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EMERSON 
 
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 Ralph IValdo Emerson. 
 
 From the drawii^lff^ George y. Tohin. 
 
 ELISABETH 
 LVTMER^ 
 
 ILLVSTi^ATED 
 
 PVT 
 
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EMERSON 
 
 POET 
 
 AND 
 THINKER 
 
 BY 
 
 ELISABETH 
 
 LVTHER. 
 
 CAI^ 
 
 ILLVSTH^ATED 
 
 fj0g^C^ PYT NAy n:S S ONS 
 
 THE FCNICKERBOCKLK .PRE^S 
 
 KEWYORJC^ LONDON 
 
C 3^' 
 
 LIBRAKYcf CONGRESS 
 Two Copies Koceiveti 
 
 NOV 7 jyuH 
 
 CLASS A Xac, No; 
 COPY B. 
 
 Copyright, 1904 
 
 BY 
 
 G, ri. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 Published, November, 1004 
 
 "Zbc Iknlcherbocfter prcse, t^ew J^^rft 
 
^^ 
 
 To 
 MY FATHER 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 EMERSON'S influence upon American thought 
 has become so pervasive ; so many books 
 embodying the modern spirit are either the 
 direct or the indirect result of his attitude tov/ard 
 things of the mind, that it seems worth while to 
 emphasise his individual message once more, even 
 at the risk of repeating much that has been said with 
 more authority. The readers of the present genera- 
 tion hardly can turn many of his pages without sur- 
 prise that he so indubitably belongs to them ; that 
 he is so freshly inspiring after half a century of 
 rapidly changing manners and customs. His firm 
 morality and the gracious art with which he has 
 made morality beautiful are as valuable to-day as 
 when his presence in the world gave a personal in- 
 terest to his writings. 
 
 ''What is the hardest task in the world? To 
 think," he somewhere says, and certainly he puts 
 his critic to the test ; his accomplishment, ap- 
 parently so simple, having a most complicated re- 
 lation to his mind and temperament. But until 
 humanity has changed its elements he will be an 
 
 111 
 
iv preface. 
 
 object of consideration with those interested in the 
 sources of mental and moral influences ; and my in- 
 adequate study of him will perhaps provoke one 
 more enlightening. I have made such use as 1 have 
 required of preceding accounts of him, and 1 wish to 
 express my gratitude to Dr. Edward Emerson and to 
 Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company for their kind 
 permission to make use of extracts from Emerson's 
 works. 
 
 Elisabeth Luther Gary. 
 
 Brooklyn, October 3d, 1904. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. — Early Years i 
 
 II. — Preparation .... 
 
 
 
 18 
 
 III. — Religion .... 
 
 
 
 34 
 
 IV.— Nature .... 
 
 
 
 . 57 
 
 V. — Carlyle 
 
 
 
 . 76 
 
 VI.— ''Man, the Reformer" 
 
 
 
 . 93 
 
 VII.— The Dial 
 
 
 
 112 
 
 VIII. — The Dial {Continued) . 
 
 
 
 . 138 
 
 IX.— Emerson Abroad . 
 
 
 
 . 155 
 
 X.— Representative Men . • 
 
 
 
 . 183 
 
 XI. — Poems .... 
 
 
 
 . 205 
 
 XII. — The Closing Years 
 
 
 
 . 221 
 
 XIII.— The French Estimate . 
 
 
 
 . 234 
 
 Appendix 
 
 
 
 265 
 
 Index 
 
 
 
 281 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson . . Frontispiece 
 
 From the drawing by George T. Tohin. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 
 From a photograph taken in 184J. 
 
 The Approach to Emerson's Home . 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 
 After an engraving by Schoff of the original drawing by 
 
 S. IV. Rowse, in the possession ofC. E. Norton, Esq. 
 
 By permission of Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 
 From the portrait by Scott. In Concord Public Library. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle 
 
 From an engraving by G. IV. Smith . 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Bradford, and 
 William H, Furness 
 
 From a photograph by Gutekunst, Philadelphia, iSyy. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . . 
 
 From a photograph. 
 
 Frank B. Sanborn 
 
 From a photograph by H. G. Smith, Boston 
 
 Page 
 
 12 
 
 24 
 
 36 
 
 Bronson Alcott . 
 
 50 
 
 16 
 
 90 
 102 
 
 no 
 
 122 
 
 From a photograph. 
 vii 
 
viii miuetratione. 
 
 Page 
 
 Henry D. Thoreau 126 
 
 From a steel engraving. 
 
 yiew of Emerson s Home 140 
 
 From a photograph by A. Hosmer. 
 
 Margaret Fuller 144 
 
 From a photograph by Lawrence 
 
 Ralph IValdo Emerson 160 
 
 From a photograph by H. G. Smith, Boston. 
 
 Emerson's Study at Concord .... ij2 
 
 From a photograph by A. Hosmer. 
 
 Ralph IValdo Emerson 792 
 
 From the drawing by 5. IV. Rowse, by permission of Messrs. Curtis 
 
 & Cameron and Messrs. Small, Maynard, & Co. 
 
 Copyright, ipoi. 
 
 Herman Grimm 2^4 
 
 From a steel engraving. 
 
 Bust of Emerson 2^0 
 
 By Daniel Chester French. By permission of The Century Co. 
 
 Ralph IValdo Emerson 260 
 
 From the etching by Aug. IVill. 
 
 Emerson's Crave at Concord .... 272 
 
 From a photograph by Alfred Hosmer. 
 
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 CHAPTER I. 
 EARLY YEARS. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born in Bos- 
 ton, Massachusetts, in the old parish house 
 of the First Church, on Summer Street, on 
 the twenty-fifth of May, 1803, and died in Concord, 
 seventy-nine years later, on the twenty-seventh of 
 April, 1882. His father, the Rev. William Emerson, 
 was a clergyman of social tastes, with a melo- 
 dious voice, a scholarly style, and a buoyant 
 disposition. Not from him certainly did Emerson 
 derive his ideal of a sacred individuality to be nur- 
 tured in solitude. If we delve the family to the root, 
 we find the grandfather and great-grandfather also 
 clergymen; then by skipping one generation we come 
 again upon the ministerial office, while scattered 
 along collateral lines are many prophets of the soul. 
 For more than two centuries the ministry claimed 
 one or more of the Emersons. ''The clergy are as 
 alike as peas," writes the offspring of this clerical 
 race, with a fine independence, *' I cannot tell them 
 apart! " One of the great-grandfathers prayed every 
 
2 IRalpb Malbo fimereon* 
 
 night that none of his descendants might ever be rich, 
 and Emerson's worldly condition must sufficiently 
 have pleased the austere ghost of that ancestor, for 
 his poverty in boyhood was not of the bland, com- 
 parative nature, but positive and exacting. 
 
 He and his four brothers were all under ten years 
 of age when his father died. His mother, a gracious 
 type of woman with sweet, dark eyes and a pleasant 
 voice, was left with a small income and the irrefraga- 
 ble New England ambition toward an education for 
 her sons. This could be gained only by hard labour 
 on the part of the elders, and no little assistance from 
 the boys themselves. At the age of nine Emerson 
 sent to his aunt a chronicle of one day's occupations, 
 and they left but a small amount of time for mere 
 boyish sport. ''We retire to bed at different times," 
 the young chronicler concludes, with the majesty of 
 style common to his age ; *M go at a little after eight, 
 and retire to my private devotions, and then close 
 my eyes in sleep, and there ends the toils of the 
 day."^ 
 
 His aunt writes of their '* trials by boarders," and 
 we hear of other trials demanding an endurance 
 somewhat more heroic, a day without food for ex- 
 ample, and a sparsity of warm clothing for the bleak 
 New England winters. It would be easy, however, 
 to make too much of these inconveniences; they 
 were no greater than fell to the lot of many a clergy- 
 man's family at that unluxurious period, and Emer- 
 
 ' ^ Memoir of Ralph IValdo Emerson. By James Elliot Cabot. 
 
