? 'He is not here:
+    he is risen.' That power which we knew,--that soaring intelligence,
+    that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit,--_that_ cannot have
+    been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. It
+    has left its darkened dust behind. It has outsoared the shadow of
+    our night. God does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to
+    nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell,
+    or some bodily tissue. Life does not die, but matter dies off from
+    it. The highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which
+    meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose,
+    insight,--this agent of immense resource and boundless power,--this
+    has not been subdued by its instrument. When we think of such an one
+    as he, we can only think of life, never of death.
+
+    "Such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on 'Immortality.'
+    But he himself was the best argument for immortality. Like the
+    greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the
+    higher evidence of universal instincts,--the vast streams of belief
+    which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those
+    shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the
+    Atlantic and Pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the
+    revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun."
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Let us then ponder his words:--
+
+          'Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
+          What rainbows teach and sunsets show?
+          Voice of earth to earth returned,
+          Prayers of saints that inly burned,
+          Saying, _What is excellent
+          As God lives, is permanent;
+          Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
+          Hearts' love will meet thee again._
+
+         *       *       *       *
+
+          House and tenant go to ground
+          Lost in God, in Godhead found.'"
+
+After the above address a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M.
+Brown, of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the
+church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott recited the
+following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion:---
+
+      "His harp is silent: shall successors rise,
+      Touching with venturous hand the trembling string,
+      Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise,
+      And wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing?
+      Shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes,
+      As when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise,
+      World-wide his native melodies did sing,
+      Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories?
+      Ah, no! That matchless lyre shall silent lie:
+      None hath the vanished minstrel's wondrous skill
+      To touch that instrument with art and will.
+      With him, winged poesy doth droop and die;
+      While our dull age, left voiceless, must lament
+      The bard high heaven had for its service sent."
+
+
+    "Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors,
+    friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the
+    dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore
+    a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession
+    took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall
+    pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies
+    of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being
+    concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray
+    surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. The services
+    here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final
+    resting-place.
+
+    "The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal
+    clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the
+    Lord's Prayer, ending at the words, 'and deliver us from evil.'
+    In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pronounced the
+    benediction. After it was over the grandchildren passed the open
+    grave and threw flowers into it."
+
+So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
+and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.--A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard.
+
+
+Emerson's earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so
+slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the
+accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has
+been long living in the companionship of his thought. Still, he had to
+be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all
+immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to
+let them all "soar and sing" as he left his earthly half-way house. It
+is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the
+daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals,
+ourselves among the rest. But Emerson has said truly "Great geniuses
+have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about
+them. They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life
+was trivial and commonplace."
+
+The reader has had many extracts from Emerson's writings laid before
+him. It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are
+so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like
+distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he
+says from his undiluted thought. His books are all so full of his life
+to their last syllable that we might letter every volume _Emersoniana_,
+by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+From the numerous extracts I have given from Emerson's writings it may
+be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man
+and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. But he may
+probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from
+the hand of his biographer, if the author of this Memoir may borrow the
+name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the
+same field. He may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of
+the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading.
+He will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the Memoir
+if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the
+interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate.
+
+Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of
+scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in
+the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that
+he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly
+have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very
+light for a man of his stature. He got on the scales at Cheyenne, on
+his trip to California, comparing his weight with that of a lady of
+the party. A little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller,
+Professor Thayer, "How much did I weigh? A hundred and forty?" "A
+hundred and forty and a half," was the answer. "Yes, yes, a hundred and
+forty and a half! That _half_ I prize; it is an index of better things!"
+
+Emerson's head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a
+philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the
+_cephalometer_ used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches
+and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven
+and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It
+was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly
+equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most
+heads.
+
+His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this
+peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like "Ammon's great son," he carried
+one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose
+somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide,
+well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in
+its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin
+shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His
+expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement,
+centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New
+Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three
+cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied
+thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port
+of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring
+intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious. Few of our
+fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished
+personages than our present minister at the Court of St. James. In
+a recent letter to myself, which I trust Mr. Lowell will pardon my
+quoting, he says of Emerson:--
+
+"There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he
+habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if
+ever, only rise in spurts."
+
+From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars
+relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record.
+
+His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick.
+His eyes were of the "strongest and brightest blue." The member of the
+family who tells me this says:--
+
+"My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else
+had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in
+sea-captains. I have seen three sea-captains who had them."
+
+He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very
+limited, if we may judge from this family story. When he was in College,
+and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented
+himself, intending to learn to sing. The master received him, and when
+his turn came, said to him, "Chord!" "What?" said Emerson. "Chord!
+Chord! I tell you," repeated the master. "I don't know what you mean,"
+said Emerson. "Why, sing! Sing a note." "So I made some kind of a noise,
+and the singing-master said, 'That will do, sir. You need not come
+again.'"
+
+Emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in
+the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with
+others using it, but always _pie_ at breakfast. "It stood before him and
+was the first thing eaten." Ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour
+of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven.
+Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could
+do night after night. He never was hungry,--could go any time from
+breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for
+food when it was set before him.
+
+He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and
+often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the
+better.
+
+It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life
+long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency.
+He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about
+ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to
+Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily
+inheritance. In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:--
+
+  "I bear in youth the sad infirmities
+  That use to undo the limb and sense of age."
+
+Four years later:--
+
+  "Has God on thee conferred
+    A bodily presence mean as Paul's,
+  Yet made thee bearer of a word
+    Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?"
+
+and again, in the same year:--
+
+  "Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,
+  Trembling for the body's sake."--
+
+Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing
+in "Terminus" his inherited weakness of organization.
+
+And in writing to Carlyle, he says:--
+
+"You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and
+postponement of the blonde constitution."
+
+Again, "I am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast
+debility and procrastination."
+
+He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be
+observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that
+semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His
+presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough
+to make him a rapid and enduring walker.
+
+Emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the
+lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly
+penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as
+to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through
+his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a
+well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite
+sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon
+pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until
+it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.
+
+He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it
+were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to
+seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while
+his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground
+swell," as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed
+convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to
+Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.
+
+Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered
+the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of
+the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity,
+and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail,
+--which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it
+to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of
+inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been very
+accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it
+is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work
+with a spade, cried out, "Take care, papa,--you will dig your leg."
+
+He used to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about
+his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the
+nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the
+words.
+
+There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the
+earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he
+had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary
+that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with
+endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.
+
+Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy,
+over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos
+eseito]--Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have
+been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling
+learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with
+impunity.
+
+In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham,
+Emerson is reported as saying, "God has given me the seeing eye, but not
+the working hand." His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its
+envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in
+connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all
+this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden
+and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the
+patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one
+thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left
+no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with
+natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its
+various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity
+(_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it
+appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity,
+according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for
+an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that
+Franklin showed in the affairs of common life.
+
+He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become
+able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships.
+We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first
+edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears
+in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that
+recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still.
+What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded
+worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between
+the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience
+and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to
+make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham
+gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections
+which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his
+equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed,
+and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed
+itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree.
+
+Of Emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory
+of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked
+or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be
+his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity
+apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the
+part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little
+children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic
+smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated
+with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are
+living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has
+already been written. Margaret Fuller,--I must call my early schoolmate
+as I best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of
+five artists,--Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully
+commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives
+in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne
+awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.
+
+How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came
+to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That "majesty" Mr.
+Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that
+doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly
+upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew
+would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent
+persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would
+have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to
+the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too
+exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many
+others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal
+frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better
+sphere of being.
+
+Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village
+in which he lived. He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on
+no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures,
+was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt
+to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came
+flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What was the errand on which he visited our earth,--the message with
+which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life?
+
+Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. These may be opened
+earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can
+tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound.
+
+Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they
+were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country,
+perhaps by too long contact with the "Sons of Liberty," and their
+revolutionary notions. But the most "liberal" Boston pulpit still held
+to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any
+independent thinker.
+
+In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, "began," as
+was said of another,--"to be about thirty years of age." He had opened
+his sealed orders and had read therein:
+
+Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.
+
+Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice
+of God in thine own soul.
+
+Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy
+fellow-servants.
+
+Thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit
+of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold
+interests of life and the typical characters of history.
+
+Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul, in conscious
+union with the Infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence.
+
+This pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing
+is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. Its least
+appearance is not unworthy of thy study. Let thy soul be open and thine
+eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere.
+
+Go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they
+must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with
+the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see
+God.
+
+Teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect
+freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that
+today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to
+reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning's sun.
+
+To thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World,
+that here, here in our America, is the home of man; that here is the
+promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded.
+
+Thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent,
+hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere
+thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was true to the orders he had received. Through doubts, troubles,
+privations, opposition, he would not
+
+                              "bate a jot
+  Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
+  Right onward."
+
+All through the writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests
+itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest
+sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane"
+where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the
+homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners,
+And all his work was done, not so much
+
+  "As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye,"
+
+as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship.
+
+He was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to
+a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. He might have been an
+idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw
+all about him. He gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and
+trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him
+above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has
+held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a
+volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a
+confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and
+Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that
+professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the
+fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings
+of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions.
+
+Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely
+made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not
+in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague
+aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them,
+in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he
+
+  "Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer."
+
+Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout
+listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn,
+who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was
+over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life
+in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.
+
+  "His was the task and his the lordly gift
+  Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift."
+
+This was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier,
+calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more
+help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude
+could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.
+
+"Nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his
+genius," as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a
+poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in
+circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these
+directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and
+he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room
+naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from
+the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very
+popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a
+very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.
+
+--"I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished
+in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos
+not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as
+conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics,
+argument and confession." So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.
+
+It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave
+most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view
+the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson
+was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a
+play-actor.
+
+The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were,
+accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the
+lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of
+Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given
+length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and
+lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience
+would tire before the allotted time was over.
+
+Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists.
+They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative
+observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in
+their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen
+portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes
+little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an
+elevated sentiment.
+
+It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer
+in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had
+learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his
+apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must
+work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the
+playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good
+estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and
+published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in
+the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never
+became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances
+until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he
+was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor,
+writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and
+dangerous winter season.
+
+He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man
+could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed
+plain people whose classics were the Bible and the "Farmer's Almanac."
+Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by
+his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found
+his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow.
+
+When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public
+in the shape of an Essay. But the Essay never lost the character it
+borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a
+lay sermon,--_concio ad populum_. We must always remember what we are
+dealing with. "Expect nothing more of my power of construction,--no
+ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs
+tied together."--"Here I sit and read and write, with very little
+system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent
+particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer
+and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom
+of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," he says, "and there it
+tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing,
+sneer, or pray, according to your genius." In England, he says, "I find
+this lecturing a key which opens all doors." But he did not tend to
+overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so
+diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again,
+"I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and
+am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received."
+Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the
+earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares
+about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest
+itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments.
+But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations
+enough. I remember Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could
+fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very
+advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was
+unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely,
+saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that
+season.
+
+No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages
+with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he
+was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was
+deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the
+end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly,
+without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild
+surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full
+measure to his audience with perfect fairness.
+
+  [Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes
+  Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei
+  Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]
+
+or, in Bryant's version,
+
+  "as the scales
+  Are held by some just woman, who maintains
+  By spinning wool her household,--carefully
+  She poises both the wool and weights, to make
+  The balance even, that she may provide
+  A pittance for her babes."--
+
+As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. It is needless to handle
+this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it. Of their effect on
+his younger listeners he says, "To some of us that long past experience
+remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson
+awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of
+the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may
+fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of 'Chevy Chase,' and we in
+Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of
+victory."
+
+There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in
+Emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. So might "Peace, be
+still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. I remember
+that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror,
+I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson's,
+where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. An
+hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the
+diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for
+a careworn soul.
+
+An author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many
+quarries. Emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide
+range of authors. I shall presently show how extensive was his reading.
+No doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would
+seem, thoroughly. But let no one be frightened away from his pages by
+the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or
+Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not
+pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a
+man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks
+very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.
+
+"As he confesses in the Essay on 'Books,' his learning is second hand;
+but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use
+of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of
+his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the
+original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than
+of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive
+glimpses, and he is content."
+
+One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has
+"contrived to read" almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has
+fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has
+not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to
+Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well
+be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to Goethe are
+very frequent.
+
+Emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly
+know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse
+him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather
+quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson
+quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because
+another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with
+a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously
+appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse
+in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than
+many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his
+authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all,
+and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named
+references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are
+three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred
+and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven
+are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times
+or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or
+more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names
+alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one
+thousand and sixty-five references.
+
+  Authorities.  Number of times mentioned.
+  Shakespeare.....112
+  Napoleon.........84
+  Plato............81
+  Plutarch.........70
+  Goethe...........62
+  Swift............49
+  Bacon............47
+  Milton...........46
+  Newton...........43
+  Homer............42
+  Socrates.........42
+  Swedenborg.......40
+  Montaigne........30
+  Saadi............30
+  Luther...........30
+  Webster..........27
+  Aristotle........25
+  Hafiz............25
+  Wordsworth.......25
+  Burke............24
+  Saint Paul.......24
+  Dante............22
+  Shattuck (Hist. of
+    Concord).......21
+  Chaucer..........20
+  Coleridge........20
+  Michael Angelo...20
+  The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times.
+
+It is interesting to observe that Montaigne, Franklin, and Emerson all
+show the same fondness for Plutarch.
+
+Montaigne says, "I never settled myself to the reading of any book of
+solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."
+
+Franklin says, speaking of the books in his father's library, "There was
+among them Plutarch's Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think
+that time spent to great advantage."
+
+Emerson says, "I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to
+all the ancient writers."
+
+Studies of life and character were the delight of all these four
+moralists. As a judge of character, Dr. Hedge, who knew Emerson well,
+has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of "English
+Traits" can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the
+intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes.
+
+_Noscitur a sociis_ is as applicable to the books a man most affects as
+well as to the companions he chooses. It is with the kings of
+thought that Emerson most associates. As to borrowing from his royal
+acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve.
+
+"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.
+There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By
+necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."
+
+What Emerson says of Plutarch applies very nearly to himself.
+
+"In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate
+between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into
+the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not
+stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all."
+
+Mr. Ruskin and Lord Tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend
+themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Emerson would never have taken
+the trouble to do such a thing. His mind was overflowing with thought as
+a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from
+an endless variety of sources. He drew ashore whatever he wanted that
+would serve his purpose. He makes no secret of his mode of writing. "I
+dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature;
+but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of
+a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities."
+Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of
+his "lapidary style" and say "I build my house of boulders."