Barl^ l?ear0. 3 
 
 son in after-life paid faithful homage to his old nurse 
 Poverty. '* Honour to the house where they are 
 simple to the verge of hardship," he wrote, and de- 
 scribed the sons of the poor thus eloquently: ''What 
 is the hoop that holds them staunch? It is the iron 
 band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which, 
 excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which 
 make other boys too early old, has directed their 
 activity in safe and right channels, and made them, 
 despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beauti- 
 ful, and the good. Ah! shortsighted students of 
 books, of Nature, and of man! too happy, could they 
 know their advantages. They pine for freedom from 
 that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, 
 for rides, for the theatre, and premature freedom and 
 dissipation, which others possess. Woe to them if 
 their wishes were crowned! The angels that dwell 
 with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their 
 youthful brows, are Toil, and Want, and Truth, and 
 Mutual Faith." ^ 
 
 Elsewhere he says that *' a tender boy who wears 
 his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure 
 the coveted place in college, and the right in the 
 library, is educated to some purpose." He speaks 
 from experience. Whatever was left out frop" the 
 little household, study was never even pushed aside 
 to make room for immediate material needs, and 
 Emerson was brought up to think no sacrifice ex- 
 treme that procured the opportunity of learning. 
 
 ' Society and Solitude. 
 
4 IRalpb MaIJ)o lemereon. 
 
 He was sent to school before he was three, and it 
 was made a matter for note that he read but poorly 
 at that ripe age. His moral sense also failed pre- 
 maturely to appear. From writing-school he de- 
 liberately and continuously played truant, although 
 at home his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, faithfully 
 indicated to him high standards of conduct. At ten 
 he was in l/irgil, but, according to his own account, 
 ''rather inclined to play than read" when out of 
 school, and looking back to this time his old friend 
 and schoolfellow. Dr. Furness thanked Heaven that 
 he had no talent for anything, ''nothing but pure 
 genius, which talents would have overlaid." 
 
 At fourteen he was ready for Harvard, and passed 
 a good entrance examination. This argued no un- 
 usual precocity, as the college was then more a boy's 
 school than a man's university. Lowell, seventeen 
 years later, entered at fifteen, and Longfellow was not 
 yet so old when he entered Bowdoin, Harvard's am- 
 bitious godchild. One of Emerson's aunts is recorded 
 as much regretting the choice of Harvard for her 
 nephew's Alma Mater, her orthodox mind turning in 
 preference to Brown University. But if tradition has 
 any power in itself for good. Harvard was the only 
 place for an Emerson, fifty-six members of the family 
 already having been graduated there. In one way 
 and another he managed to cover most of the heavier 
 expenses of the college course without making seri- 
 ous demands upon the family resources. He was 
 waiter at Commons, which gave him the right to 
 
learli? 15ear6. 5 
 
 three-fourths of the cost of his board ; he was the 
 '' president's Freshman " (the messenger of the presi- 
 dent to summon delinquents, and to announce to the 
 students the decisions of the faculty), and had his 
 lodging free in the president's house. He also was 
 beneficiary of certain scholarship funds. Although 
 he never could recognise that his college experience 
 greatly benefited him, he could praise New England 
 for deciding the destiny of the country in allowing 
 the poor man to '' put his hand into the pocket of the 
 rich, and say. You shall educate me, not as you will, 
 but as 1 will: not alone in the elements, but, by 
 further provision, in the languages, in sciences, in 
 the useful and in elegant arts."^ 
 
 As a student, in the ordinary acceptation of the 
 term, he seems not to have been either a great suc- 
 cess or a failure. In mathematics he records himself 
 a hopeless dunce. During his Freshman period he 
 boldly announced to his elder brother his scepticism 
 on the subject of ''Mathematics and Greek." It 
 was not necessary, he thought, to understand them 
 thoroughly in order to be a good, useful, or even 
 great man. His final standing was a little above the 
 middle of his class in college rank. Many lifelong 
 tendencies and habits reveal themselves in his early 
 attitude toward his studies. Constantly rambling off 
 from such dry terrors as analytical geometry to the 
 pleasant pastures of Chaucer and Montaigne, Plu- 
 tarch and Plato, he sturdily recommended this system 
 
 ' Essay on Education. 
 
6 IRalpb MaI&o lemereon* 
 
 in his mature writings. To teachers he dictates: 'M 
 believe that our own experience instructs us that the 
 secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is 
 not for you to choose what he shall know, what he 
 shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only 
 holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering 
 and thwarting and too much governing he may be 
 hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Re- 
 spect the child. Wait and see the new product of 
 Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. 
 Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. 
 Trespass not on his solitude."^ 
 
 Nothing could come nearer to the general principles 
 of modern education than this independent doctrine 
 of which in those days there were few exponents, 
 and as teacher to himself he carried it out to the last 
 article. His intellectual effort was all on the line of 
 his natural inclination. He would ''as soon swim 
 the Charles River to get from Cambridge to Boston " 
 as read a book in a difficult foreign tongue when a 
 translation could be had. To the end of his days he 
 kept the browsing habit of his youth, clipping off the 
 sweet perfection of many authors, but seldom search- 
 ing them profoundly for their inner meaning. In his 
 essay on Experience he depicts the restless temper of 
 his mind, so curiously contrasting with his moral 
 steadiness. ''Our love of the real draws us to per- 
 manence, but health of body consists in circulation, 
 and sanity of mind in variety or facility of associa- 
 
 ' Essay on Education. 
 
tion. We need change of objects. Dedication to 
 one thought is quickly odious. We house with the 
 insane and must humour them ; then conversation 
 dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne 
 that I thought 1 should not need any other book ; be- 
 fore that, in Shakespeare; then in Plutarch; then in 
 Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; 
 even in Bettine; but now 1 turn the pages of either of 
 them languidly, whilst still I cherish their genius." 
 
 Doubtless if in college or later he had applied himself 
 diligently to conquer this desultoriness of interest, 
 his so-called ''philosophy" would have gained in 
 order and logical construction, but almost inevitably 
 it would have been limited to a much smaller audi- 
 ence. Emerson's theories and views come hot from 
 his own experience. He generalises himself and 
 states his generalisations in positive terms, without 
 challenging discussion. In this brilliant use of him- 
 self as the medium of inspiration lies his great 
 strength. No one ever was less curious concerning 
 what lay outside himself, and with a whimsical, 
 conscious perversity he declined to consider valuable 
 what he himself did not desire. Thus all that he 
 says throbs with personality and touches intimately 
 his own character and temperament. He, whose 
 dearest wish would seem to be aloofness from his 
 fellow-beings, opens to them his heart and soul and 
 seldom speaks to them of aught besides the secrets 
 within his private consciousness. So much does 
 freedom for us. 
 
8 IRalpb Malbo jEmereon. 
 
 It is interesting to learn that the president of Har- 
 vard during Emerson's life there, Dr. John Thornton 
 Kirkland, composed sermons in the epigrammatic 
 style so familiar to the reader oi Society and Solitude 
 and Conduct of Life, apparently putting them to- 
 gether on the spot from disconnected notes. Whether 
 Emerson caught this manner from him or devised it 
 for himself is a matter of small importance. It is 
 much more significant that in these early college days, 
 before his mind had fairly passed out of its childhood, 
 he initiated his Commonplace Book, that scrap-bag of 
 reference from which in the course of his career so 
 many treasurable sentences were to be drawn. Into 
 it went quotations from poetry and prose, original 
 sentiments, phrases for poetical use, and paraphrases 
 of striking passages met with in his reading. When 
 we recall that he was only eighteen when he left col- 
 lege, we realise with what integrity the web of his 
 life-work was spun from a mind singularly undiverted 
 by the guidance of others. This trick of using his 
 reading chiefly to provide texts and illustrations for 
 his independent reflections served him for three-score 
 years, and, characteristically preaching what he prac- 
 tised, he upheld it with confidence as the only way 
 in which a '' scholar " profitably could read. '' Books 
 are the best of things, well used; abused, among 
 the worst. What is the right use ? What is the 
 one end which all means go to effect ? They are for 
 nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book 
 than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my 
 
own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. . . , 
 Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can 
 read God directly, the hour is too precious to be 
 wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings."^ 
 
 There were moments, nevertheless, when this 
 shifting interest seemed to him his "cardinal vice of 
 intellectual dissipation," a ''sinful strolling from book 
 to book, from care to idleness"; but these were not 
 his moments of conviction. Certainly he gained 
 from his method all that could be gained. His strol- 
 ling was done among the products of radiant minds. 
 Nor did he always fulfil his tendency. It is reported 
 that he ''pored over Montaigne, and knew Shake- 
 speare almost by heart," while for the task of "writ- 
 ing the character of Socrates" he allotted a year. 
 But in the main he tied himself to no author long 
 enough to risk following his leadership. His Aunt 
 Mary, to whose opinions he listened always with 
 reverence and whose letters he copied into his Com- 
 monplace Book as models of style, encouraged his 
 independence of other minds and outer influences. 
 Much of the counsel upon which he laid most stress 
 came to him straight from her ardent exhortation. 
 The year after he left college, for example, she wrote 
 to him as follows: 
 
 " Solitude, which to people not talented to deviate 
 from the beaten track, is the safe ground of medi- 
 ocrity (without offending), is to learning and genius 
 the only sure labyrinth, though sometimes gloomy, 
 
 ' The American Scholar. 
 
lo "Ralpb Wnl^o lEmereon^ 
 
 to form the eagle-wing that will bear one farther 
 than suns and stars. . . . Would to Providence 
 your unfoldings might be there ! that it were not a 
 wild and fruitless wish that you could be disunited 
 from travelling with the souls of other men; of living 
 and breathing, reading and writing, with one vital, 
 time-fated idea, their opinions."^ Compare with 
 this a passage from the essay on Culture, the most 
 eloquent passage to be found therein: 
 
 *' 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. He who should inspire and lead his 
 race must be defended from travelling with the souls 
 of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and 
 writing in the daily time-worn yoke of their opinions. " 
 
 It hardly could have been from this good lady, 
 however, that Emerson learned his lesson of manners. 
 Her eccentricity knew no bounds, carrying her to the 
 point of making her shroud, and, wearying of Death's 
 tardy approach, wearing it as a day gown, and riding 
 horseback in it through the streets of Concord. Em- 
 erson had no leaning toward these strange forms of 
 individuality. The benignant serenity of his mature 
 life rested on his boyhood and young manhood. 
 Those who knew him in school and college describe 
 him as '* a slender, delicate youth ... of a sen- 
 sitive, retiring nature," '' equable " and *' fair," not 
 demonstrative or boisterous, but mirthful in his way, 
 
 ' j4 Memoir of Ralph IValdo Emerson. 
 
and keenly appreciative of humour. He was unob- 
 trusive and kindly, and spoke with deliberation and 
 a certain ''courtly hesitation." Especially he was 
 self-contained and somewhat aloof, though affable 
 in his relations with his companions. Many of these 
 qualities and characteristics find their place in the 
 picture he paints for us of manners in the abstract 
 man, and also occasionally he lays stress upon some 
 feature of behaviour that he does not possess, but 
 covets. Here, as elsewhere, his teachings are rooted 
 in his natural tendencies and desires. ''Those who 
 are not self-possessed obtrude and pain us, "he says. 
 " Self-reliance is the basis of behaviour, as it is the 
 guaranty that the powers are not squandered in too 
 much demonstration." The squandering of power in 
 demonstration was at no time of his life a temptation, 
 as he had the dread of a Greek for anything resem- 
 bling excess. In self-possession of the external sort, 
 however, he was not rich. 
 
 Mrs. Cheney tells an amusing anecdote of an ex- 
 temporaneous address given by him to the boys of 
 a Reform Schoolship. He was embarrassed and con- 
 fused, and his manner was awkward. A few days 
 after, the teacher of reading, wishing to impress upon 
 the boys of the ship the importance of ease and 
 freedom of utterance, mimicked the awkwardness 
 and confusion of an inexperienced speaker, and asked 
 "Now, boys, what should you think if you heard 
 a man speak so?" "Should think it was Mr. Emer- 
 son! " they shouted. Well aware of this deficiency. 
 
12 IRalpb 'CHlalbo lEmereom 
 
 and not perhaps aware of the gracious wisdom and 
 dignity that found their way to his manner, from the 
 intensity of his moral conviction, he was fond of 
 exalting the social gifts of readiness and ease. His 
 lines on Tact, so deplorable as an illustration of his 
 poetic method, are a partly satirical expression of his 
 respect for these endowments: 
 
 What boots it, thy virtue, 
 What profit thy parts, 
 While one thing thou lackest, 
 The art of all arts! 
 The only credentials. 
 Passport to success, 
 Opens castle and parlour. 
 Address, man, address. 
 
 To what we call pure animal spirits he was entirely 
 a stranger. Even as a boy his habit was to smile 
 where others would laugh, nor could he perceive 
 the happy charm of hearty, spontaneous laughter. 
 ''What a seneschal and detective is laughter!" he 
 says, 'Mt seems to require several generations of 
 education to train a squeaking or a shouting habit 
 out of a man. Sometimes when in almost all expres- 
 sions the Choctaw and the slave have been worked 
 out of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his 
 contemptit)le squeals of joy. It is necessary for the 
 purification of drawing rooms, that these entertaining 
 explosions should be under strict control." His ob- 
 jection to Margaret Fuller, the friend of his middle 
 years, was that she made him laugh too much, and 
 
£mei 
 
 . f I'M C 
 
 Ralph IValdo Emerson, 
 
 From a phoiograph taken in 1847. 
 
 ,-..1 .^, 
 
 'len in '*^ st an ^.a^iv- 
 .ive have beer ••- -v-^ 
 till betr: 
 
 •nllpr t^ 
 
Dr. Holmes has vividly depicted his mode of exhibit- 
 ing mirth: '' 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 Prof. Thayer happily called it, of 
 the half-suppressed convulsion."^ 
 
 From the experiences of his youth Emerson was 
 able to deduce a philosophy of training for young 
 people singularly free from impracticability, yet highly 
 imaginative and far-sighted. Books always are 
 needed for purposes of culture, he holds, but books 
 are good ''only as far as a boy is ready for them." 
 '* He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, 
 fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is 
 right and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up 
 if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. 
 Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and 
 boat, are all educators, liberalisers; and so are danc- 
 ing, dress, and street talk; and provided only the boy 
 has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain, 
 these will not serve him less than the books. " Minor 
 accomplishments Emerson laid stress upon as ena- 
 bling the youth to "judge intelligently of much on 
 which otherwise he would give a pedantic squint." 
 All the liberal arts common to the schoolboy age are 
 " lessons in the art of power, which it is his main 
 business to learn. " These pleadings for the graces of 
 
 ^Life of Emerson. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
 
14 IRalpb XRHalbo lEmerson* 
 
 training denied to the poor by reason of their cost in 
 money are made with a keen perception of their 
 negative, as well as of their positive values. ''Their 
 chief use to the youth is not amusement, but to be 
 known for what they are, and not to remain to him 
 occasions of heart burn. We are full of superstitions. 
 Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not; 
 the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth 
 and breeding. One of the benefits of a college edu- 
 cation is to show the boy its little avail. Balls, riding, 
 wine parties and billiards pass to a poor boy for 
 something fine and romantic, which they are not; 
 and a free admission to them on an equal footing, if 
 it were possible, only once or twice, would be worth 
 ten times its cost by undeceiving him. " ^ Here, ob- 
 viously, he is thinking of himself and of his restric- 
 tions, bringing into play again his splendid capacity 
 for turning to the account of others his knowledge of 
 his character, temperament, and environment. He 
 placed little value on travel as a means to the highest 
 culture, and he seems to have cared almost as little 
 to explore other minds, except to find therein paral- 
 lelism with his own. 
 