+
+"It is to be remembered," says Mr. Ruskin, "that all men who have sense
+and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they
+meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest
+is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human
+minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the
+world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original
+powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to
+their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it."
+
+The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson's words
+and thoughts and those of others.
+
+Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. "Scorn trifles"
+comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph
+Waldo.--"What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?
+This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." So writes Ralph Waldo
+Emerson in his Lecture "New England Reformers."--"Hiding the badges of
+royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest
+their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags."
+Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the "Harvard Register" nearly
+twenty years before.
+
+  "The hero is not fed on sweets,
+  Daily his own heart he eats."
+
+The image comes from Pythagoras _via_ Plutarch.
+
+Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a
+sentence which recalls Carlyle.
+
+"The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.
+The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all
+its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a
+long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule."
+
+Compare this passage from "English Traits" with the following one from
+Carlyle's "French Revolution":--
+
+"So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and
+character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch
+all men:--till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire,
+the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day!
+For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass;
+most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the
+burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing
+will put out."
+
+  "O what are heroes, prophets, men
+  But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow
+  A momentary music."
+
+The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns's letters, again in
+one of Coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a
+letter of Leibnitz.
+
+  "He builded better than he knew"
+
+is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson. The thought is constantly
+recurring in our literature. It helps out the minister's sermon; and a
+Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the "Address
+without a Phoenix" among the Drury Lane mock poems. Can we find any
+trace of this idea elsewhere?
+
+In a little poem of Coleridge's, "William Tell," are these two lines:
+
+  "On wind and wave the boy would toss
+  Was great, nor knew how great he was."
+
+The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle
+called "Characteristics." It reappears in Emerson's poem "Fate."
+
+  "Unknown to Cromwell as to me
+  Was Cromwell's measure and degree;
+  Unknown to him as to his horse,
+  If he than his groom is better or worse."
+
+It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this
+connection. In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest
+themselves. All the best poetry the world has known is full of such
+resemblances. If we find Emerson's wonderful picture, "Initial Love"
+prefigured in the "Symposium" of Plato, we have only to look in the
+"Phaedrus" and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare's
+famous group,--
+
+  "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet."
+
+Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental
+coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed
+from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished
+copies, _editions de luxe_ of sayings that all the world knows are old,
+but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again.
+The more improved versions of the world's great thoughts we have, the
+better, and we look to the great minds for them. The larger the river
+the more streams flow into it. The wide flood of Emerson's discourse has
+a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries.
+
+It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his
+lectures and essays. He was always on the lookout in conversation for
+things to be remembered. He picked up facts one would not have expected
+him to care for. He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple's time at
+Kalamazoo. I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me
+right. He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown
+in several instances. Another example is where he speaks of Quintus
+Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the
+self-sacrificing equestrian. Little inaccuracies of this kind did not
+concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could
+not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular
+article.
+
+Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him.
+Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most
+easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau.
+Carlyle's harsh virility could not be without its effect on his
+valid, but sensitive nature. Alcott's psychological and physiological
+speculations interested him as an idealist. Thoreau lent him a new set
+of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a
+poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as
+vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like
+those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest
+stone in the darkest night,--or come nearer to seeing it than those of
+most mortals. Emerson's long intimacy with him taught him to give an
+outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to
+him but for this companionship. A nicer analysis would detect many
+alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits
+predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood
+out distinct from the common family qualities. Mr. Whipple has well
+said: "Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his
+ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his
+genius? Indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words,
+and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius 'to spring,
+like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the
+past and refuse all history.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson's place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He cannot
+properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered
+lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have
+been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments
+rather than of the results of systematic study. He was a man of
+intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism.
+This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost,
+if not quite, unintelligible. We can, for this reason, understand why
+the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and Dr. Walter
+Channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. But it is not
+always a writer's fault that he is not understood. Many persons have
+poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand
+themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. But that which is
+mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring
+imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. It is to be hoped that no
+reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found
+under the title "Diogenes," in the work of his namesake, Diogenes
+Laertius. I translate from the Latin version.
+
+"Plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of _mensality_ and _cyathity_
+[_tableity_, and _gobletity_]. 'I can see a table and a goblet,' said
+the cynic, 'but I can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.'
+'Quite so,' answered Plato, 'because you have the eyes to see a goblet
+and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and
+gobletity.'"
+
+This anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following Emerson into
+the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation.
+
+Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a
+spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, "as
+the wise Spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. This, of
+course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than
+Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India,
+fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers
+and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux,
+Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has
+his fancies on the subject. The geography of an undiscovered country and
+the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to
+romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge.
+
+That the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a
+simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different
+proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its
+retina,--why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such
+questions very simply by saying it is so.
+
+The poet in Emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the
+philosopher. He speaks of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of
+Immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. It
+sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble
+Ode as working truths.
+
+     "Not in entire forgetfulness,
+      And not in utter nakedness,
+  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+      From God, who is our home."
+
+In accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a
+preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant:--
+
+    "Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
+     On whom those truths do rest
+  Which we are toiling all our lives to find."--
+
+These are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the
+poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and
+the age of eight years, at which Wordsworth finds the little girl of
+  whom he speaks in the lines,--
+
+             "A simple child--
+    That lightly draws its breath
+  And feels its life in every limb,--
+    What should it know of death?"
+
+What should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which
+Time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone
+render appreciable to the consciousness? Undoubtedly every brain has its
+own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own
+individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a
+good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as Dryden called it, from a
+good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth
+to plant himself on his instincts. But the individual to whom this
+counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts.
+He has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. His
+instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous
+conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided
+tendencies. The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what
+is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological
+language, from God or the devil. That which was a safe guide for Emerson
+might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy. The cloud of glory
+which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts,
+which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,--not the
+truths themselves. And too many children come into life trailing after
+them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory.
+
+It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new
+doctrine,--new to his young disciples,--of planting themselves on their
+instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting
+to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the
+door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which
+listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of
+babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as
+one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a
+very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "The Dial"
+was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness,
+incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to
+satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.
+
+The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less
+than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence.
+It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we
+cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance
+in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout
+religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious
+free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right
+and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its
+legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or
+institutions.
+
+All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of
+emancipation. For the Fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of Medmenham
+Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense _ce que voudras_. There was
+an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some
+susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally
+of the Bedlam sort. Emerson's disciples were never accused of falling
+into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself
+distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing
+effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign
+influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the
+effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the
+regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.
+
+Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration
+of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not
+yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but
+so was throwing the tea overboard. A provincial affair, if the Bohemian
+press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was
+fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over
+the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Too much has been made of Emerson's mysticism. He was an intellectual
+rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let
+go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of
+common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being
+could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob
+Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader
+may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic
+asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the
+contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in
+the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to
+insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable,
+the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played
+with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified
+the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual
+divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach
+to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out
+of itself. If "Rejected Addresses" had not been written half a century
+before Emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant
+to ridicule and parody it.
+
+       "The song of Braham is an Irish howl;
+       Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
+  And nought is everything and everything is nought."
+
+Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma
+that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.
+
+Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the "Yoga" doctrine
+of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The
+oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic
+dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a
+peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to
+construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be,
+of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and
+ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to
+build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a
+human soul had ever constructed.
+
+Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel,"
+illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's
+calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes
+refers to,--that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I
+become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. This
+was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his
+most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well
+known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for
+a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the
+spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.
+
+Emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question
+sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to
+the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a
+charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and
+disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have
+a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "Uriel" is a poem which finds itself
+perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt
+not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment,
+it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the
+voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest
+imaginative conceptions.
+
+Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of
+universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return.
+Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects
+in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the
+landscape. Here is a curious extract from "The Adirondacs," in which the
+reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron's--
+
+  "The sky is changed,--and such a change! O night
+  And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."--
+
+Now Emerson:--
+
+  "And presently the sky is changed; O world!
+  What pictures and what harmonies are thine!
+  The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
+  _So like the soul of me, what if't were me_?"
+
+We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem
+printed among the "Translations" in the Appendix to Emerson's Poems.
+These are the last two lines of "The Flute, from Hilali":--
+
+  "Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,
+  If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?"
+
+The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley's "Ode
+to the West Wind":
+
+              "Be thou, Spirit fierce,
+  My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"
+
+Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops
+of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical
+metempsychosis.
+
+The laird of Balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him
+cherry-brandy instead of port wine. In driving home over a wild tract of
+land called Munrimmon Moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got
+out of the gig and brought them to him. The hat he recognized, but not
+the wig. "It's no my wig, Hairy [Harry], lad; it's no my wig," and he
+would not touch it. At last Harry lost his patience: "Ye'd better tak'
+it, sir, for there's nae waile [choice] o' wigs on Munrimmon Moor."
+And in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman,
+whose _Ego_ was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she
+had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of
+her four-footed companion:--
+
+  "If it be I, he'll wag his little tail;
+  And if it be not I, he'll loudly bark and wail."
+
+I have not lost my reverence for Emerson in showing one of his fancies
+for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. He would
+doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense
+of humor. But I take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about
+"a foresmell of the Infinite" which Mr. Conway has attributed to me, who
+am innocent of all connection with it.
+
+The mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial
+concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special
+endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. It is
+not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great
+composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise
+the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine
+contemplation. The bewildered reader must not forget that passage of
+arms, previously mentioned, between Plato and Diogenes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson looked rather askance at Science in his early days. I remember
+that his brother Charles had something to say in the "Harvard Register"
+(1828) about its disenchantments. I suspect the prejudice may have come
+partly from Wordsworth. Compare this verse of his with the lines of
+Emerson's which follow it.
+
+  "Physician art thou, one all eyes;
+  Philosopher, a fingering slave,
+  One that would peep and botanize
+  Upon his mother's grave?"
+
+Emerson's lines are to be found near the end of the Appendix in the new
+edition of his works.
+
+  "Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
+  And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
+  In love he cannot therefore cease his trade;
+  Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
+  He feels it, introverts his learned eye
+  To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.
+  His mother died,--the only friend he had,--
+  Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
+  Couched like a cat, sat watching close behind
+  And throttled all his passion. Is't not like
+  That devil-spider that devours her mate
+  Scarce freed from her embraces?"
+
+The same feeling comes out in the Poem "Blight," where he says the
+"young scholars who invade our hills"
+
+  "Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
+  And all their botany is Latin names;"
+
+and in "The Walk," where the "learned men" with their glasses are
+contrasted with the sons of Nature,--the poets are no doubt meant,--much
+to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. Emerson's mind
+was very far from being of the scientific pattern. Science is
+quantitative,--loves the foot-rule and the balance,--methodical,
+exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. The poet is curious,
+asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the
+answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it. Emerson wonders,
+for instance,--
+
+  "Why Nature loves the number five,"
+
+but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any
+farther. He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany
+from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr.
+Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial
+anaesthesia. It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz,
+who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most
+delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science
+and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came
+among us. At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their
+specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves
+the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his
+Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says:--
+
+"Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet's
+curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the
+feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection
+they awake."--
+
+This was Emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of
+nature.
+
+Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes
+quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects.
+His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are
+independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is
+frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the
+special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound
+that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing
+_audacities_:--
+
+"There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is
+naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."--
+
+"He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and
+carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic."--
+
+"If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long
+hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy
+which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature."--
+
+"Tapping the tempest for a little side wind."--
+
+"The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot
+every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and
+employment and bind them fast in one web."--
+
+He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes
+the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe,
+Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word "husband"
+in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word "haughty" is so
+fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its
+employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But
+his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like
+dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty Ariel,"--"fine Ariel." It
+belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to
+Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators
+are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of
+Emerson's. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic
+traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn
+fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and
+his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;"
+his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word "fine," with a
+certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the
+word "melioration."
+
+We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel
+with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The "point and
+surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch
+belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is
+very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects,
+ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool
+and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison
+grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such
+delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to
+match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the
+slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced
+organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling
+the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an
+unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he "peddles out all the
+wit he can gather from Time or from Nature," and we find that "he has
+changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying
+about the morning light as merchandise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as
+home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen
+sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets
+familiar to all of us,--"This great, intelligent, sensual, and
+avaricious America." This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his
+Essay, "Works and Days," he is quite as outspoken: "This mendicant
+America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America." "I
+see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the
+respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "The war," he
+says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." All his
+life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization.
+All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them.
+To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the
+ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "Here,"
+he said, in words I have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is
+the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded."
+
+Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent;
+he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him
+as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our
+fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. So it pleases us
+to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of
+Franklin's bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of
+Emerson's:--
+
+  "A blessing through the ages thus
+  Shield all thy roofs and towers,
+  GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
+  Thou darling town of ours!"
+
+Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not
+fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend
+their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop,
+and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the
+penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of
+the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. His courtesy and kindness
+to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. Poets who come to recite
+their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are
+among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted
+his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but
+collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable
+inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one
+phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far
+as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his
+most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in
+its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The natural purity and elevation of Emerson's character show themselves
+in all that he writes. His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him
+from his writings. This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all
+the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so
+spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave
+their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some
+superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about
+Boileau,--
+
+  "Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,--cela porte malheur."
+
+(Don't let us abuse Nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up
+dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had
+their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the
+assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him,
+and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy,
+sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England
+was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The
+_dour_ Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and
+they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise
+above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until
+he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and
+find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. So
+did the music of Emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our
+stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would
+have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When
+a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened
+persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs
+as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the
+convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about
+which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep
+and anxious and devout religious scepticism.
+
+It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by
+Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his
+ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but
+when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the
+end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the
+more he found himself perplexed.
+
+The name most frequently applied to Emerson's form of belief is
+Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can
+tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief
+in the omnipresence of the Deity?
+
+Theodore Parker explained Emerson's position, as he understood it, in an
+article in the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." I borrow this quotation
+from Mr. Cooke:--
+
+"He has an absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of
+Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it.
+He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or
+morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy
+for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates
+at Andover or Cambridge."
+
+We read in his Essay, "Self-Reliance ": "This is the ultimate fact which
+we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all
+into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the
+Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in
+which it enters into all lower forms."
+
+The "ever-blessed ONE" of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the
+doctrine of the Trinity. The "Over-Soul" of Emerson is that aspect of
+Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a
+divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in
+all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as
+he was willing to be called a Platonist.
+
+Explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like
+this. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the
+Almighty unto perfection?" But on certain great points nothing could be
+clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of
+spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His
+views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character,
+brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him
+afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any
+denial of the self-governing power of the will.
+
+His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. In all
+he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in
+all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his light and guide; through
+all nature he looked up to nature's God; and if he did not worship the
+"man Christ Jesus" as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed
+his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of
+him as more like Christ than any man he had known.
+
+Emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church
+from which he had parted. Since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not
+of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of
+well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an
+impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent
+sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before.