 It was not merely, however, to give voice to his 
 particular ideas that he thus clung to his particular 
 experience. Very early he began to feel the influ- 
 ence of the chief idea developed in his later work; 
 the idea of a universal God, toward whom we 
 tend in all our moments of high thought; whose 
 
 ' Essay on Culture, 
 
fiarl^ l?ear0* 15 
 
 mind flows into our minds; whose soul flows in- 
 to our souls, guiding us toward permanence and 
 beauty in our thoughts and actions. In Plato's 
 Symposium are certain passages which Emerson must 
 often have read, and which might properly form the 
 text of his collected writings. Diotima is instructing 
 Socrates concerning the mysteries of love, uncertain 
 if he will be able to attain the greater and more 
 hidden ones: '' He who would proceed rightly in this 
 matter should begin in youth to turn to beautiful 
 forms; and first, if his instructor guide him rightly, he 
 should learn to love one such form only — out of that he 
 should create fair thoughts; and soon he will himself 
 perceive that the beauty of one form is truly related 
 to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in gen- 
 eral is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to 
 recognise that the beauty in every form is one and 
 the same! And when he perceives this he will abate 
 his violent love of the one which he will despise and 
 deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all 
 beautiful forms. . . . And the true order of going 
 or being led by another to the things of love, is to 
 use the beauties of earth as steps along which he 
 mounts upwards for the sake of that other beauty, 
 going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, 
 and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair 
 actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he 
 arrives at the notion of absolute beauty and at last 
 knows what the essence of beauty is. . . . But 
 what if man had eyes to see the true beauty — the 
 
1 6 IRalpb IKDialbo lEmereom 
 
 divine beauty I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, 
 not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all 
 the colours and vanities of human life — thither look- 
 ing, and holding converse with the true beauty divine 
 and simple, and bringing into being and educating true 
 creations of virtue, and not idols only? Do you not 
 see that in that communion only, beholding beauty 
 with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to 
 bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities; for he 
 has hold not of an image but of a reality, and bring- 
 ing forth and educating true virtue to become the 
 friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may."^ 
 To such a vision of divine beauty Emerson early 
 aspired and early attained. With unerring instinct 
 he sought to reveal it to others by the plain and 
 homely use of his daily experience. His insight is 
 that of a seer, his language that of a poet, his argu- 
 ment that of a plain man acquainted with the plain 
 facts of ordinary life. His power to bring down from 
 Heaven the very soul of moral beauty, and show it 
 in the protean forms of commonplace, gives him his 
 especial influence over the young, who like to exalt 
 their motives, and find ''sweeping a room to the 
 glory of God " easier than sweeping it without a 
 thought beyond its cleanliness. It is customary to 
 think of Emerson as a '' philosopher " and a ''sage," 
 but it is pleasanter and possibly truer to think of him 
 as forever a meditative youth to whom life suddenly 
 unfolded its beneficent meaning, making it impos- 
 
 ' Jowett's translation. 
 
jearli? ipear0* 
 
 17 
 
 sible for him to grow old or dispirited. The teach- 
 ings of his boyhood are marvellously like the teach- 
 ings of his age, and the freshness of his response to 
 precious intuitions of eternal truth is kept to the 
 end of his career. In the first chapter of his life we 
 see him fix his eyes upon spiritual happiness, in 
 the last chapter we find his gaze no less divinely 
 innocent, no less joyously serene. 
 
 '' The sun," he says in the earliest of his published 
 writings — ''the sun illuminates only the eye of the 
 man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the 
 child. "^ Such childhood he never outgrew. 
 
 ^ Essay on Nature. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 PREPARATION. 
 
 WHEN Emerson left college in 1821, he ex- 
 pected ultimately to follow the tradition 
 of the family and become a minister of 
 religion. Without having applied himself with special 
 interest to theological problems, he had been prepar- 
 ing himself in his own way for his prospective work, 
 and it was significant that a concern for the art of 
 expression was prominent in his mind from the 
 beginning. Many of the quotations and original re- 
 flections in his Commonplace Books had been col- 
 lected there with reference to their use in future 
 sermons ; he was proud of his poet's fancies, and 
 " hoped to put on eloquence as a robe," burning, he 
 said, "after the aliquid immensum infinitusque which 
 Cicero desired." In his boyish dreams he saw him- 
 self holding his congregations by the power of ora- 
 tory, taking sovereign possession of their emotions, 
 and the vision was alluring, yet he was not diverted 
 by it from his allegiance to pure sincerity. 
 
 ''Even a seraph's eloquence," he avowed, ''will 
 
 18 
 
preparation* 19 
 
 shamefully defeat its own end if it has not first won 
 the heart of the defender to the cause he defends," 
 and the future was to show the candour of this pro- 
 testation. Thus, early in the morning hours, he 
 found himself, without the delay of erratic wander- 
 ing in alien fields by which the haggards of literature 
 squander their energies. Although the pulpit was 
 not long to hold him, no whit of his training for it 
 was lost, and his warning note against the waste of 
 time is prompted by his adequate economy of that 
 precious possession. ''Profligacy," he says in his 
 essay on WeoMh, " consists not in spending years of 
 time or chests of money, but in spending them off 
 the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts 
 men and states is job-work ; declining from your 
 main design, to serve a turn here or there. Nothing 
 is beneath you if it is in the direction of your 
 life ; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from 
 that." 
 
 Naturally, the line of his career revealed itself to 
 him as the line of ethical instruction, and naturally, 
 also, he practised almost in childhood the interroga- 
 tion of his soul under the unflinching censorship of 
 his doughty Aunt Mary, from whose devoted vigil- 
 ance no child of the Emerson flock could hope to 
 escape. It was with her that he corresponded con- 
 cerning his psychological state. Nothing could speak 
 better for the poise and clear sanity of his nature 
 than that he escaped unscathed from this stimulating 
 but dangerous influence exercised with so much 
 
20 IRalpb TKHalbo lEmer^on* 
 
 force and persuasive eloquence during his impression- 
 able years. He did escape, and moreover, he probed 
 the mysticism of that curious exalted mind until he 
 reached the flaming conviction inspiring all his own 
 writings, the conviction of the direct dealing of God 
 with the individual soul. He became the apostle 
 whose beautiful utterance of the message made it his 
 own, but it is pleasant to recognise the overwhelm- 
 ing contribution to his creed by the poor lady, who 
 seemed, she said, "to live to give pain rather than 
 pleasure." 
 
 The pursuit of style, however, although his aunt 
 had her share in furthering it, was Emerson's per- 
 sonal affair. No one could materially have helped 
 him hammer out from the common vocabulary of our 
 speech such expressive forms, such stately symbols, 
 passages of such sincere distinction. During his col- 
 lege years he had moved among the greater writers 
 and in a certain sense he took them all for his models 
 but not one of them for his master. It was a time 
 of eloquence in Boston. Channing was preaching 
 ''sublime sermons" in Federal Street, Edward 
 Everett had just returned from his five years in 
 Europe, and was drawing all the young enthusiasm 
 of his native town under his glittering spell. But 
 Emerson's star differed from these in glory. Prophet 
 of inspiration though he was, he spared no pains to 
 provide for the 'Mnner light" a medium as artistic- 
 ally interpretative as the artist within him could 
 create. His method was the slow and searching ef- 
 
preparation 21 
 
 fort of serious artists toward large and truthful ren- 
 dering of a personal vision. 
 
 Once he wrote to his aunt who had asked him to 
 procure for her a copy of Baillie's poems : '' What do 
 you want them for ? Only as I do in my slovenly 
 way of thinking, for a kind of better word-hunting, 
 that a phrase which catches the eye may be tortured 
 in the mind till it chances to suggest a new thought 
 or an old one with a new face ? " From these tor- 
 tured phrases he evolved epithets of untainted and 
 clean-cut felicity, compact, and vigorous bodies for 
 his poetic and dignified ideas. His " slovenly think- 
 ing," certainly not marked by the arduous ratiocina- 
 tion of his theological comrades, was redeemed by 
 the far from slovenly workmanship spent upon the 
 form enshrining it. 
 
 Professor Woodbury describes his manuscripts as 
 filled with evidences of his reconsideration and re- 
 touching, the language subjected to multitudinous 
 revisions until the paper resembled palimpsest, the 
 sentences modified, abated, and restricted to nar- 
 rower outline until tempered to the exact fact, the 
 ''clean and clear distinction." 
 
 ''Do not put hinges to your work to make it 
 cohere " is one of his directions to young writers, and 
 the lack of " hinges " in his work has brought down 
 upon him the adverse criticism of high authorities. 
 Mr. Morley has expressed irritation with the "fer- 
 vent votaries " who have praised his style ; Mat- 
 thew Arnold declares that it "has not the requisite 
 
22 1?alpb Malbo jemereom 
 
 wholeness of good tissue." Even Mr. Henry James, 
 of whom we expect the utmost sensitiveness to the 
 least obvious forms of art, utters the astonishing im- 
 pression that Emerson's writings ''were not com- 
 posed at all," and deems it a sign of his power that 
 he is ''a striking exception to the general rule that 
 writings live in the last resort by their form." Mr. 
 Birrell refers to his ' 'unparalleled nonsequaciousness. " 
 Carlyle, reading the Essays in sheets before their 
 publication in England, found the style not entirely 
 coherent, ''the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but 
 as a beautiful square bag of duck shot held together 
 by canvas." Emerson himself doubted if he were 
 capable of artistic construction, and wrote to Carlyle 
 about one of his early volumes : " In a fortnight or 
 three weeks my little raft will be afloat. Expect 
 nothing more of my powers of construction, no 
 shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, 
 only boards and logs tied together." 
 
 All this, apparently, because with the exhausting 
 labour of those who regard their workmanship as the 
 means to great ends, he has concealed the skeleton 
 of his construction, and has concentrated upon his 
 central idea countless statements of truth related to 
 it by delicate unseen connections, too exquisitely 
 realised to be distorted into prominence. His essays 
 are all pictures of the soul under different lights and 
 in different positions toward life. The sentences are 
 brief and perhaps fragmentary, as the crisp, broken 
 brushwork of certain painters may be called so. But 
 
Ipreparatiom 23 
 
 unity in literary style is no more really dependent 
 upon the length of the sentence than unity in a 
 picture is dependent upon the touch of the brush 
 against the canvas. In one case as in the other the 
 final co-ordinated effect is gained by a design that 
 may be frankly before the eye as an arrangement of 
 abstract lines and spaces, or may be suggested by an 
 invisible harmony of the elements of the work. Cer- 
 tain pictures seem to the decorative designer, accus- 
 tomed to observe external patterns and outlines, 
 quite without the architectonic quality when that 
 very quality is supremely indicated by the relation 
 of the values and colours and planes. It would be 
 the mistake of shallow criticism to deny to Emerson 
 the power to create a general impression, coherent 
 and whole, with the heterogeneous material of his 
 note-books. The idea in his mind was uniformly 
 single and the contributed ideas from the works of 
 others invariably converged to it in a perfect relation. 
 His essay on Nature, first printed in 1836, but con- 
 taining much fruit of the reflection indulged in during 
 the pensive idle hours at Cambridge fifteen years 
 earlier, furnishes a notable example of this organic 
 unity. Its central idea, in fact, is nothing less than 
 the unity of all nature, physical and spiritual. In the 
 first chapter of the series forming the essay, this 
 herald note of aesthetic comprehension is sounded : 
 
 **When we speak of nature in this manner, 
 we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the 
 mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by 
 
24 IRalpb TKIlalbo jEmereon* 
 
 manifold natural objects. It is this which distin- 
 guishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter from the 
 tree of the poet. The charming landscape which 1 saw 
 this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty 
 or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, 
 and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of 
 them owns the landscape. There is a property in 
 the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can 
 integrate all the parts, that is, the poet." 
 
 The different parts of the essay show the ministry 
 of Nature to the senses, the nobler service rendered 
 to the sense of beauty, the expression of the spirit 
 through natural forms, the relation of human actions 
 to the universal spirit (with emphasis again laid upon 
 *' the unity in variety which meets us everywhere,") 
 and, finally, the moral significance of this supreme 
 law of art, everywhere observed. *Mt is not so per- 
 tinent to man to know all the individuals of the 
 animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and where- 
 to is this tyrannising unity in his constitution, which 
 evermore separates and classifies things, endeavour- 
 ing to reduce the most diverse to one form. When 
 1 behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to 
 recite correctly the order and superposition of the 
 strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is 
 lost in a tranquil sense of unity. . . The problem 
 of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty 
 is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or 
 blank that we see when we look at nature is in our 
 eye. . . The reason why the world lacks unity 
 
lilBi^fe'^"^.- 
 
The Approach to Emerson's Home, 
 
preparation. 25 
 
 and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is dis- 
 united with himself." 
 
 No observer with such an extraordinary percep- 
 tion of synthesis in the external world, and in the 
 region of spiritual suggestion, could fail to attempt 
 synthesis in giving expression to his thought ; nor 
 could the attempt be completely a failure. With 
 Emerson it came much nearer to being completely a 
 success. Logically his arguments are non-existent. 
 He does not argue at all in the strict sense of the 
 word. But his art is rich and explicit, strong, and 
 balanced, not deeply coloured, but with atmospheric 
 depths and with a curious vibrating note of joy quite 
 independent of his hopeful temperament — the joy of 
 the artist skilfully moulding his material — the unmis- 
 takable exultation of those who are consciously pro- 
 ducing forms of beauty. 
 
 There were to be, however, some years of plain 
 drudgery before the happy thinker could apply him- 
 self to the fulfilment of his natural destiny. While 
 he was in college and before he was sixteen he had 
 done at least enough school-teaching to earn a new 
 coat for himself, and as soon as he was graduated he 
 went to work in earnest as the assistant of his brother 
 William who kept a school for young women in 
 his mother's house. William was twenty, Waldo, 
 eighteen, and the school was popular. Within three 
 years Emerson had earned between two and three 
 thousand dollars, at that time no mean reward for 
 such labour, and quite sufficient to rouse the alarm 
 
26 1?alpb Malbo Cmereon* 
 
 of his Spartan aunt who feared the effect upon him 
 of such ease of circumstance. He himself was not 
 impressed by the amenity of his situation. He de- 
 scribed himself as *' lifting the truncheon against the 
 fair-haired daughters" of the "raw city" and as 
 ''toiling through the miserable employment without 
 even the poor satisfaction of doing it well." ''The 
 good suspect me and the geese dislike me," he added, 
 with a self-consciousness not usual in either his pub- 
 lic or private intercourse ; and, still in this gloomy 
 strain, he wrote his famous poem : " Good-by, proud 
 world, 1 'm going home." Emphatically the school- 
 room was too contracted for his chosen horizon, yet 
 he seems to have been a satisfactory teacher along 
 orthodox lines, winning the respect of his pupils and 
 the approbation of their parents. We have only his 
 own authority that, judged by his higher standards, 
 he was something of a failure. He lacked as yet the 
 independence of judgment that later forced him out 
 of ruts worn by convention, and long afterward he 
 blamed himself for not introducing the young minds 
 with which he came into contact to contemplation 
 of the eternal laws that called to him through the 
 dull rattle of common occupations. In his room at 
 night he was writing down his thoughts on morals, 
 but he kept them safely out of the school-room and 
 shyly grappled there with the genii of languages, 
 geography, arithmetic, and chemistry, each wearing 
 for him a fearful mien. It would be sad indeed for 
 those fond of the pungent flavour of immaturity to 
 
preparation- 27 
 
 miss the picture he draws of himself, terrified and 
 embarrassed and stirred by youth's agitations among 
 the '' fair haired daughters " who tormented him. 
 