+Their official Confessions of Faith make far less difference in their
+human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago.
+These ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials
+with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little
+bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long
+as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully
+treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that.
+
+Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of
+Emerson's religious teachings I will select two as typical.
+
+Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in
+Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has
+written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the
+New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with
+the following sentence:--
+
+"Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of
+Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one
+of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole,
+tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a
+great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest
+of human life: 'HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.'"
+
+"But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report," says
+Mr. Conway "('Macmillan,' June, 1879), that religion had there passed
+through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that 'the genial
+atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all
+the churches equally.'"
+
+What is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of Christianity?
+The good Baptist minister's Essay is full of it. He comes asking what
+has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of
+"fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same
+Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him.
+The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if
+he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations
+ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later
+he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was
+called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished
+to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into
+pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals.
+
+It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the
+self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the
+Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness
+of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely
+claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote:--
+
+"Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place
+these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man
+sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again
+to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our
+faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the
+Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be
+there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and
+the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of
+conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the
+spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of
+voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself
+there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from
+the dead, to swell their number."
+
+The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson's writings and life
+is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and
+critics. The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by
+three considerable Memoirs. Mr. George Willis Cooke's elaborate work is
+remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson's teachings.
+Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway's "Emerson at Home and Abroad" is a lively
+picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. Mr.
+Alexander Ireland's "Biographical Sketch" brings together, from a great
+variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of
+Emerson's history and the comments of those whose opinions were best
+worth reproducing. I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the
+various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject.
+
+From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our
+intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and
+appreciative criticisms of Emerson's Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the
+portrait of the New England "Plotinus-Montaigne" in his brilliant "Fable
+for Critics," to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John
+Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson's
+writings have furnished one of the most enduring _pieces de resistance_
+at the critical tables of the old and the new world.
+
+He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and
+writers: Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services;
+Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss
+Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him "a noble man."
+Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson's
+fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but
+unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned
+whether they would pass current with posterity. He found discerning
+critics in France, Germany, and Holland. Better than all is the
+testimony of those who knew him best. They who repeat the saying that
+"a prophet is not without honor save in his own country," will find an
+exception to its truth in the case of Emerson. Read the impressive words
+spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the
+glowing tributes of three of Concord's poets,--Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing,
+and Mr. Sanborn,--and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame
+had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored,
+beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his
+own fireside.
+
+It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the
+language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the
+adamant of Shakespeare," and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison
+or Gray's Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought
+entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified
+the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as
+a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. _Corpora non agunt
+nisi soluta_, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as
+material substances before they can act. "That which thou sowest is not
+quickened except it die," or rather lose the form with which it was
+sown. Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of "The
+Burial of Sir John Moore" an immortal, and endowed the language with a
+classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. But what is the gift of a
+mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? How many lives
+have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost
+in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their
+influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which
+they formed a part and the generations that came after them! We can dare
+to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr.
+Cranch:--
+
+  "The wise will know thee and the good will love,
+    The age to come will feel thy impress given
+  In all that lifts the race a step above
+    Itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven."
+
+It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson's best literary work in prose and
+verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or
+fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and
+the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends,
+indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly
+pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose
+footsteps Christendom professes to follow. The time was when the divine
+authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported
+to have wrought. As the faith in these exceptions to the general laws
+of the universe diminished, the teachings of the Master, of whom it was
+said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon
+as evidence of his divine mission. Now, when a comparison of these
+teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to
+have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the
+sinless and self-devoted servant of God and friend of man is appealed to
+as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation
+of the Divinity.
+
+Judged by his life Emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity.
+He was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even
+the jail. But the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing
+it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of Queen
+Mary's martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. His faith was too large and
+too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too
+honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred
+calling. His writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of
+admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them
+their true value. It was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on
+so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the
+privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise.
+No matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks,
+carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to
+his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without
+which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. He shaped an ideal for
+the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after
+truth. Look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall
+see it everywhere. Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you
+shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul. Trust yourself because
+you trust the voice of God in your inmost consciousness.
+
+There are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts
+beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. So
+transparent was the life of Emerson; so clearly did the true nature of
+the man show through it. What he taught others to be, he was himself.
+His deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere
+among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest
+manifestations of character. Here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may
+have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if He who knew what was in man
+had wandered from door to door in New England as of old in Palestine, we
+can well believe that one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet"
+would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been
+that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+[For many references, not found elsewhere, see under the general
+headings of _Emerson's Books, Essays, Poems_.]
+
+
+  Abbott, Josiah Gardiner, a pupil of Emerson, 49, 50.
+
+  Academic Races, 2, 3. (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Action, subordinate, 112.
+
+  Adams, John, old age, 261.
+
+  Adams, Samuel, Harvard debate, 115.
+
+  Addison, Joseph, classic, 416.
+
+  Advertiser, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+  Aeolian Harp, his model, 329, 340.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Harp.)
+
+  Aeschylus, tragedies, 253. (See _Greek_.)
+
+  Agassiz, Louis:
+    Saturday Club, 222;
+    companionship, 403.
+
+  Agriculture:
+    in Anthology, 30;
+    attacked, 190;
+    not Emerson's field, 255, 256, 365.
+
+  Akenside, Mark, allusion, 16.
+
+  Alchemy, adepts, 260, 261.
+
+  Alcott, A. Bronson:
+    hearing Emerson, 66;
+    speculations, 86;
+    an idealist, 150;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    sonnet, 355;
+    quoted, 373;
+    personality traceable, 389.
+
+  Alcott, Louisa M., funeral bouquet, 351.
+
+  Alexander the Great:
+    allusion, 184;
+    mountain likeness, 322.
+
+  Alfred the Great, 220, 306.
+
+  Allston, Washington, unfinished picture, 334.
+      (See _Pictures_.)
+
+  Ambition, treated in Anthology, 30.
+
+  America:
+    room for a poet, 136, 137;
+    virtues and defects, 143;
+    faith in, 179;
+    people compared with English, 216;
+    things awry, 260;
+    _aristocracy_, 296;
+    in the Civil War, 304;
+    Revolution, 305;
+    Lincoln, the true history of his time, 307;
+    passion for, 308, 309;
+    artificial rhythm, 329;
+    its own literary style, 342;
+    home of man, 371;
+    loyalty to, 406;
+    epithets, 406, 407.
+      (See _England, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Amici, meeting Emerson, 63.
+      (See _Italy_.)
+
+  Amusements, in New England, 30.
+
+  Anaemia, artistic, 334.
+
+  Ancestry:
+    in general, 1-3;
+    Emerson's, 3 _et seq._
+      (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Andover, Mass.:
+    Theological School, 48;
+    graduates, 411.
+
+  Andrew, John Albion:
+    War Governor, 223;
+    hearing Emerson, 379.
+      (See _South_.)
+
+  Angelo. (See _Michael Angelo_.)
+
+  Antinomianism:
+    in The Dial, 162;
+    kept from, 177.
+      (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Anti-Slavery:
+    in Emerson's pulpit, 57;
+    the reform, 141, 145, 152;
+    Emancipation address, 181;
+    Boston and New York addresses, 210-212;
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 228;
+    Fugitive Slave Law, and other matters, 303-307.
+      (See _South_.)
+
+  Antoninus, Marcus, allusion, 16.
+
+  Architecture, illustrations, 253.
+
+  Arianism, 51.
+      (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+  Aristotle:
+    influence over Mary Emerson, 17;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Arminianism, 51.
+      (See _Methodism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Arnim, Gisela von, 225.
+
+  Arnold, Matthew:
+    quotation about America, 137:
+    lecture, 236;
+    on Milton, 315;
+    his Thyrsis, 333;
+    criticism, 334;
+    string of Emerson's epithets, 406.
+
+  Aryans, comparison, 312.
+
+  Asia:
+    a pet name, 176;
+    immovable, 200.
+
+  Assabet River, 70, 71.
+
+  Astronomy:
+    Harp illustration, 108;
+    stars against wrong, 252, 253.
+    (See _Galileo, Stars, Venus_, etc.)
+
+  Atlantic Monthly:
+    sketch of Dr. Ripley, 14, 15;
+    of Mary Moody Emerson, 16;
+    established, 221;
+    supposititious club, 222;
+    on Persian Poetry, 224;
+    on Thoreau, 228;
+    Emerson's contributions, 239, 241;
+    Brahma, 296.
+
+  Atmosphere:
+    effect on inspiration, 290;
+    spiritual, 413, 414.
+
+  Augustine, Emerson's study of, 52.
+
+  Authors, quoted by Emerson, 381-383.
+    (See _Plutarch_, etc.)
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis:
+    allusion, 22, 111;
+    times quoted, 382.
+
+  Bancroft, George:
+    literary rank, 33;
+    in college, 45.
+
+  Barbier, Henri Auguste, on Napoleon, 208.
+
+  Barnwell, Robert W.:
+    in history, 45;
+    in college, 47.
+
+  Beaumont and Fletcher, disputed, line, 128, 129.
+
+  Beauty:
+    its nature, 74, 94, 95;
+    an end, 99, 135, 182;
+    study, 301.
+
+  Beecher, Edward, on preexistence, 391.
+    (See _Preexistence_.)
+
+  Behmen, Jacob:
+    mysticism, 201, 202, 396;
+    citation, 380.
+
+  Berkeley, Bishop:
+    characteristics, 189;
+    matter, 300.
+
+  Bible:
+    Mary Emerson's study, 16;
+    Mosaic cosmogony, 18;
+    the Exodus, 35;
+    the Lord's Supper, 58;
+    Psalms, 68, 181, 182, 253;
+    lost Paradise, 101;
+    Genesis, Sermon on the Mount, 102;
+    Seer of Patmos, 102, 103;
+    Apocalypse, 105;
+    Song of Songs, 117;
+    Baruch's roll, 117, 118;
+    not closed, 122;
+    the Sower, 154;
+    Noah's Ark, 191;
+    Pharisee's trumpets, 255;
+    names and imagery, 268;
+    sparing the rod, 297;
+    rhythmic mottoes, 314;
+    beauty of Israel, 351;
+    face of an angel, 352;
+    barren fig-tree, 367;
+    a classic, 376;
+    body of death, "Peace be still!" 379;
+    draught of fishes, 381;
+    its semi-detached sentences, 405;
+    Job quoted, 411;
+    "the man Christ Jesus," 412;
+    scattering abroad, 414.
+    (See _Christ, God, Religion,_ etc.)
+
+  Bigelow, Jacob, on rural cemeteries, 31.
+
+  Biography, every man writes his own, 1.
+
+  Blackmore, Sir Richard, controversy, 31.
+
+  Bliss Family, 9.
+
+  Bliss, Daniel, patriotism, 72.
+
+  Blood, transfusion of, 256.
+
+  Books, use and abuse, 110, 111.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Boston, Mass.:
+    First Church, 10, 12, 13;
+    Woman's Club, 16;
+    Harbor, 19;
+    nebular spot, 25, 26;
+    its pulpit darling, 27;
+    Episcopacy, 28;
+    Athenaeum, 31;
+    magazines, 28-34;
+    intellectual character, lights on its three hills, high caste
+  religion, 34;
+    Samaria and Jerusalem, 35;
+    streets and squares, 37-39;
+    Latin School, 39, 40, 43;
+    new buildings, 42;
+    Mrs. Emerson's boarding-house, the Common as a pasture, 43;
+    Unitarian preaching, 51;
+    a New England centre, 52;
+    Emerson's settlement, 54;
+    Second Church, 55-61;
+    lectures, 87, 88, 191;
+    Trimount Oracle, 102;
+    stirred by the Divinity-School address, 126;
+    school-keeping, Roxbury, 129;
+    aesthetic society, 149;
+    Transcendentalists, 155, 156;
+    Bay, 172;
+    Freeman Place Chapel, 210:
+    Saturday Club, 221-223;
+    Burns Centennial, 224, 225;
+    Parker meeting, 228;
+    letters, 263, 274, 275;
+    Old South lecture, 294;
+    Unitarianism, 298;
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 307;
+    special train, 350;
+    Sons of Liberty, 369;
+    birthplace, 407;
+    Baptists, 413.
+
+  Boswell, James:
+    allusion, 138;
+    one lacking, 223;
+    Life of Johnson, 268.
+
+  Botany, 403.
+    (See _Science_.)
+
+  Bowen, Francis: literary rank, 34;
+    on Nature, 103, 104.
+
+  Brook Farm, 159, 164-166, 189, 191.
+    (See _Transcendentalism_, etc.)
+
+  Brown, Howard N., prayer, 355.
+
+  Brown, John, sympathy with, 211.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery, South_.)
+
+  Brownson, Orestes A., at a party, 149.
+
+  Bryant, William Cullen:
+    his literary rank, 33;
+    redundant syllable, 328;
+    his translation of Homer quoted, 378.
+
+  Buckminster, Joseph Stevens:
+    minister in Boston, 12, 26, 27, 52;
+    Memoir, 29;
+    destruction of Goldau, 31.
+
+  Buddhism:
+    like Transcendentalism, 151;
+    Buddhist nature, 188;
+    saints
+    298. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma,
+    --_India_, etc.)
+
+  Buffon, on style, 341.
+
+  Bulkeley Family, 4-7.
+
+  Bulkeley, Peter:
+    minister of Concord, 4-7, 71;
+    comparison of sermons, 57;
+    patriotism, 72;
+    landowner, 327.
+
+  Bunyan, John, quoted, 169.
+
+  Burke, Edmund:
+    essay, 73;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Burns, Robert:
+    festival, 224, 225;
+    rank, 281;
+    image referred to, 386;
+    religious position, 409. (See _Scotland_.)
+
+  Burroughs, John, view of English life, 335.
+
+  Burton, Robert, quotations, 109, 381.
+
+  Buttrick, Major, in the Revolution, 71, 72.
+
+  Byron, Lord:
+    allusion, 16;
+    rank, 281;
+    disdain, 321;
+    uncertain sky, 335;
+    parallelism, 399.
+
+
+  CABOT, J. ELLIOT:
+    on Emerson's literary habits, 27;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    prefaces, 283, 302;
+    Note, 295, 296;
+    Prefatory Note, 310, 311;
+    the last meetings, 347, 348.
+
+  Caesar, Julius, 184,197.
+
+  California, trip, 263-271, 359. (See _Thayer_.)
+
+  Calvin, John:
+    his Commentary, 103;
+    used by Cotton, 286.
+
+  Calvinism:
+    William Emerson's want of sympathy with, 11, 12;
+    outgrown, 51;
+    predestination, 230;
+    saints, 298;
+    spiritual influx, 412.
+    (See _God, Puritanism, Religion, Unitarianism.)_
+
+  Cambridge, Mass.:
+    Emerson teaching there, 50;
+    exclusive circles, 52.
+    (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+  Cant, disgust with, 156.
+
+  Carlyle, Thomas:
+    meeting Emerson, 63;
+    recollections of their relations, 78-80, 83;
+    Sartor Resartus, 81, 82, 91;
+    correspondence, 82, 83, 89, 90, 127, 176, 177, 192, 315, 317, 374,
+         380, 381, 406, 407;
+    Life of Schiller, 91;
+    on Nature, 104, 105;
+    Miscellanies, 130;
+    the Waterville Address, 136-138;
+    influence, 149, 150;
+    on Transcendentalism, 156-158;
+    The Dial, 160-163;
+    Brook Farm, 164;
+    friendship, 171;
+    Chelsea visit, 194;
+    bitter legacy, 196;
+    love of power, 197;
+    on Napoleon and Goethe, 208;
+    grumblings, 260;
+    tobacco, 270;
+    Sartor reprinted, 272;
+    paper on, 294;
+    Emerson's dying friendship, 349;
+    physique, 363;
+    Gallic fire, 386;
+    on Characteristics, 387;
+    personality traceable, 389.
+
+  Carpenter, William B., 230.
+
+  Century, The, essay in, 295.
+
+  Cerebration, unconscious, 112, 113.
+
+  Chalmers, Thomas, preaching, 65.
+
+  Channing, Walter, headache, 175, 390.
+
+  Channing, William Ellery:
+    allusion, 16;
+    directing Emerson's studies, 51;
+    preaching, 52;
+    Emerson in his pulpit, 66;
+    influence, 147, 149;
+    kept awake, 157.
+
+  Channing, William Ellery, the poet:
+    his Wanderer, 263;
+    Poems, 403.
+
+  Channing, William Henry:
+    allusions, 131, 149;
+    in The Dial, 159;
+    the Fuller Memoir, 209;
+    Ode inscribed to, 211, 212.
+
+  Charleston, S C, Emerson's preaching, 53. (See _South_.)
+
+  Charlestown, Mass., Edward Emerson's residence, 8.
+
+  Charles V., 197.
+
+  Charles XII., 197.
+
+  Chatelet, Parent du, a realist, 326.
+
+  Chatham, Lord, 255.
+
+  Chaucer, Geoffrey:
+    borrowings, 205;
+    rank, 281;
+    honest rhymes, 340;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Chelmsford, Mass., Emerson teaching there, 49, 50.
+
+  Chemistry, 403. (See _Science_.)
+
+  Cheshire, its "haughty hill," 323.
+
+  Choate, Rufus, oratory, 148.
+
+  Christ:
+    reserved expressions about, 13;
+    mediatorship, 59;
+    true office, 120-122;
+    worship, 412. (See _Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Christianity:
+    its essentials, 13;
+    primitive, 35;
+    a mythus, defects, 121;
+    the true, 122;
+    two benefits, 123;
+    authority, 124;
+    incarnation of, 176;
+    the essence, 306;
+    Fathers, 391.
+
+  Christian, Emerson a, 267.
+
+  Christian Examiner, The:
+    on William Emerson, 12;
+    its literary predecessor, 29;
+    on Nature, 103, 104;
+    repudiates Divinity School Address, 124.
+
+  Church:
+    activity in 1820, 147;
+    avoidance of, 153;
+    the true, 244;
+    music, 306. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Cicero, allusion, 111.
+  Cid, the, 184.
+
+  Clarke, James Freeman:
+    letters, 77-80, 128-131;
+    transcendentalism, 149;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    Fuller Memoir, 209;
+    Emerson's funeral, 351, 353-355.
+
+  Clarke, Samuel, allusion, 16.
+
+  Clarke, Sarah, sketches, 130.
+
+  Clarkson, Thomas, 220.
+
+  Clergy:
+    among Emerson's ancestry, 3-8;
+    gravestones, 9. (See _Cotton, Heredity_, etc.)
+
+  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:
+    allusion, 16;
+    Emerson's account, 63;
+    influence, 149, 150;
+    Carlyle's criticism, 196;
+    Ancient Mariner, 333;
+    Christabel, Abyssinian Maid, 334;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    an image quoted, 386;
+    William Tell, 387.
+
+  Collins, William:
+    poetry, 321;
+    Ode and Dirge, 332.
+
+  Commodity, essay, 94.
+
+  Concentration, 288.
+
+  Concord, Mass.:
+    Bulkeley's ministry, 4-7;
+    first association with the Emerson name, 7;
+    Joseph's descendants, 8;
+    the Fight, 9; Dr. Ripley, 10;
+    Social Club, 14;
+    Emerson's preaching, 54;
+    Goodwin's settlement, 56;
+    discord, 57;
+    Emerson's residence begun, 69, 70;
+    a typical town, 70;
+    settlement, 71;
+    a Delphi, 72;
+    Emerson home, 83;
+    Second Centennial, 84, 85, 303;
+    noted citizens, 86;
+    town government, the, monument, 87;
+    the Sage, 102;
+    letters, 125-131, 225;
+    supposition of Carlyle's life there, 171;
+    Emancipation Address, 181;
+    leaving, 192;
+    John Brown meeting, 211;
+    Samuel Hoar, 213;
+    wide-awake, 221;
+    Lincoln obsequies, 243, 307;
+    an _under_-Concord, 256;
+    fire, 271-279;
+    letters, 275-279;
+    return, 279;
+    Minute Man unveiled, 292;
+    Soldiers' Monument, 303;
+    land-owners, 327;
+    memorial stone, 333;
+    Conway's visits, 343, 344;
+    Whitman's, 344, 345;
+    Russell's, 345; funeral, 350-356;
+    founders, 352;
+    Sleepy Hollow, 356;
+    a strong attraction, 369;
+    neighbors, 373;
+    Prophet, 415.
+
+  Congdon, Charles, his Reminiscences,
+  66.
+
+  Conservatism, fairly treated, 156,
+  157. (See _Reformers, Religion,
+  Transcendentalism,_ etc.)
+
+  Conversation:
+    C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 258;
+    inspiration, 290.
+
+  Conway, Moncure D.:
+    account of Emerson, 55, 56, 66, 194;
+    two visits, 343, 344;
+    anecdote, 346;
+    error, 401;
+    on Stanley, 414.
+
+  Cooke, George Willis:
+    biography of Emerson, 43, 44, 66, 88;
+    on American Scholar, 107, 108;
+    on anti-slavery, 212;
+    on Parnassus, 280-282;
+    on pantheism, 411.
+
+  Cooper, James Fenimore, 33.
+
+  Corot, pearly mist, 335, 336. (See
+  _Pictures_, etc.)
+
+  Cotton, John:
+    service to scholarship, 34;
+    reading Calvin, 286.
+
+  Counterparts, the story, 226.
+
+  Cowper, William:
+    Mother's Picture, 178;
+    disinterested good, 304;
+    tenderness, 333;
+    verse, 338.
+
+  Cranch, Christopher P.:
+    The Dial, 159;
+    poetic prediction, 416, 417.
+
+  Cromwell, Oliver:
+    saying by a war saint, 252;
+    in poetry, 387.
+
+  Cudworth, Ralph, epithets, 200.
+
+  Cupples, George, on Emerson's lectures, 195.
+
+  Curtius, Quintus for Mettus, 388.
+
+  Cushing, Caleb:
+    rank, 33;
+    in college, 45.
+
+
+  Dana, Richard Henry, his literary place, 33, 223.
+
+  Dante:
+    allusion in Anthology, 31;
+    rank, 202, 320;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Dartmouth College, oration, 131-135.
+
+  Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, 105.
+
+  Dawes, Rufus, Boyhood Memories, 44.
+
+  Declaration of Independence, intellectual,
+  115. (See _American_, etc.)
+
+  Delirium, imaginative, easily produced,
+  238. (See _Intuition_.)
+
+  Delia Cruscans, allusion, 152. (See
+  _Transcendentalism_.)
+
+  Delos, allusion, 374.
+
+  Delphic Oracle:
+    of New England, 72;
+    illustration, 84.
+
+  Democratic Review, The, on Nature, 103.
+
+  De Profundis, illustrating Carlyle's spirit, 83.
+
+  De Quincey, Thomas:
+    Emerson's interview with, 63, 195;
+    on originality, 92.
+
+  De Stael, Mme., allusion, 16.
+
+  De Tocqueville, account of Unitarianism, 51.
+  Dewey, Orville, New Bedford ministry, 67.
+
+  Dexter, Lord Timothy, punctuation, 325, 326.
+
+  Dial, The:
+    established, 147, 158;
+    editors, 159;
+    influence, 160-163;
+    death, 164;
+    poems, 192;
+    old contributors, 221;
+    papers, 295;
+    intuitions, 394.
+
+  Dial, The (second), in Cincinnati, 239.
+
+  Dickens, Charles:
+    on Father Taylor, 56;
+    American Notes, 155.
+
+  Diderot, Denis, essay, 79.
+
+  Diogenes, story, 401. (See _Laertius_.)
+
+  Disinterestedness, 259.
+
+  Disraeli, Benjamin, the rectorship, 282.
+
+  Dramas, their limitations, 375. (See _Shakespeare_.)
+
+  Dress, illustration of poetry, 311, 312.
+
+  Dryden, John, quotation, 20, 21.
+
+  Dwight, John S.:
+    in The Dial, 159;
+    musical critic, 223.
+
+
+  East Lexington, Mass., the Unitarian pulpit, 88.
+
+  Economy, its meaning, 142.
+
+  Edinburgh, Scotland:
+    Emerson's visit and preaching, 64, 65;
+    lecture, 195.
+
+  Education:
+    through friendship, 97, 98;
+    public questions, 258, 259.
+
+  Edwards, Jonathan:
+    allusions, 16, 51;
+    the atmosphere changed, 414.
+    (See _Calvinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Egotism, a pest, 233.
+
+  Egypt:
+    poetic teaching, 121;
+    trip, 271, 272;
+    Sphinx, 330. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Sphinx.)
+
+  Election Sermon, illustration, 112.
+
+  Elizabeth, Queen, verbal heir-loom, 313. (See _Raleigh_, etc.)
+
+  Ellis, Rufus, minister of the First Church, Boston, 43.
+
+  Eloquence, defined, 285, 286.
+
+  Emerson Family, 3 _et seq_.
+
+  Emerson, Charles Chauncy, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+    feeling towards natural science, 18, 237;
+    memories, 19-25, 37, 43;
+    character, 77;
+    death, 89, 90;
+    influence, 98;
+    The Dial, 161;
+    "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+    nearness, 368;
+    poetry, 385;
+    Harvard Register, 401.
+
+  Emerson, Edith, daughter of Ralph Waldo, 263.
+
+  Emerson, Edward, of Newbury, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Edward Bliss, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+    allusions, 19, 20, 37, 38;
+    death, 89;
+    Last Farewell, poem, 161;
+    nearness, 368.
+
+  Emerson, Edward Waldo, son of Ralph Waldo:
+    in New York, 246;
+    on the Farming essay, 255;
+    father's last days, 346-349;
+    reminiscences, 359.
+
+  Emerson, Ellen, daughter of Ralph Waldo:
+    residence, 83;
+    trip to Europe, 271;
+    care of her father, 294;
+    correspondence, 347.
+
+  Emerson, Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tucker, first wife of Ralph Waldo, 55.
+
+  Emerson, Joseph, minister of Mendon, 4, 7, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Joseph, the second, minister of Malden, 8.
+
+  Emerson, Mrs. Lydia Jackson, second wife of Ralph Waldo:
+    marriage, 83;
+    _Asia_, 176.
+
+  Emerson, Mary Moody:
+    influence over her nephew, 16-18;
+    quoted, 385.
+
+  Emerson, Robert Bulkeley, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37.