 Early in 1825 he gave over keeping school and 
 entered the Divinity School at Cambridge but left it 
 in a month's time in ill-health and with an affection 
 of the eyes that forbade his reading. He presently 
 resumed school-teaching for another year. He at- 
 tended the lectures of the class he had expected to 
 join in the Divinity School, however, and, with surely 
 as little technical preparation as the most liberal 
 Christian could wish, he was ''approbated to preach " 
 by the Middlesex Association of Ministers, October 
 10, 1826. 
 
 Even yet his brief occupation of the pulpit was 
 at some distance away. His first public sermon was 
 delivered on the Sunday following his approbation, 
 but his health immediately demanded close attention, 
 and before the end of the year the weakness of his 
 lungs drove him to a softer climate than that of New 
 England. He spent the winter at St. Augustine, 
 Florida, and systematically refrained from any exer- 
 tion that could diminish his chance of recovery. 
 
 In April he recorded that he had not written a 
 sermon since leaving home, and the following winter, 
 still far from sound, he wrote to his brother William 
 that he was "living cautiously, yea, treading on 
 eggs," to strengthen his constitution. He never 
 wrote when he could walk, nor when he could laugh, 
 he said, but made it his business to build up a fair 
 
28 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 
 
 structure of physical strength and efficiency for his 
 healthy mind to work within. It is interesting to 
 contrast his temper in this regard with that of the 
 youthful Channing, whose rule of life during his sea- 
 son of boyish extravagance compelled him to sleep 
 on the bare floor, endure cold, eat what he disliked, 
 and sit at his books until the daylight broke upon his 
 studies. By these means he thought to curb the 
 flesh, and succeeded in almost ridding himself of its 
 burden. 
 
 Emerson's temperament in contrast to Channing's 
 was lacking in nervous energy, and doubtless it 
 would have required a stronger exertion of will to 
 overcome the languor of invalidism, had he thought 
 that the way of wisdom, than to yield to its benefi- 
 cent influences. Nevertheless, if duty had whis- 
 pered the message of activity his reply would have 
 been that of the youth in his well-known quatrain, 
 and nothing is more characteristic of his entire sanity 
 than his attitude toward ill-health. Whatever his 
 physical condition his reason was uniformly robust, 
 and the philosophy he evolved from the experiences 
 of illness is marked by the balance and sobriety of 
 his natural judgment. 
 
 Health, as the basis of excellence and beauty of 
 appearance and performance, finds frequent mention 
 in his works : ''The first wealth is health," he urges 
 in his essay on Power, '* Sickness is poor-spirited, and 
 cannot serve anyone : it must husband its resources 
 to live. But health or fulness answers its own ends 
 
preparation. 29 
 
 and has to spare ; runs over and inundates the 
 neighbourhoods and creeks of other men's necessi- 
 ties." He speaks with approbation of the Greek de- 
 light in the perfection of the body, declares that all 
 healthy things are sweet-tempered, that extraordi- 
 nary health is needed for performance of great mark, 
 and that '' no labour, pains, temperance, poverty, nor 
 exercise that can gain it must be grudged." And 
 against the whimpering habit of invalidism, possibly 
 more popular fifty years ago than now, he raises his 
 voice in lusty expostulation : 
 
 ''There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to 
 all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their 
 distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have 
 slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, 
 or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to 
 hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to 
 which all housemates bring serene and pleasant 
 thoughts, by corruption and groans." 
 
 These were precepts that had their origin in 
 his struggle with a constitutional delicacy, ominous 
 enough in one of his family. His younger brother Ed- 
 ward with a similar tendency to disease, worked him- 
 self into an early grave ; and his brother Charles died 
 at twenty-seven. Before Edward died his mind gave 
 way, and Emerson curiously expressed his belief that 
 no such evil was in store for him, declaring that he 
 had so much mixture of silliness in his intellectual 
 frame as to temper him against it. Whether its name 
 was silliness or sense, there certainly was mingled 
 
30 1?alpb Mal5o lEmereon* 
 
 with his other mental qualities a saving element that 
 kept him free from extravagance and irregularity, 
 and, prompted by this, he won back his health by 
 slow degrees, grudging the idle hours and gaining 
 little pleasure from the sight of strange places, loving 
 not ''the look of foreign men," but patiently abiding 
 the time for action, and losing nothing we may well 
 assume for the gradual ripening of his thoughts before 
 he committed them to publicity. 
 
 He had the faculty of detaching himself from his 
 life, from his mirth and from his melancholy — at this 
 time the two were mingled in his temperament — 
 from his suffering, his disappointments, and even 
 from his convictions. He held them away from him 
 and pondered them, with the result of finally offering 
 them in a generalised form wonderfully adapted to 
 the needs of individualities with which his own had 
 little in common ; with the result, too, of losing the 
 sharp tang of reality associated with personal exper- 
 ience. Indomitably as he clung to facts and to the 
 symbols of common life, he could not make them 
 savour of their mother earth after he had appropriated 
 them. The very incidents of the dooryard and the 
 threshold became remote under his spiritualising 
 touch. '' Thought makes everything fit for use," he 
 says in his lecture on the poet. '\ . . Small and 
 mean things serve as well as great symbols. . . . 
 The poorest experience is rich enough for all the 
 purposes of expressing thought." And thus it was 
 with him. He scorned nothing because of its home- 
 
Ipreparatlon. 31 
 
 liness, but the homeliest word in the language lost 
 its power to stir the pulse with its reality when it 
 became the vehicle of his disinterested thought. 
 ''Let us treat the men and women well, treat them 
 as if they were real," he says ; '' perhaps they are." 
 And stoutly as we may believe that they are, he 
 draws us within the circle of his doubt. 
 
 He early experienced and seems never to have 
 lost the feeling that comes perhaps to all persons 
 once, — the feeling that we are merely dissolving 
 types of universal life, and can call nothing our own. 
 Intimately as he searched himself and probed his 
 personal experience, it was invariably desire for 
 knowledge of the type, never the egoism of the 
 individual, that impelled him. No petty self-concern 
 compromised his consecration to universal interests. 
 It is a curious paradox that he alienates himself from 
 us in his very refusal to conceive himself as separate 
 from us. Seeking our features in his soul and reveal- 
 ing himself as the likeness of the human world, he 
 yet fails to come very close to us, because he ignores 
 in us the qualities not also present in his own nature, 
 and in himself he ignores whatever he cannot mould 
 to a universal application. Readers impressed by 
 his emphasis upon habits of self-reliance, indepen- 
 dence, the protection of the individuality by solitude, 
 the impossibility of adequate communication between 
 any two human minds, the divine right of self-de- 
 velopment, find puzzling his freedom from peculiarity, 
 his wide and general use of the essential spiritual 
 
32 IRalpb IKHal&o Emcreom 
 
 truth of humanity ; but the two apparently opposed 
 attitudes toward life are not difficult to harmonise in 
 a thinker so rich in moral imagination. He has many 
 times made perfectly clear the steps toward harmony, 
 from the differentiated souls of man to the envelop- 
 ing soul to which he seldom gives the name of God. 
 The realm of which he writes in The Dcemonic and 
 the Celestial Love is the one to which he constantly 
 directs his thought : 
 
 Thou must mount for love 
 Into vision where all form 
 In one only form dissolves ; 
 
 Where unlike things are like ; 
 
 Where good and ill, 
 
 And joy and moan, 
 
 Melt into one. 
 