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, His Life:
+    moulding influences, 1;
+    New England heredity, 2;
+    ancestry, 3-10;
+    parents, 10-16;
+    Aunt Mary, 16-19;
+    brothers, 19-25;
+    the nest, 25;
+    noted scholars, 26-36;
+    birthplace, 37, 38;
+    boyhood, 39, 40;
+    early efforts, 41, 42;
+    parsonages, 42;
+    father's death, 43;
+    boyish appearance, 44;
+    college days, 45-47;
+    letter, 48;
+    teaching, 49, 50;
+    studying theology, and preaching, 51-54;
+    ordination, marriage, 55;
+    benevolent efforts, wife's death, 56;
+    withdrawal from his church, 57-61;
+    first trip to Europe, 62-65;
+    preaching in America, 66, 67;
+    remembered conversations, 68, 69;
+    residence in the Old Manse, 69-72;
+    lecturing, essays in The North American, 73;
+    poems, 74;
+    portraying himself, 75;
+    comparison with Milton, 76, 77;
+    letters to Clarke, 78-80, 128-131;
+    interest in Sartor Resartus, 81;
+    first letter to Carlyle, 82;
+    second marriage and Concord home, 83;
+    Second Centennial, 84-87;
+    Boston lectures, Concord Fight; 87;
+    East Lexington church, War, 88;
+    death of brothers, 89, 90;
+    Nature published, 91;
+    parallel with Wordsworth, 92;
+    free utterance, 93;
+    Beauty, poems,
+    94;
+    Language, 95-97;
+    Discipline, 97, 98;
+    Idealism, 98, 99;
+    Illusions, 99, 100;
+    Spirit and Matter, 100;
+    Paradise regained, 101;
+    the Bible spirit, 102;
+    Revelations, 103;
+    Bowen's criticism, 104;
+    Evolution, 105, 106;
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 108;
+    fable of the One Man, 109;
+    man thinking, 110;
+    Books, 111;
+    unconscious cerebration, 112;
+    a scholar's duties, 113;
+    specialists, 114;
+    a declaration of intellectual independence, 115;
+    address at the Theological School, 116, 117;
+    effect on Unitarians, 118;
+    sentiment of duty, 119;
+    Intuition, 120;
+    Reason, 121;
+    the Traditional Jesus, 122;
+    Sabbath and Preaching, 123;
+    correspondence with Ware, 124-127;
+    ensuing controversy, 127;
+    Ten Lectures, 128;
+    Dartmouth Address, 131-136;
+    Waterville Address, 136-140;
+    reforms, 141-145;
+    new views, 146;
+    Past and Present, 147;
+    on Everett, 148;
+    assembly at Dr. Warren's, 149;
+    Boston _doctrinaires_, 150;
+    unwise followers, 151-156;
+    Conservatives, 156, 157;
+    two Transcendental products, 157-166;
+    first volume of Essays, 166;
+    History, 167, 168;
+    Self-reliance, 168, 169;
+    Compensation, 169;
+    other essays, 170;
+    Friendship, 170, 171;
+    Heroism, 172;
+    Over-Soul, 172-175;
+    house and income, 176;
+    son's death, 177, 178;
+    American and Oriental qualities, 179;
+    English virtues, 180;
+    Emancipation addresses in 1844, 181;
+    second series of Essays, 181-188;
+    Reformers, 188-191;
+    Carlyle's business, Poems published, 192;
+    a second trip to Europe, 193-196;
+    Representative Men, 196-209;
+    lectures again, 210;
+    Abolitionism, 211, 212;
+    Woman's Rights, 212, 213;
+    a New England Roman, 213, 214;
+    English Traits, 214-221;
+    a new magazine, 221;
+    clubs, 222, 223;
+    more poetry, 224;
+    Burns Festival, 224;
+    letter about various literary matters, 225-227;
+    Parker's death, Lincoln's Proclamation, 228;
+    Conduct of Life, 228-239;
+    Boston Hymn, 240;
+    "So nigh is grandeur to our dust," 241;
+    Atlantic contributions, 242;
+    Lincoln obsequies, 243;
+    Free Religion, 243, 244;
+    second Phi Beta Kappa oration, 244-246;
+    poem read to his son, 246-248;
+    Harvard Lectures, 249-255;
+    agriculture and science, 255, 256;
+    predictions, 257;
+    Books, 258;
+    Conversation, 258;
+    elements of Courage, 259;
+    Success, 260, 261;
+    on old men, 261, 262;
+    California trip, 263-268;
+    eating, 269;
+    smoking, 270;
+    conflagration, loss of memory, Froude banquet, third trip abroad, 272;
+    friendly gifts, 272-279;
+    editing Parnassus, 280-282;
+    failing powers, 283;
+    Hope everywhere, 284;
+    negations, 285;
+    Eloquence, Pessimism, 286;
+    Comedy, Plagiarism, 287;
+    lessons repeated, 288;
+    Sources of Inspiration, 289, 290;
+    Future Life, 290-292;
+    dissolving creed, 292;
+    Concord Bridge, 292, 293;
+    decline of faculties, Old South lecture, 294;
+    papers, 294, 295;
+    quiet pen, 295;
+    posthumous works, 295 _et seq.;_
+    the pedagogue, 297;
+    University of Virginia, 299;
+    indebtedness to Plutarch, 299-302;
+    slavery questions, 303-308;
+    Woman Question, 308;
+    patriotism, 308, 309;
+    nothing but a poet, 311;
+    antique words, 313;
+    self-revelation, 313, 314;
+    a great poet? 314-316;
+    humility, 317-319;
+    poetic favorites, 320, 321;
+    comparison with contemporaries, 321;
+    citizen of the universe, 322;
+    fascination of symbolism, 323;
+    realism, science, imaginative coloring, 324;
+    dangers of realistic poetry, 325;
+    range of subjects, 326;
+    bad rhymes, 327;
+    a trick of verse, 328;
+    one faultless poem, 332;
+    spell-bound readers, 333;
+    workshop, 334;
+    octosyllabic verse, atmosphere, 335, 336;
+    comparison with Wordsworth, 337;
+    and others, 338;
+    dissolving sentences, 339;
+    incompleteness, 339, 340;
+    personality, 341, 342;
+    last visits received, 343-345;
+    the red rose, 345;
+    forgetfulness, 346;
+    literary work of last years, 346, 347;
+    letters unanswered, 347;
+    hearing and sight, subjects that interested him, 348;
+    later hours, death, 349;
+    last rites, 350-356;
+    portrayal, 357-419;
+    atmosphere, 357;
+    books, distilled alcohol, 358;
+    physique, 359;
+    demeanor, 360;
+    hair and eyes, insensibility to music, 361;
+    daily habits, 362;
+    bodily infirmities, 362, 363;
+    voice, 363;
+    quiet laughter, want of manual dexterity, 364;
+    spade anecdote, memory,
+    ignorance of exact science, 305;
+    intuition and natural sagacity united, fastidiousness, 366;
+    impatience with small-minded worshippers, Frothingham's Biography, 367;
+    intimates, familiarity not invited, 368;
+    among fellow-townsmen, errand to earth, inherited traditions, 369;
+    sealed orders, 370, 371;
+    conscientious work, sacrifices for truth, essays instead of sermons,
+      372;
+    congregation at large, charm, optimism, 373;
+    financially straitened, 374;
+    lecture room limitations, 374, 375;
+    a Shakespeare parallel, 375, 376;
+    platform fascination, 376;
+    constructive power, 376, 377;
+    English experiences, lecture-peddling, 377;
+    a stove relinquished, utterance, an hour's weight, 378;
+    trumpet-sound, sweet seriousness, diamond drops, effect on Governor
+      Andrew, 379;
+    learning at second hand, 380;
+    the study of Goethe, 380;
+    a great quoter, no pedantry, 381;
+    list of authors referred to, 381, 382;
+    special indebtedness, 382;
+    penetration, borrowing, 383;
+    method of writing and its results, aided by others, 384;
+    sayings that seem family property, 385;
+    passages compared, 385-387;
+    the tributary streams, 388;
+    accuracy as to facts, 388;
+    personalities traceable in him, 389;
+    place as a thinker, 390;
+    Platonic anecdote, 391;
+    preexistence, 391, 392;
+    mind-moulds, 393;
+    relying on instinct, 394;
+    dangers of intuition, 395;
+    mysticism, 396;
+    Oriental side, 397;
+    transcendental mood, 398;
+    personal identity confused, 399;
+    a distorting mirror, 400;
+    distrust of science, 401-403;
+    style illustrated, 403, 404;
+    favorite words, 405;
+    royal imagery, 406;
+    comments on America, 406, 407;
+    common property of mankind, 407;
+    public spirit, solitary workshop, martyrdom from visitors, 408;
+    white shield invulnerable, 409;
+    religious attitude, 409-411;
+    spiritual influx, creed, 412;
+    clerical relations, 413;
+    Dr. Hague's criticism, 413, 414;
+    ameliorating religious influence, 414;
+    freedom, 415;
+    enduring verse and thought, 416, 417;
+    comparison with Jesus, 417;
+    sincere manhood, 418;
+    transparency, 419.
+
+  Emerson's Books:--
+    Conduct of Life, 229, 237.
+    English Traits:
+      the first European trip, 62;
+      published, 214;
+      analysis, 214-220;
+      penetration, 383;
+      Teutonic fire, 386.
+    Essays:
+      Dickens's allusion, 156;
+      collected, 166.
+    Essays, second series, 183.
+    Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 128, 295, 296, 347.
+    Letters and Social Aims, 210, 283, 284, 296.
+    May-day and Other Pieces, 161, 192, 224, 242, 257, 310, 318, 346.
+    Memoir of Margaret Fuller, 209.
+    Miscellanies, 302, 303.
+    Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 179.
+    Nature:
+      resemblance of extracts from Mary Moody Emerson, 17;
+      where written, 70;
+      the Many in One, 73;
+      first published, 91, 92, 373;
+      analysis, 93-107;
+      obscure, 108;
+      Beauty, 237.
+    Parnassus:
+      collected, 280;
+      Preface, 314;
+      allusion, 321.
+    Poems, 293, 310, 318, 339.
+    Representative Men, 196-209.
+    Selected Poems, 311, 347.
+    Society and Solitude, 250.
+
+  Emerson's Essays, Lectures, Sermons, Speeches, etc.:--
+    In general:
+      essays, 73, 88, 91, 92, 310;
+      income from lectures, 176, 191, 192;
+      lectures in England, 194-196;
+      long series, 372;
+      lecture-room, 374;
+      plays and lectures, 375;
+      double duty, 376, 377;
+      charm, 379.
+      (See _Emerson's Life, Lyceum_, etc.)
+    American Civilization, 307.
+    American Scholar, The, 107-115, 133, 188.
+    Anglo-Saxon Race, The, 210.
+    Anti-Slavery Address, New York, 210-212.
+    Anti-Slavery Lecture, Boston, 210, 211.
+    Aristocracy, 296.
+    Art, 166, 175, 253, 254.
+    Beauty, 235-237.
+    Behavior, 234.
+    Books, 257, 380.
+    Brown, John, 302, 305, 306.
+    Burke, Edmund, 73.
+    Burns, Robert, 224, 225, 307.
+    Carlyle, Thomas, 294, 302, 317.
+    Channing's Poem, preface, 262, 263, 403.
+    Character, 183, 295, 297.
+    Chardon Street and Bible Convention, 159, 302.
+    Circles, 166, 174, 175.
+    Civilization, 250-253.
+    Clubs, 258.
+    Comedy. 128.
+    Comic, The, 286, 287.
+    Commodity, 94.
+    Compensation, 166, 169.
+    Concord Fight, the anniversary speech, 292, 293.
+    Concord, Second Centennial Discourse, 84-86.
+    Conservative, The, 156, 157, 159.
+    Considerations by the Way, 235.
+    Courage, 259.
+    Culture, 232, 233.
+    Demonology, 128, 296.
+    Discipline, 97, 98.
+    Divinity School Address, 116-127, 131.
+    Doctrine of the Soul, 127.
+    Domestic Life, 254, 255.
+    Duty, 128.
+    Editorial Address, Mass. Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307.
+    Education, 296, 297.
+    Eloquence, 254;
+      second essay, 285, 286.
+    Emancipation in the British West Indies, 181, 303.
+    Emancipation Proclamation, 228, 307.
+    Emerson, Mary Moody, 295, 296, 302.
+    English Literature, 87.
+    Experience, 182.
+    Farming, 255, 256.
+    Fate, 228-330.
+    Fortune of the Republic, 294, 302, 307-309.
+    Fox, George, 73.
+    France, 196.
+    Free Religious Association, 243, 302, 307.
+    Friendship, 166, 170.
+    Froude, James Anthony, after-dinner speech, 271.
+    Fugitive Slave Law, 303, 304.
+    Genius, 127.
+    Gifts, 184, 185.
+    Goethe, or the Writer, 208, 209.
+    Greatness, 288, 346.
+    Harvard Commemoration, 307.
+    Heroism, 166, 172.
+    Historical Discourse, at Concord, 303.
+    Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England, 147, 165, 296, 302.
+    History, 166, 167.
+    Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214, 295, 302.
+    Home, 127.
+    Hope, 284, 285.
+    Howard University, speech, 263.
+    Human Culture, 87.
+    Idealism, 98-100.
+    Illusions, 235, 239.
+    Immortality, 266, 290-292, 354.
+    Inspiration, 289.
+    Intellect, 166, 175.
+    Kansas Affairs, 305.
+    Kossuth, 307.
+    Language, 95-97.
+    Lincoln, Abraham, funeral remarks, 242, 243, 307.
+    Literary Ethics, 131-136.
+    Lord's Supper, 57-60, 303.
+    Love, 127,128,166,170. (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+    Luther, 73.
+    Manners, 183, 234.
+    Man of Letters, The, 296, 298.
+    Man the Reformer, 142, 143.
+    Method of Nature, The, 136-141.
+    Michael Angelo, 73, 75.
+    Milton, 73, 75.
+    Montaigne, or the Skeptic, 202-204.
+    Napoleon, or the Man of the World, 206-209.
+    Natural History of the Intellect, 249, 268, 347.
+    Nature (the essay), 185, 186, 398.
+    New England Reformers, 188-191, 385.
+    Nominalism and Realism, 188.
+    Old Age, 261, 262.
+    Over-Soul, The, 166, 172-175, 398, 411.
+    Parker, Theodore, 228, 306.
+    Perpetual Forces, 297.
+    Persian Poetry, 224.
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 347.
+    Philosophy of History, 87.
+    Plato, 198-200;
+      New Readings, 200.
+    Plutarch, 295, 299-302.
+    Plutarch's Morals, introduction, 262.
+    Poet, The, 181, 182.
+    Poetry, 210.
+    Poetry and Imagination, 283;
+      subdivisions: Bards and Trouveurs,
+      Creation, Form, Imagination,
+      Melody, Morals, Rhythm, Poetry,
+      Transcendency, Veracity, 283, 284;
+      quoted, 325.
+    Politics, 186, 187.
+    Power, 230, 231.
+    Preacher, The, 294, 298.
+    Professions of Divinity, Law, and Medicine, 41.
+    Progress of Culture, The, 244, 288.
+    Prospects, 101-103.
+    Protest, The, 127.
+    Providence Sermon, 130.
+    Prudence, 166, 171, 172.
+    Quotation and Originality, 287, 288.
+    Relation of Man to the Globe, 73.
+    Resources, 286.
+    Right Hand of Fellowship, The, at Concord, 56.
+    Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 295, 302.
+    Scholar, The, 296, 299.
+    School, The, 127.
+    Scott, speech, 302, 307.
+    Self-Reliance, 166, 168, 411.
+    Shakespeare, or the Poet, 204-206.
+    Social Aims, 285.
+    Soldiers' Monument, at Concord, 303.
+    Sovereignty of Ethics, The, 295, 297, 298.
+    Spirit, 100, 101.
+    Spiritual Laws, 166, 168.
+    Success, 260, 261.
+    Sumner Assault, 304.
+    Superlatives, 295, 297.
+    Swedenborg, or the Mystic, 201, 202, 206.
+    Thoreau, Henry D., 228, 295, 302.
+    Times, The, 142-145.
+    Tragedy, 127.
+    Transcendentalist, The, 145-155, 159.
+    Universality of the Moral Sentiment, 66.
+    University of Virginia, address, 347.
+    War, 88, 303.
+    Water, 73.
+    Wealth, 231, 232.
+    What is Beauty? 74, 94, 95.
+    Woman, 307, 308.
+    Woman's Rights, 212, 213.
+    Work and Days, 256, 312, 406, 407.
+    Worship, 235.
+    Young American, The, 166, 180, 181.
+
+  Emerson's Poems:--
+    In general: inspiration from nature, 22, 96;
+      poetic rank in college, 45, 46;
+      prose-poetry and philosophy, 91, 93;
+      annual _afflatus_, in America, 136, 137;
+      first volume, 192;
+      five immortal poets, 202;
+      ideas repeated, 239;
+      true position, 311 _et seq.; in carmine veritas_, 313;
+      litanies, 314;
+      arithmetic, 321, 322;
+      fascination, 323;
+      celestial imagery, 324;
+      tin pans, 325;
+      realism, 326;
+      metrical difficulties, 327, 335;
+      blemishes, 328;
+      careless rhymes, 329;
+      delicate descriptions, 331;
+      pathos, 332;
+      fascination, 333;
+      unfinished, 334, 339, 340;
+      atmosphere, 335;
+      subjectivity, 336;
+      sympathetic illusion, 337;
+      resemblances, 337, 338;
+      rhythms, 340;
+      own order, 341, 342;
+      always a poet, 346.
+      (See _Emerson's Life, Milton, Poets_, etc.)
+    Adirondacs, The, 242, 309, 327.
+    Blight, 402.
+    Boston, 346, 407, 408.
+    Boston Hymn, 211, 221, 241, 242.
+    Brahma, 221, 242, 396, 397.
+    Celestial Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+    Class Day Poem, 45-47.
+    Concord Hymn, 87, 332.
+    Daemonic Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+    Days, 221, 242, 257, 312;
+      _pleached_, 313.
+    Destiny, 332.
+    Each and All, 73, 74, 94, 331.
+    Earth-Song, 327.
+    Elements, 242.
+    Fate, 159, 387.
+    Flute, The, 399.
+    Good-by, Proud World, 129, 130, 338.
+    Hamatreya, 327.
+    Harp, The, 320, 321, 329, 330. (See _Aeolian Harp_.)
+    Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214.
+    Humble Bee, 46, 74, 75, 128, 272, 326, 331, 338.
+    Initial Love, 170, 387. (Three Loves.)
+    In Memoriam, 19, 89.
+    Latin Translations, 43.
+    May Day, 242;
+      changes, 311, 333.
+    Merlin, 318, 319. (Merlin's Song.)
+    Mithridates, 331.
+    Monadnoc, 322, 331;
+      alterations, 366.
+    My Garden, 242.
+    Nature and Life, 242.
+    Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces, 242.
+    Ode inscribed to W.H. Channing, 211, 212.
+    Poet, The, 317-320, 333.
+    Preface to Nature, 105.
+    Problem, The, 159, 161, 253, 284, 326, 337, 380.
+    Quatrains, 223, 242.
+    Rhodora, The, 74, 94, 95, 129.
+    Romany Girl, The, 221.
+    Saadi, 221, 242.
+    Sea-Shore, 333, 339.
+    Snow-Storm, 331, 338, 339.
+    Solution, 320.
+    Song for Knights of Square Table, 42.
+    Sphinx, The, 113, 159, 243, 330, 398.
+    Terminus, 221, 242;
+      read to his son, 246-248, 363.
+    Test, The, 201, 202, 320.
+    Threnody, 178, 333.
+    Titmouse, The, 221, 326.
+    Translations, 242, 399.
+    Uriel, 326, 331, 398.
+    Voluntaries, 241.
+    Waldeinsamkeit, 221.
+    Walk, The, 402.
+    Woodnotes, 46, 159, 331, 338.
+    World-Soul, The, 331.
+
+  Emersoniana, 358.
+
+  Emerson, Thomas, of Ipswich, 38.
+
+  Emerson, Waldo, child of Ralph Waldo:
+    death, 177, 178;
+    anecdote, 265.
+
+  Emerson, William, grandfather of Ralph Waldo:
+    minister of Concord, 8-10, 14;
+    building the Manse, 70;
+    patriotism, 72.
+
+  Emerson, William, father of Ralph Waldo:
+    minister, in Harvard and Boston, 10-14;
+    editorship, 26, 32, 33;
+    the parsonage, 37, 42;
+    death, 43.
+
+  Emerson, William, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37, 39, 49, 53.
+
+  England:
+    first visit, 62-65;
+    Lake Windermere, 70;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    the virtues of the people, 179, 180;
+    a second visit, 192 _et seq.;_
+    notabilities 195;
+    the lectures, 196;
+    Stonehenge, 215;
+    the aristocracy, 215;
+    matters wrong, 260;
+    Anglo-Saxon race, trade and liberty, 304;
+    lustier life, 335;
+    language, 352;
+    lecturing, a key, 377;
+    smouldering fire, 385. (See _America, Europe_, etc.)
+
+  Enthusiasm:
+    need of, 143;
+    weakness, 154.
+
+  Epicurus, agreement with, 301.
+
+  Episcopacy:
+    in Boston, 28, 34, 52;
+    church in Newton, 68;
+    at Hanover, 132;
+    quotation from liturgy, 354;
+    burial service, 356. (See _Calvinism, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Esquimau, allusion, 167.
+
+  Establishment, party of the, 147. (See _Puritanism, Religion,
+    Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Eternal, relations to the, 297. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Europe:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62-65;
+    return, 72;
+    the Muses, 114;
+    debt to the East, 120;
+    famous gentlemen, 184;
+    second visit, 193-196;
+    weary of Napoleon, 207;
+    return, 210;
+    conflict possible, 218;
+    third visit, 271-279;
+    cast-out passion for, 308. (See _America, England, France_, etc.)
+
+  Everett, Edward:
+    on Tudor, 28;
+    literary rank, 33;
+    preaching, 52;
+    influence, 148.
+
+  Evolution, taught in "Nature," 105, 106.
+
+  Eyeball, transparent, 398.
+
+
+  Faith:
+    lacking in America, 143,
+    building cathedrals, 253. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Fine, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Fire, illustration, 386. (See _England, France_, etc.)
+
+  Forbes, John M., connected with the Emerson family, 263-265;
+    his letter, 263.
+
+  Foster, John, minister of Brighton, 15.
+
+  Fourth-of-July, orations, 386. (See _America_, etc.)
+
+  Fox, George, essay on, 73.
+
+  France:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    Revolution, 80;
+    tired of Napoleon, 207, 208;
+    realism, 326;
+    wrath, 385, 386. (See _Carlyle, England, Europe_, etc.)
+
+  Francis, Convers, at a party, 149.
+
+  Franklin, Benjamin:
+    birthplace, 37;
+    allusion, 184;
+    characteristics, 189;
+    Poor Richard, 231;
+    quoted, 236;
+    maxims, 261;
+    fondness for Plutarch, 382;
+    bequest, 407.
+
+  Fraunhofer, Joseph, optician, 230, 324.
+
+  Frazer's Magazine:
+    "The Mud," 79;
+    Sartor Resartus, 81. (See _Carlyle_.)
+
+  Freeman, James, minister of King's Chapel, 11, 12, 52.
+  Free Trade, Athenaeum banquet, 220.
+
+  Friendship, C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 23, 77.
+
+  Frothingham, Nathaniel L., account of Emerson's mother, 13.
+
+  Frothingham, Octavius Brooks: Life of Ripley, 165;
+    an unpublished manuscript, 365-367.
+
+  Fuller, Margaret:
+    borrowed sermon, 130;
+    at a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159, 160, 162;
+    Memoir, 209;
+    causing laughter, 364;
+    mosaic Biography, 368.
+
+  Furness, William Henry:
+    on the Emerson family, 14;
+    Emerson's funeral, 350, 353.
+
+  Future, party of the, 147.
+
+
+  Galton, Francis, composite portraits, 232.
+
+  Gardiner, John Sylvester John:
+    allusion, 26;
+    leadership in Boston, 28;
+    Anthology Society, 32.
+    (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+  Gardner, John Lowell, recollections of Emerson's boyhood, 38-42.
+
+  Gardner, S.P., garden, 38.
+
+  Genealogy, survival of the fittest, 3.
+    (See _Heredity_.)
+
+  Gentleman's Magazine, 30.
+
+  Gentleman, the, 183.
+
+  Geography, illustration, 391.
+
+  German:
+    study of, 48, 49, 78, 380;
+    philosophers, 76;
+    scholarship, 148;
+    oracles, 206;
+    writers unread, 208;
+    philosophers, 380;
+    professors, 391.
+
+  Germany, a visit, 225, 226.
+    (See _Europe, France, Goethe_, etc.)
+
+  Gifts, 185.
+
+  Gilfillan, George:
+    on Emerson's preaching, 65;
+    Emerson's physique, 360.
+
+  Gilman, Arthur, on the Concord home, 83.
+
+  Glasgow, the rectorship, 280.
+
+  God:
+    the universal spirit, 68, 69, 94;
+    face to face, 92, 93;
+    teaching the human mind, 98, 99;
+    aliens from, 101;
+    in us, 139-141;
+    his thought, 146;
+    belief, 170;
+    seen by man, 174;
+    divine offer, 176;
+    writing by grace, 182;
+    presence, 243;
+    tribute to Great First Cause, 267;
+    perplexity about, 410;
+    ever-blessed One, 411;
+    mirrored, 412.
+    (See _Christianity, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Goethe:
+    called _Mr_., 31;
+    dead, 63;
+    Clarke's essay, 79;
+    generalizations, 148;
+    influence, 150;
+    on Spinoza, 174, 175;
+    rank as a poet, 202, 320;
+    lovers, 226;
+    rare union, 324;
+    his books read, 380, 381;
+    times quoted, 382.
+    (See _German_, etc.)
+
+  Goldsmith, Oliver, his Vicar of Wakefield, 9, 10, 15.
+
+  Good, the study of, 301.
+
+  Goodwin, H.B., Concord minister, 56.
+
+  Gould, Master of Latin School, 39.
+
+  Gould, Thomas R., sculptor, 68.
+
+  Gourdin, John Gaillard Keith and Robert, in college, 47.
+
+  Government, abolition of, 141.
+
+  Grandmother's Review, 30.
+
+  Gray, Thomas, Elegy often quoted, 316, 317, 416.
+
+  Greece:
+    poetic teaching, 121;
+    allusion, 108.
+
+  Greek:
+    Emerson's love for, 43, 44;
+    in Harvard, 49;
+    poets, 253;
+    moralist, 299;
+    Bryant's translation, 378;
+    philosophers, 391.
+    (See _Homer_, etc.)
+
+  Greenough, Horatio, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+  Grimm, Hermann, 226.
+
+  Guelfs and Ghibellines, illustration, 47.
+
+
+  Hafiz, times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Persia_.)
+
+  Hague, William, essay, 413.
+
+  Haller, Albert von, rare union, 324.
+
+  Harvard, Mass., William Emerson's settlement, 10, 11.
+
+  Harvard University:
+    the Bulkeley gift, 6;
+    William Emerson's graduation, 10;
+    list of graduates, 12;
+    Emerson's brothers, 19, 21;
+    Register, 21, 24, 385, 401;
+    Hillard, 24, 25;
+    Kirkland's presidency, 26, 27;
+    Gardner, 39-41;
+    Emerson's connection, 44-49;
+    the Boylston prizes, 46;
+    Southern students, 47;
+    graduates at Andover, 48;
+    Divinity School, 51, 53;
+    a New England centre, 52;
+    Bowen's professorship, 103;
+    Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 115, 133, 188, 244;
+    Divinity School address, 116-132;
+    degree conferred, 246;
+    lectures, 249;
+    library, 257;
+    last Divinity address, 294;
+    Commemoration, 307;
+    singing class, 361;
+    graduates, 411.
+    (See _Cambridge_.)
+
+  Haskins, David Green, at Emerson's funeral, 356.
+
+  Haskins, Ruth (Emerson's mother), 10, 13, 14.
+  Haughty, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Hawthorne, Nathaniel:
+    his Mosses, 70;
+    "dream-peopled solitude," 86;
+    at the club, 223;
+    view of English life, 335;
+    grave, 356;
+    biography, 368.
+
+  Hazlitt, William:
+    British Poets, 21.
+
+  Health, inspiration, 289.
+
+  Hebrew Language, study, 48. (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Hedge, Frederic Henry:
+    at a party, 149;
+    quoted, 383.
+
+  Henry VII., tombs, 415.
+
+  Herbert, George:
+    Poem on Man, 102;
+    parallel, 170;
+    poetry, 281;
+    a line quoted, 345.
+
+  Herder, Johann Gottfried, allusion, 16.
+
+  Heredity:
+    Emerson's belief, 1, 2;
+    in Emerson family, 4, 19;
+    Whipple on, 389;
+    Jonson, 393.
+
+  Herrick, Robert, poetry, 281.
+
+  Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. (See _Emerson's Books_,--Nature.)
+
+  Hilali, The Flute, 399.
+
+  Hillard, George Stillman:
+    in college, 24, 25;
+    his literary place, 33;
+    aid, 276.
+
+  Hindoo Scriptures, 199, 200. (See _Bible, India_, etc.)
+
+  History, how it should be written, 168.
+
+  Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood:
+    reference to, 223;
+    on the Burns speech, 225;
+    kindness, 273, 274, 276-279;
+    at Emerson's death-bed, 349;
+    funeral address, 351-353.
+
+  Hoar, Samuel:
+    statesman, 72;
+    tribute, 213, 214.
+
+  Holland, description of the Dutch, 217.
+
+  Holley, Horace, prayer, 267.
+
+  Holmes, John, a pupil of Emerson, 50.
+
+  Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
+    memories of Dr. Ripley, 15;
+    of C.C. Emerson, 20, 21;
+    familiarity with Cambridge and its college, 45;
+    erroneous quotation from, 251, 252;
+    jest erroneously attributed to, 400, 401.
+
+  Holy Ghost, "a new born bard of the," 123. (See _Christ, God,
+    Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Homer:
+    poetic rank, 202, 320;
+    plagiarism, 205;
+    Iliad, 253;
+    allusion, 315;
+    tin pans, 325;
+    times quoted, 382. (See _Greek_, etc.)
+
+  Homer, Jonathan, minister of Newton, 15.
+
+  Hooper, Mrs. Ellen, The Dial, 159, 160.
+
+  Hope:
+    lacking in America, 143;
+    in every essay, 284.
+
+  Horace:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Ars Poetica, 316.
+
+  Horses, Flora Temple's time, 388.
+
+  Howard University, speech, 263.
+
+  Howe, Samuel Gridley, the philanthropist, 223.
+
+  Hunt, Leigh, meeting Emerson, 195.
+
+  Hunt, William, the painter, 223.
+
+
+  Idealism, 98-100, 146, 150.
+
+  Idealists:
+    Ark full, 191;
+    Platonic sense, 391.
+
+  Imagination:
+    the faculty, 141;
+    defined, 237, 238;
+    essay, 283;
+    coloring life, 324.
+
+  Imbecility, 231.
+
+  Immortality, 262. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Incompleteness, in poetry, 339.
+
+  India:
+    poetic models, 338;
+    idea of preexistence, 391;
+    Brahmanism, 397. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma.)
+
+  Indians:
+    in history of Concord, 71;
+    Algonquins, 72.
+
+  Inebriation, subject in Monthly Anthology, 30.
+
+  Insects, defended, 190.
+
+  Inspiration:
+    of Nature, 22, 96, 141;
+    urged, 146.
+
+  Instinct, from God or Devil, 393.
+
+  Intellect, confidence in, 134.
+
+  Intuition, 394.
+
+  Ipswich, Mass., 3, 4, 8.
+
+  Ireland, Alexander:
+    glimpses of Emerson, 44, 64, 65:
+    reception, 193,194;
+    on Carlyle, 196;
+    letter from Miss Peabody, 317;
+    quoting Whitman, 344;
+    quoted, 350.
+
+  Irving, Washington, 33.
+
+  Italy:
+    Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+    Naples, 113.
+
+
+  Jackson, Charles, garden, 38.
+
+  Jackson, Dr. Charles Thomas, anaesthesia, 403.
+
+  Jackson, Miss Lydia, reading Carlyle, 81. (See _Mrs. Emerson_.)