 There Past, Present, Future, shoot 
 
 Triple blossoms from one root ; 
 
 Substances at base divided 
 
 In their summits are united ; 
 
 There the holy essence rolls, 
 
 One through separated souls. 
 
 He stood, composed and ready, at the outset of 
 his long career, the same in all essential regards as at 
 the end. The antithesis of the mythical Undine, he 
 seemed a spirit continually seeking a material envel- 
 ope of human associations to make visible his con- 
 nection with his fellow beings. That its form should 
 be beautiful he insisted as an artist ; that it should 
 
preparation* 
 
 33 
 
 illustrate truth was indispensable to him as both 
 artist and moralist; that it should wear to us the 
 familiar face of life, as our kindly neighbour he in- 
 tended ; but what he showed us was instead the in- 
 scrutible countenance of that inner life of which we 
 stand somewhat in awe at our bravest ; to which, 
 despite its identity with ourselves, we bear almost 
 the relation of strangers. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 RELIGION. 
 
 ON the eleventh of March, 1829, Emerson, 
 then in his twenty-sixth year, was or- 
 dained as the colleague of the Reverend 
 Henry Ware of the Second Church of Boston. He 
 had already substituted for Mr. Ware during the 
 illness of the latter, and a parish familiar with his 
 preaching accorded him seventy-four out of seventy- 
 nine votes. A few weeks later he became the sole 
 incumbent, and in September he was married to 
 Ellen Tucker, a charming frail New England girl to 
 whom for nine months he had been engaged. 
 
 Thus he was launched upon his profession under 
 the most smiling auspices, and with the promise of a 
 brilliant future. For three years he preached in the 
 ''venerable house " his fathers "built to God," and 
 apparently without arousing any doubt of his con- 
 formity with the Unitarian thought of his congrega- 
 tion, although orthodox minds were shocked by his 
 ''untheological style." Mr. Cabot, having read the 
 
 one hundred and seventy-one sermons still lying by 
 
 34 
 
IReligiom 35 
 
 Emerson's request in manuscript, can report nothing 
 unconventional or revolutionary to be found upon 
 their now ancient pages, but he reminds us that we 
 have travelled far on the liberal road since the time of 
 their writing, and are not perhaps so keen as Emer- 
 son's contemporaries to catch the note of change. 
 
 It may be significant that from the few who have 
 set down their impressions of the young preacher 
 during these first years, we learn more of his gra- 
 ciousness of presence, his benignity of countenance, 
 the sweetness of his voice and the beauty of his 
 elocution, than of his special teachings. No doubt 
 what Lowell said much later was then as true ; that 
 many went not so much to hear what Emerson said 
 as to hear Emerson. One of his hearers has re- 
 corded, however, ''an infinite charm of simplicity 
 and wisdom " in an early sermon, ''with occasional 
 illustrations from nature." "These," he adds "were 
 about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind 
 which I had ever heard ; 1 could understand them, if 
 not the fresh philosophical novelties of the dis- 
 course. Another describes him as coming to the 
 pulpit of a church with whose minister he was ex- 
 changing and preaching a sermon "with his chin in 
 the air in scorn of the whole human race." It is 
 difficult now to find in any of his writings scorn of 
 humanity, but to an unsympathetic mind his stout 
 ethical independence of low or utilitarian ends may 
 easily have worn this face. Unconsciously to him- 
 self he was nearing the breaking of his bonds to the 
 
36 IRalpb Malbo jBrncraon* 
 
 ministry, an act that, when at last he came to it, 
 was performed with such grace and kindness as to 
 seem more like benediction than defiance. 
 
 The religious life of New England for many years 
 had been flowing from old forms into new ones, and 
 was now curiously mingling the rigid traditions of 
 Calvinism with the influences of German and classic 
 philosophy and scientific investigation. Gradually 
 the pale keen Puritan atmosphere of the New Eng- 
 land Church had softened to a type of Congrega- 
 tionalism in which the mind could expand toward 
 individual inquiry, and during the first quarter of 
 the Nineteenth Century the Unitarians carried still 
 farther the personal testing of religious belief. 
 
 In 1830, the year after Emerson's ordination, the 
 separation of the Unitarian from the Calvinistic 
 churches was practically complete, and Dr. Chan- 
 ning, representing the more spiritual side of the sect, 
 dwelt fervently upon the right of the rational nature 
 to guide belief, but found no difficulty in accepting, 
 under the guidance of his reason, the supernatural 
 character of Christ and the Bible. This, essentially, 
 was the Unitarianism under the shelter of which 
 Emerson stood, and was wholly different from 
 the ''Sensational" philosophy, as it was called, 
 of the more materialistic thinkers who followed 
 Locke and Bentham, denied the existence of innate 
 ideas, based morality upon utility, and recognised 
 ''nothing in the intellect that was not first in the 
 senses." Pure idealism (later to be called Transcend- 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 
 After an engraving hy Schoff of the original draining hj' 
 S. W. Rowse, in the possession of C. E. "Norton, Esq. 
 By permission of Houghton, Mifflin, &■ Co. 
 
IReligiom 37 
 
 entalism from Kant's use of the term '* transcendental" 
 to denominate intuitive ideas transcending experi- 
 ence), had not yet gained the doctrinal solidity and 
 formality of a school, but was diffused through the 
 higher regions of New England thought. 
 
 Intimations of Transcendental philosophies had 
 reached Emerson from various European sources, 
 and in 1827 Carlyle's articles upon German literature 
 had appeared in the Edinburgh Review, written at the 
 glowing period of their author's life when he could 
 speak hopefully of an era of ''new Spirituality and 
 Belief; in the midst of old Doubt and Denial, as it 
 were, a new revelation of Nature, and the Freedom 
 and Infinitude of Man, wherein Reverence is again 
 rendered compatible with Knowledge, and Art and 
 Religion are one." Coleridge also brought his 
 readers on both sides of the Atlantic in contact with 
 German thought, and people interested in the things 
 of the mind were generally astir with the quickening 
 of ideas that were certainly not new but that were 
 then unfamiliar. How far Emerson was influenced 
 by these teachings can hardly be estimated ; not 
 more, perhaps, than by the Greek writers with 
 whom he had become acquainted in college ; but 
 he read them all according to his custom, for the 
 ''tustres," and let the suggestions that came from 
 them melt gently into the simple belief which he 
 finally succeeded in detaching from the abstruse 
 speculation and argument so repugnant to his direct 
 mental vision. As "an eternal man," to use one of 
 
38 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 
 
 his own vivid characterisations, he could not any- 
 where find a philosophy flexible enough to fit with- 
 out constraint his intuitive wisdom. It accorded 
 completely with his temperament to accept the 
 conception of a Universal Mind or Soul of which all 
 nature is the expression, and of a faculty by which 
 divinity may be recognised and known. Such an 
 interpretation of Nature and God had an indescrib- 
 able fascination for a mind constantly craving beauty 
 of thought as an element of spiritual life, and 
 he passionately made his own this doctrine of the 
 ages by consistently disconnecting it from all fixed 
 symbols and from narrow or limiting systems and 
 dogmas. So far he was independent of local influ- 
 ences and after what he characterises as ''the war 
 between institutions and nature " had begun in the 
 society surrounding him he stood among the contend- 
 ing forces, seeking a leader. ''I need instructors," 
 he exclaimed, with a certain pathos in the innocent 
 humility of the cry, '' God's greatest gift is a teacher; 
 and when will He send me one full of truth and of 
 boundless benevolence and heroic sentiments ? " He 
 was suffering the singularity of all who in aim and 
 insight are raised above their companions. His 
 destiny as a master precluded for him the comfort of 
 adherence to any school or teacher. 
 