+
+  Jahn, Johann, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+  Jameson, Anna, new book, 131.
+
+  Jesus:
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    a divine manifestation, 411;
+    followers, 417;
+    and Emerson, 419. (See _Bible, Christ, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+  Joachim, the violinist, 225, 226.
+
+  Johnson, Samuel, literary style, 29.
+
+  Jonson, Ben:
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    a phrase, 300;
+    _traduction_, 393.
+    (See _Heredity_, etc.)
+
+  Journals, as a method of work, 384.
+
+  Jupiter Scapin, 207.
+
+  Jury Trial, and dinners, 216.
+
+  Justice, the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+
+  Juvenal:
+    allusion, 22;
+    precept from heaven, 252.
+
+
+  Kalamazoo, Mich., allusion, 388.
+
+  Kamschatka, allusion, 167.
+
+  Keats, John:
+    quoted, 92;
+    Ode to a Nightingale, 316;
+    _faint, swoon_, 405.
+
+  King, the, illustration, 74.
+
+  Kirkland, John Thornton:
+    Harvard presidency, 26, 52;
+    memories, 27.
+
+  Koran, allusion, 198.
+    (See _Bible, God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+
+  Labor:
+    reform, 141;
+    dignity, 142.
+
+  Lacenaire, evil instinct, 392.
+
+  Laertius, Diogenes, 390, 391.
+
+  La Harpe, Jean Francois, on Plutarch, 301.
+
+  Lamarck, theories, 166.
+
+  Lamb, Charles, Carlyle's criticism, 196.
+
+  Landor, Walter Savage, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+  Landscape, never painted, 339, 240.
+    (See _Pictures, etc_.)
+
+  Language:
+    its symbolism, 95-97;
+    an original, 394.
+
+  Latin:
+    Peter Bulkeley's scholarship, 7;
+    translation, 24, 25;
+    Emerson's Translations, 43, 44.
+
+  Laud, Archbishop, 6.
+
+  Law, William, mysticism, 396.
+
+  Lawrence, Mass., allusion, 44.
+
+  Lecturing, given up, 295.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays, Lectures_, etc.)
+
+  Leibnitz, 386.
+
+  Leroux, Pierre, preexistance, 391.
+
+  Letters, inspiration, 289.
+
+  Lincoln, Abraham, character, 307.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Linnaeus, illustration, 323, 324.
+
+  Litanies, in Emerson, 314.
+    (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+  Literature:
+    aptitude for, 2, 3;
+    activity in 1820, 147.
+
+  Little Classics, edition, 347.
+
+  Liverpool, Eng., a visit, 193, 194.
+    (See _England, Europe, Scotland_, etc.)
+
+  Locke, John, allusion, 16, 111.
+
+  London, England.:
+    Tower Stairs, 63;
+    readers, 194;
+    sights, 221;
+    travellers, 308;
+    wrath, 385.
+    (See _England_, etc.)
+
+  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
+    allusions, 31, 33;
+    Saturday Club, 222, 223;
+    burial, 346.
+
+  Lord, Nathan, President of Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+  Lord's Supper, Emerson's doubts, 57-61.
+
+  Lothrop & Co., publishers, 83.
+
+  Louisville, Ky., Dr. Clarke's residence, 78-80.
+
+  Lounsbury, Professor, Chaucer letter, 205.
+
+  Love:
+    in America, 143;
+    the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+
+  Lowell, Charles:
+    minister of the West Church, 11, 12, 52;
+    on Kirkland, 27.
+
+  Lowell, F.C., generosity, 276.
+
+  Lowell, James Russell:
+    an allusion, 33;
+    on The American Scholar, 107;
+    editorship, 221;
+    club, 223;
+    on the Burns speech, 225;
+    on Emerson's bearing, 360, 361;
+    Hawthorne biography, 368;
+    on lectures, 379.
+
+  Lowell, Mass., factories, 44.
+
+  Luther, Martin:
+    lecture, 73;
+    his conservatism, 298;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Lyceum, the:
+    a pulpit, 88;
+    New England, 192;
+    a sacrifice, 378.
+    (See _Lecturing, Emerson's Lectures_, etc.)
+
+  Lycurgus, 306. (See _Greece_.)
+
+
+  Mackintosh, Sir James, an allusion, 16.
+
+  Macmillan's Magazine, 414.
+
+  Malden, Mass.:
+    Joseph Emerson's ministry, 8;
+    diary, 17.
+
+  Man:
+    a fable about, 109, 110;
+    faith in, 122;
+    apostrophe, 140.
+
+  Manchester, Eng.:
+    visit, 194, 195;
+    banquet, 220.
+    (See _England_, etc.)
+
+  Marlowe, Christopher, expressions, 404.
+
+  Marvell, Andrew:
+    reading by C.C. Emerson, 21;
+    on the Dutch, 217;
+    verse, 338.
+
+  Mary, Queen, her martyrs, 418.
+
+  Massachusetts Historical Society:
+    tribute to C.C. Emerson, 21;
+    quality of its literature, 84;
+    on Carlyle, 294.
+
+  Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307, 411.
+  Materialism, 146, 391.
+    (See _Religion_.)
+
+  Mather, Cotton:
+    his Magnalia, 5-7;
+    on Concord discord, 57;
+    on New England Melancholy, 216;
+    a borrower, 381.
+
+  Mathew, Father, disciples, 368.
+
+  Mayhew, Jonathan, Boston minister, 51.
+
+  Melioration, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+  Mendon, Mass., Joseph Emerson's ministry, 4.
+
+  Mephistopheles, Goethe's creation, 208.
+
+  Merrimac River, 71.
+
+  Metaphysics, indifference to, 249.
+
+  Methodism, in Boston, 56.
+    (See _Father Taylor_.)
+
+  Michael Angelo:
+    allusions, 73, 75;
+    on external beauty, 99;
+    course, 260;
+    filled with God, 284;
+    on immortality, 290;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Middlesex Agricultural Association, 235.
+    (See _Agriculture, Emerson's Essays._)
+
+  Middlesex Association, Emerson admitted, 53.
+
+  Miller's Retrospect, 34.
+
+  Milton, John:
+    influence in New England, 16;
+    quotation, 24;
+    essay, 73, 75;
+    compared with Emerson, 76, 77;
+    Lycidas, 178;
+    supposed speech, 220;
+    diet, 270, 271;
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    Arnold's citation, Logic, Rhetoric, 315;
+    popularity, 316;
+    quoted, 324;
+    tin pans, 325;
+    inventor of harmonies, 328;
+    Lycidas, 333;
+    Comus, 338;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    precursor, quotation, 415.
+
+  Miracles:
+    false impression, 121, 122;
+    and idealism, 146;
+    theories, 191;
+    St. Januarius, 217;
+    objections, 244.
+    (See _Bible, Christ, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Modena, Italy, Emerson's visit, 63.
+
+  Monadnoc, Mount, 70.
+
+  Montaigne:
+    want of religion, 300;
+    great authority, 380;
+    times quoted, 382.
+
+  Montesquieu, on immortality, 291.
+
+  Monthly Anthology:
+    Wm. Emerson's connection, 13, 26;
+    precursor of North American Review, 28, 29;
+    character, 30, 31;
+    Quincy's tribute, 31;
+    Society formed, 32;
+    career, 33;
+    compared with The Dial, 160.
+
+  Moody Family, of York, Me., 8,10.
+
+  Morals, in Plutarch, 301.
+
+  Morison, John Hopkins, on Emerson's preaching, 67.
+
+  Mormons, 264, 268.
+
+  Mother-wit, a favorite expression, 404, 405.
+
+  Motley, John Lothrop, 33, 223.
+
+  Mount Auburn, strolls, 40.
+
+  Movement, party of the, 147.
+
+  Munroe & Co., publishers, 81.
+
+  Music:
+    church, 306;
+    inaptitude for, 361;
+    great composers, 401.
+
+  Musketaquid River, 22, 70, 71.
+
+  Mysticism:
+    unintelligible, 390;
+    Emerson's, 396.
+
+
+  Napoleon:
+    allusion, 197;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Napoleon III., 225.
+
+  Nation, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+  Native Bias, 288.
+
+  Nature:
+    in undress, 72;
+    solicitations, 110;
+    not truly studied, 135;
+    great men, 199;
+    tortured, 402.
+    (See _Emerson's Books, Emerson's Essays_, etc.)
+
+  Negations, to be shunned, 285.
+
+  New Bedford, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 52, 67.
+
+  Newbury, Mass., Edward Emerson's deaconship, 8.
+
+  New England:
+    families, 2, 3, 5;
+    Peter Bulkeley's coming, 6;
+    clerical virtues, 9;
+    Church, 14;
+    literary sky, 33;
+    domestic service, 34, 35;
+    two centres, 52;
+    an ideal town, 70, 71;
+    the Delphi, 72;
+    Carlyle invited, 83;
+    anniversaries, 84;
+    town records, 85;
+    Genesis, 102;
+    effect of Nature, 106;
+    boys and girls, 163;
+    Massachusetts, Connecticut River, 172;
+    lyceums, 192;
+    melancholy, 216;
+    New Englanders and Old, 220;
+    meaning of a word, 296, 297;
+    eyes, 325;
+    life, 325, 335;
+    birthright, 364;
+    a thorough New Englander, 406;
+    Puritan, 409;
+    theologians, 410;
+    Jesus wandering in, 419.
+    (See _America, England_, etc.)
+
+  Newspapers:
+    defaming the noble, 145;
+    in Shakespeare's day, 204.
+
+  Newton, Mass.:
+    its minister, 15;
+    Episcopal Church, 68.
+    (See _Rice_.)
+
+  Newton, Sir Isaac, times quoted, 382.
+
+  Newton, Stuart, sketches, 130.
+
+  New World, gospel, 371. (See _America_.)
+
+  New York:
+    Brevoort House, 246;
+    Genealogical Society, 413.
+
+  Niagara, visit, 263.
+
+  Nidiver, George, ballad, 259.
+
+  Nightingale, Florence, 220.
+
+  Nithsdale, Eng., mountains, 78.
+
+  Non-Resistance, 141.
+
+  North American Review:
+    its predecessor, 28, 29, 33;
+    the writers, 34;
+    Emerson's contributions, 73;
+    Ethics, 294, 295;
+    Bryant's article, 328.
+
+  Northampton, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 53.
+
+  Norton, Andrews:
+    literary rank, 34;
+    professorship, 52.
+
+  Norton, Charles Eliot:
+    editor of Correspondence, 82;
+    on Emerson's genius, 373.
+
+
+  Old Manse, The:
+    allusion, 70;
+    fire, 271-279.
+    (See _Concord_.)
+
+  Oliver, Daniel, in Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+  Optimism:
+    in philosophy, 136;
+    "innocent luxuriance," 211;
+    wanted by the young, 373.
+
+  Oriental:
+    genius, 120;
+    spirit in Emerson, 179.
+
+  Orpheus, allusion, 319.
+
+
+  Paine, R.T., JR., quoted, 31.
+
+  Palfrey, John Gorham:
+    literary rank, 34;
+    professorship, 52.
+
+  Pan, the deity, 140.
+
+  Pantheism:
+    in Wordsworth and Nature, 103;
+    dreaded, 141;
+    Emerson's, 410, 411.
+
+  Paris, Trance:
+    as a residence, 78;
+    allusion, 167;
+    salons, 184;
+    visit, 196, 308.
+
+  Parker, Theodore:
+    a right arm of freedom, 127;
+    at a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159, 160;
+    editorship, 193;
+    death, 228;
+    essence of Christianity, 306;
+    biography, 368;
+    on Emerson's position, 411.
+
+  Parkhurst, John, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+  Parr, Samuel, allusion, 28.
+
+  Past, party of the, 147.
+
+  Peabody, Andrew Preston, literary rank, 34.
+
+  Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer:
+    her Aesthetic Papers, 88;
+    letter to Mr. Ireland, 317.
+
+  Peirce, Benjamin, mathematician, 223.
+
+  Pelagianisin, 51.
+    (See _Religion_.)
+
+  Pepys, Samuel, allusion, 12.
+
+  Pericles, 184, 253.
+
+  Persia, poetic models, 338.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems, Saadi_).
+
+  Pessimism, 286.
+    (See _Optimism_).
+
+  Philadelphia, Pa., society, 184.
+
+  Philanthropy, activity in 1820, 147.
+
+  Philolaus, 199.
+
+  Pie, fondness for, 269.
+
+  Pierce, John:
+    the minister of Brookline, 11;
+    "our clerical Pepys," 12.
+
+  Pindar, odes, 253.
+    (See _Greek, Homer_, etc.)
+
+  Plagiarism, 205, 206, 287, 288, 384.
+    (See _Quotations, Mather_, etc.)
+
+  Plato:
+    influence on Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+    over Emerson, 22, 52, 173, 188, 299, 301;
+    youthful essay, 74;
+    Alcott's study, 150;
+    reading, 197;
+    borrowed thought, 205, 206;
+    Platonic idea, 222;
+    a Platonist, 267;
+    saints of Platonism, 298;
+    academy inscription, 365;
+    great authority, 380;
+    times quoted, 382;
+    Symposium and Phaedrus quoted, 387;
+    _tableity_, preexistence, 391;
+    Diogenes dialogue, 401;
+    a Platonist, 411.
+    (See _Emerson's Books_, and _Essays, Greek_, etc.)
+
+  Plotinus:
+    influence over Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+    ashamed of his body, 99;
+    motto, 105;
+    opinions, 173, 174;
+    studied, 380.
+
+  Plutarch:
+    allusion, 22;
+    his Lives, 50;
+    study, 197;
+    on immortality, 291;
+    influence over Emerson, 299 _et seq_.;
+    his great authority, 380;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    Emerson on, 383;
+    imagery quoted, 385;
+    style, 405.
+
+  Plymouth, Mass.:
+    letters written, 78, 79;
+    marriage, 83.
+
+  Poetry:
+    as an inspirer, 290;
+    Milton on, 315.
+    (See _Shakespeare_, etc.)
+
+  Poets:
+    list in Parnassus, 281;
+    comparative popularity, 316, 317;
+    consulting Emerson, 408.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_).
+
+  Politics:
+    activity in 1820, 147;
+    in Saturday Club, 259.
+
+  Pomeroy, Jesse, allusion, 393.
+
+  Pope, Alexander, familiar lines, 316
+
+  Porphyry:
+    opinions, 173, 174;
+    studied, 380.
+
+  Porto Rico, E.B. Emerson's death, 19.
+
+  Power, practical, 259.
+
+  Prayer:
+    not enough, 138, 139;
+    anecdotes, 267.
+    (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Preaching, a Christian blessing, 123.
+  Preexistence, 391.
+
+  Presbyterianism, in Scotland, 409.
+
+  Prescott, William, the Judge's mansion, 38.
+
+  Prescott, William Hickling:
+    rank, 33;
+    Conquest of Mexico, 38.
+
+  Prior, Matthew, 30.
+
+  Proclus, influence, 173, 380.
+
+  Prometheus, 209.
+
+  Prospects, for man, 101-103.
+    (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+  Protestantism, its idols, 28.
+    (See _Channing, Religion, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Psammetichus, an original language, 394.
+    (See _Heredity, Language_, etc.)
+
+  Punch, London, 204.
+
+  Puritans, rear guard, 15.
+    (See _Calvinism_, etc.)
+
+  Puritanism:
+    relaxation from, 30;
+    after-clap, 268;
+    in New England, 409.
+    (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+  Putnam's Magazine, on Samuel Hoar, 213, 214.
+
+  Pythagoras:
+    imagery quoted, 385;
+    preexistence, 391.
+
+
+  Quakers, seeing only broad-brims, 218.
+
+  Quincy, Josiah:
+    History of Boston Athenaeum, 31;
+    tribute to the Anthology, 32, 33;
+    memories of Emerson, 45-47;
+    old age, 261.
+
+  Quotations, 381-383.
+    (See _Plagiarism_, etc.)
+
+
+  Raleigh, Sir Walter, verse, 338.
+
+  Raphael, his Transfiguration, 134.
+    (See _Allston, Painters_, etc.)
+
+  Rats, illustration, 167, 168.
+
+  Reed, Sampson, his Growth of the Mind, 80.
+
+  Reforms, in America, 141-145.
+
+  Reformers, fairness towards, 156, 157, 188-192.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery, John Brown_.)
+
+  Religion:
+    opinions of Wm. Emerson and others, 11-13;
+    nature the symbol of spirit, 95;
+    pleas for independence, 117;
+    universal sentiment, 118-120;
+    public rites, 152;
+    Church of England, 219;
+    of the future, 235;
+    relative positions towards, 409, 410;
+    Trinity, 411;
+    Emerson's belief, 412-415;
+    bigotry modified, 414.
+    (See _Calvinism, Channing, Christ, Emerson's Life, Essays_,
+    and _Poems, Episcopacy, God, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Republicanism, spiritual, 36.
+
+  Revolutionary War:
+    Wm. Emerson's service, 8, 9;
+    subsequent confusion, 25, 32;
+    Concord's part, 71, 72, 292, 293.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 228.
+
+  Rhythm, 328, 329, 340.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_, etc.)
+
+  Rice, Alexander H., anecdote, 68, 69, 346.
+    (See _Newton_.)
+
+  Richard Plantagenet, 197.
+
+  Ripley, Ezra:
+    minister of Concord, 10;
+    Emerson's sketch, 14-16;
+    garden, 42;
+    colleague, 56;
+    residence, 70.
+
+  Ripley, George:
+    a party, 149;
+    The Dial, 159;
+    Brook Farm, 164-166;
+    on Emerson's limitations, 380.
+
+  Robinson, Edward, literary rank, 34.
+
+  Rochester, N.Y., speech, 168.
+
+  Rome:
+    allusions, 167, 168;
+    growth, 222;
+    amphora, 321.
+    (See _Latin_.)
+
+  Romilly, Samuel, allusion, 220.
+
+  Rose, anecdote, 345.
+    (See _Flowers_.)
+
+  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, his Savoyard Vicar, 51, 52.
+
+  Ruskin, John:
+    on metaphysics, 250;
+    certain chapters, 336;
+    pathetic fallacy, 337;
+    plagiarism, 384.
+
+  Russell, Ben., quoted, 267.
+
+  Russell, Le Baron:
+    on Sartor Resartus, 81, 82;
+    groomsman, 83;
+    aid in rebuilding the Old Manse, 272-279;
+    Concord visit, 345.
+
+
+  Saadi: a borrower, 205;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Persia_.)
+
+  Sabbath: a blessing of Christianity, 123, 298.
+
+  Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, on poetry, 339.
+
+  Saint Paul, times mentioned, 382.
+    (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Saladin, 184.
+
+  Sallust, on Catiline, 207.
+
+  Sanborn, Frank B.:
+    facts about Emerson, 42, 43, 66;
+    Thoreau memoir, 368;
+    old neighbor, 373.
+
+  Sapor, 184.
+
+  Satan, safety from, 306.
+    (See _Mephistopheles, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Saturday Club:
+    establishment, 221-223, 258;
+    last visits, 346, 347;
+    familiarity at, 368.
+
+  Scaliger, quotation, 109, 110.
+
+  Schelling, idealism, 148;
+    influence 173.
+
+  Schiller, on immortality, 290.
+
+  Scholarship:
+    a priesthood, 137;
+    docility of, 289.
+
+  School-teaching, 297.
+    (See _Chelmsford_.)
+
+  Schopenhauer, Arthur:
+    his pessimism, 286;
+    idea of a philosopher, 359.
+
+  Science:
+    growth of, 148;
+    Emerson inaccurate in, 256;
+    attitude toward, 401, 402.
+    (See _C.C. Emerson_.)
+
+  Scipio, 184.
+
+  Scotland:
+    Carlyle's haunts, 79;
+    notabilities, 195, 196;
+    Presbyterian, 409.
+
+  Scott, Sir Walter:
+    allusion, 22;
+    quotations, 23, 77;
+    dead, 63;
+    "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+    as a poet, 281;
+    popularity, 316;
+    poetic rank, 321.
+
+  Self:
+    the highest, 113;
+    respect for, 288, 289.
+
+  Seneca, Montaigne's study, 382.
+
+  Shakespeare:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Hamlet, 90, 94;
+    Benedick and love, 106;
+    disputed line, 128, 129;
+    an idol, 197;
+    poetic rank, 202, 281, 320, 321;
+    plagiarism, 204-206;
+    on studies, 257, 258;
+    supremacy, 328;
+    a comparison, 374;
+    a playwright, 375, 376;
+    punctiliousness of Portia, 378;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    lunatic, lover, poet, 387;
+    Polonius, 389;
+    _mother-wit_, 404;
+    _fine_ Ariel, 405;
+    adamant, 418.
+
+  Shattuck, Lemuel, History of Concord, 382.
+
+  Shaw, Lemuel, boarding-place, 43.
+
+  Shelley, Percy Bysshe:
+    Ode to the West Wind, 316, 399;
+    redundant syllable, 328;
+    Adonais, 333.
+
+  Shenandoah Mountain, 306.
+
+  Shingle, Emerson's jest, 364.
+
+  Ships:
+    illustration of longitude, 154;
+    erroneous quotation, 251, 252;
+    building illustration, 376, 377.
+
+  Sicily:
+    Emerson's visit, 62;
+    Etna, 113.
+
+  Sidney, Sir Philip, Chevy Chace, 379.
+
+  Silsbee, William, aid in publishing Carlyle, 81.
+
+  Simonides, prudence, 410.
+
+  Sisyphus, illustration, 334.
+
+  Sleight-of-hand, illustration, 332.
+
+  Smith, James and Horace, Rejected Addresses, 387, 397.
+
+  Smith, Sydney, on bishops, 219.
+
+  Socrates:
+    allusion, 203;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Solitude, sought, 135.
+
+  Solomon, epigrammatic, 405.
+    (See _Bible_.)
+
+  Solon, 199.
+
+  Sophron, 199.
+
+  South, the:
+    Emerson's preaching tour, 53;
+    Rebellion, 305, 407.
+    (See _America, Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+  Southerners, in college, 47.
+
+  Sparks, Jared, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Spenser, Edmund:
+    stanza, 335, 338;
+    soul making body, 391;
+    _mother-wit_, 404.
+
+  Spinoza, influence, 173, 380.
+
+  Spirit and matter, 100, 101.
+    (See _God, Religion, Spenser_, etc.)
+
+  Spiritualism, 296.
+
+  Sprague, William Buel, Annals of the American Pulpit, 10-12.
+
+  Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, on American religion, 414.
+
+  Star:
+    "hitch your wagon to a star," 252, 253;
+    stars in poetry, 324.
+
+  Sterling, J. Hutchinson, letter to, 282, 283.
+
+  Stewart, Dugald, allusion, 16.
+
+  Story, Joseph, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Stuart, Moses, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Studio, illustration, 20.
+
+  Summer, description, 117.
+
+  Sumner, Charles:
+    literary rank, 33:
+    the outrage on, 211;
+    Saturday Club, 223.
+
+  Swedenborg, Emanuel:
+    poetic rank, 202, 320;
+    dreams, 306;
+    Rosetta-Stone, 322;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Swedenborgians:
+    liking for a paper of Carlyle's, 78;
+    Reed's essay, 80;
+    spiritual influx, 412.
+
+  Swift, Jonathan:
+    allusion, 30;
+    the Houyhnhnms, 163;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Synagogue, illustration, 169.
+
+
+  Tappan, Mrs. Caroline, The Dial, 159.
+
+  Tartuffe, allusion, 312.
+
+  Taylor, Father, relation to Emerson, 55, 56, 413.
+
+  Taylor, Jeremy:
+    allusion, 22;
+    Emerson's study, 52;
+    "the Shakespeare of divines," 94;
+    praise for, 306.
+
+  Teague, Irish name, 143.
+
+  Te Deum:
+    the hymn, 68;
+    illustration, 82.
+
+  Temperance, the reform, 141, 152.
+    (See _Reforms_.)
+
+  Tennyson, Alfred:
+    readers, 256;
+    tobacco, 270;
+    poetic rank, 281;
+    In Memoriam, 333;
+    on plagiarism, 384.
+
+  Thacher, Samuel Cooper:
+    allusion, 26;
+    death, 29.
+
+  Thayer, James B.:
+    Western Journey with Emerson, 249, 263, 265-271, 359;
+    _ground swell_, 364.
+    (See _California_.)
+
+  Thinkers, let loose, 175.
+
+  Thomson, James, descriptions, 338.
+
+  Thoreau, Henry D.:
+    allusion, 22;
+    a Crusoe, 72;
+    "nullifier of civilization," 86;
+    one-apartment house, 142, 143;
+    The Dial, 159, 160;
+    death, 228;
+    Emerson's burial-place, 356;
+    biography, 368;
+    personality traceable, 389;
+    woodcraft, 403.
+
+  Ticknor, George:
+    on William Emerson, 12;
+    on Kirkland, 27;
+    literary rank, 33.
+
+  Traduction, 393.
+    (See _Heredity, Jonson_, etc.)
+
+  Transcendentalism:
+    Bowen's paper, 103, 104;
+    idealism, 146;
+    adherents, 150-152;
+    dilettanteism, 152-155;
+    a terror, 161.
+
+  Transcendentalist, The, 157-159.
+
+  Truth:
+    as an end, 99;
+    sought, 135.
+
+  Tudor, William:
+    allusion, 26;
+    connecting literary link, 28, 29.
+
+  Turgot, quoted, 98, 99.
+
+  Tyburn, allusion, 183.
+
+
+  Unitarianism:
+    Dr. Freeman's, 11, 12;
+    nature of Jesus, 13;
+    its sunshine, 28;
+    white-handed, 34;
+    headquarters, 35;
+    lingual studies, 48, 49;
+    transition, 51;
+    domination, 52;
+    pulpits, 53, 54;
+    chapel in Edinburgh, 65;
+    file-leaders, 118;
+    its organ, 124;
+    "pale negations," 298.
+    (See _Religion, Trinity_, etc.)
+
+  United States, intellectual history, 32.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Unity, in diversity, 73, 106, 284.
+
+  Upham, Charles W., his History, 45.
+
+
+  Verne, Jules, _onditologie_, 186.
+
+  Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, literary rank, 33.
+
+  Virginia, University of, 299.
+
+  Volcano, illustration, 113.
+
+  Voltaire, 409.
+
+  Voting, done reluctantly, 152, 153.
+
+
+  Wachusett, Mount, 70.
+
+  Walden Pond:
+    allusion, 22, 70, 72;
+    cabin, 142, 143.
+    (See _Concord_.)
+
+  War:
+    outgrown, 88, 89;
+    ennobling, 298.
+
+  Ware, Henry, professorship, 52.
+    (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+  Ware, Henry, Jr.:
+    Boston ministry, 55;
+    correspondence, 124-127.
+    (See _Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+  Warren, John Collins, Transcendentalism and Temperance, 149.
+
+  Warren, Judge, of New Bedford, 67.
+
+  Warwick Castle, fire, 275.
+
+  Washington City, addresses, 307.
+    (See _Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+  Waterville College, Adelphi Society, 135-142.
+
+  Webster, Daniel:
+    E.B. Emerson's association with, 19;
+    on Tudor, 28, 29;
+    literary rank, 33;
+    Seventh-of-March Speech, 303;
+    times mentioned, 382.
+
+  Weiss, John, Parker biography, 368.
+
+  Wellington, Lord, seen by Emerson, 63, 64.
+
+  Wesley, John, praise of, 306.
+    (See _Methodism_.)
+
+  Western Messenger, poems in, 128.
+
+  West India Islands, Edward B. Emerson's death, 89.
+
+  Westminster Abbey, Emerson's visit, 63, 64.
+    (See _Emerson's Books_,--English Traits,--_England_, etc.)
+
+  Westminster Catechism, 298.
+    (See _Calvinism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+  Whipple, Edwin Percy:
+    literary rank, 33;
+    club, 223;
+    on heredity, 389.
+
+  White of Selborne, 228.
+
+  Whitman, Walt:
+    his enumerations, 325, 326;
+    journal, 344, 346.
+
+  Wilberforce, William, funeral, 64.
+
+  Will:
+    inspiration of, 289;
+    power of, 290.
+
+  Windermere, Lake, 70.
+    (See _England_.)
+
+  Winthrop, Francis William, in college, 45.
+
+  Wolfe, Charles, Burial of Moore, 416.
+
+  Woman:
+    her position, 212, 213, 251;
+    crossing a street, 364.
+
+  Woman's Club, 16.
+
+  Words, Emerson's favorite, 404, 405.
+    (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Days.)
+
+  Wordsworth, William:
+    Emerson's account, 63;
+    early reception, Excursion, 92, 95;
+    quoted, 96, 97;
+    Tintern Abbey, 103;
+    influence, 148, 150;
+    poetic rank, 281, 321;
+    on Immortality, 293, 392;
+    popularity, 316;
+    serenity, 335;
+    study of nature, 337;
+    times mentioned, 382;
+    We are Seven, 393;
+    prejudice against science, 401.
+
+  Wotton, Sir Henry, quoted, 259.
+
+
+  Yankee:
+    a spouting, 136;
+    _improve_, 176;
+    whittling, 364.
+    (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+  Yoga, Hindoo idea, 397.
+
+  Young, Brigham:
+    Utah, 264, 268;
+    on preexistence, 391.
+
+  Young, Edward, influence in New England, 16, 17.
+
+
+  Zola, Emile, offensive realism, 326.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
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