 No teaching of the ancients received more 
 promptly his joyous approval than the doctrine of 
 the Flowing. "Here is the difference," he said, 
 ''betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails 
 
IRcligion. 39 
 
 a symbol to one sense which was a true sense for a 
 moment, but soon becomes old and false." In his 
 position as a Christian minister he could not lay 
 aside his poetic character, and by the latter he was 
 led to question the benefit gained from traditional 
 forms of worship. 
 
 In 1832 he astonished the members of his con- 
 gregation by proposing to them the discontinuance 
 of an institution so closely interwoven with their 
 reverent devotion as to seem inseparable from it; the 
 rite of the Lord's Supper which he found himself 
 unable to regard as a suitable commemoration of the 
 spirit of Christ. He proposed that the use of the 
 bread and wine be dispensed with, and the service 
 made one of the spirit only, informal and voluntary. 
 His hold upon his people was so strong that the 
 suggestion was debated though not accepted, and he 
 went up into the White Hills where he argued with 
 his own soul concerning the course he should pursue. 
 That he approached the subject in a mood far re- 
 moved from critical superiority is obvious not merely 
 from our knowledge of his temper, but from the 
 tone of his journal during the interval of uncertainty 
 while church and priest were pondering their respec- 
 tive attitudes. '' it seems not worth while for 
 them who charge others with exalting forms above 
 the moon to fear forms themselves with extravagant 
 dislike," he admitted, but the conclusion was fore- 
 gone, and he returned to resign his office. 
 
 In the sermon announcing his resignation he 
 
40 *RaIpb Malbo lemereon^ 
 
 deals cogently and winningly with the cause of his 
 separation from the church, and in a manner that 
 frequently recalls his own counsel to those engaged 
 in religious argument, not to '' put yourself in a false 
 position with your contemporaries by indulging a 
 vein of hostility and bitterness," but ''though your 
 views are in straight antagonism to theirs " to as- 
 sume ''that you are saying precisely that which all 
 think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your 
 paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of 
 a doubt." 
 
 For the one supreme occasion he carefully sup- 
 ports his instinctive conviction with arguments less 
 vital and important to him than to his hearers. He 
 examines the authority on which the ordinance of 
 the Communion rests, showing himself capable of 
 orderly dialectics with full attention to subordinate 
 and specific illustrations of his central idea. But the 
 central idea finally is emphasised in a passage of ex- 
 traordinary sincerity which even in this day of liberal 
 interpretations, rings in the mind as one of the 
 clearest and most courageous appeals to inherent 
 morality possible to be made from any pulpit. 
 
 " If 1 understand the distinction of Christianity," 
 he says, " the reason why it is to be preferred over 
 all other systems and is divine is this, that it is a 
 moral system; that it presents men with truths 
 which are their own reason, and enjoins practices 
 that are their own justification; that if miracles may 
 be said to have been its evidence to the first Chris- 
 
IReligion* 41 
 
 tians, they are not its evidence to us, but the doc- 
 trines themselves; that every practice is Christian 
 which praises itself, and every practice unchristian 
 which condems itself. 1 am not engaged to Christi- 
 anity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is 
 not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that 
 binds me to it, — let these be the sandy foundations 
 of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its 
 reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the 
 rest it gives to mind, the echo it returns to my 
 thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason 
 through all its representation of God and His Provi- 
 dence; and the persuasion and courage that come 
 out thence to lead me upward and onward. Free- 
 dom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object 
 simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions 
 then should be as flexible as the wants of men. 
 That form out of which the life and suitableness 
 have departed, should be as worthless in its eyes as 
 the dead leaves that are falling around us. 
 
 ''And therefore, although for the satisfaction of 
 others I have labored to show by the history that this 
 rite was not intended to be perpetual; although I 
 have gone back to weigh the expressions of Paul, I 
 feel that here is the true point of view. In the midst 
 of considerations as to what Paul thought, and why 
 he so thought, I cannot help feeling that it is time 
 misspent to argue to or from his convictions, or 
 those of Luke and John, respecting any form. I 
 seem to lose the substance in seeking the shadow. 
 
42 IRalpb Mal^o lEmereon. 
 
 *' That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; 
 that for which Jesus gave Himself to be crucified; 
 the end that animated the thousand martyrs and 
 heroes who have followed His steps, was to redeem 
 us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our 
 well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole 
 world was full of idols and ordinances. 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 re- 
 ligious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice 
 was smoke, and forms were shadows. This man 
 lived and died true to this purpose; and now, 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 agreeable to their under- 
 standings or not! Is not this to make vain the gift 
 of God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the 
 dial? Is not this to make men — to make ourselves, — 
 forget that not forms, but duties; not names, but 
 righteousness and love are enjoined; and that in the 
 eye of God there is no other measure of the value of 
 any one form than the measure of its use? " 
 
 This limpid statement, suffused with feeling, but 
 without heat or bitterness or superfluity of expres- 
 sion, indicates a plane of discussion below which 
 Emerson never sank, although he was many times 
 to rise above it. It is related of him that on the 
 
IReligiom 43 
 
 evening when his church was considering his propo- 
 sition, he sat talking with undisturbed serenity with 
 a fellow-clergyman on literature and other topics 
 alien to his personal concern, until, as he rose to 
 leave, he said gently: "This is probably the last 
 time we shall meet as brethren in the same calling." 
 It was characteristic of him to let nothing so indi- 
 vidual and fragmentary as his private loss or gain 
 interrupt the harmony of his mind; and though he 
 may have been saddened by his inability to carry 
 his congregation with him to the spiritual altitude 
 where he was most at home, there is no one in his- 
 tory of whom it is more possible to believe that his 
 sorrow under such circumstances was altruistic and 
 devoid of self-pity or wounded pride. 
 
 Although his farewell sermon illustrates both his 
 candour and his kindness, it suggests in its careful 
 phrasing the place in which he stood. He was later 
 to warn young preachers: ''When there is any dif- 
 ference felt between the foot-board of the pulpit and 
 the floor of the parlor, you have not yet said that 
 which you should say." The foot-board of the pul- 
 pit gave in this instance a slight rigidity to the form 
 in which the sapient thought found its expression, 
 and the effect is not without its value. In his en- 
 deavour to make very plain to a deeply interested 
 public the beliefs that were to separate his path from 
 theirs, he abstained from the strongly individual idiom 
 by which his later utterances are marked and some- 
 times marred. In his famous Divinity School Address, 
 
44 IRalpb Malbo jEmereon^ 
 
 delivered six years later before the senior class in 
 Divinity College, Cambridge, the style has notably 
 changed. It is more richly coloured and various, 
 and the ideas are clothed in words of memorable 
 beauty. There is even a touch of rhetorical fluency 
 in such passages as this in which the religious senti- 
 ment is exalted: 
 
 ''Wonderful is its power to charm and to com- 
 mand. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of 
 the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and 
 rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, 
 and the silent song of the stars is it." The occa- 
 sional perversity of metaphor in the effort toward 
 poignant statement of feeling gave to the mocking 
 youth of the period its opportunity. The first bio- 
 grapher of Theodore Parker describes the promis- 
 ing young graduates as repairing in numbers to 
 the apothecary shops to discover what else beside 
 *' myrrh and rosemary" Religion was, and adverse 
 critics were used to toss and trample these phrases 
 with zeal, ''thinking they had the man in them and 
 were punishing him well." The deep poetry of the 
 author's mind could not be obscured, however, by 
 the straggling clouds of fantasy now and then trail- 
 ing across the utterance of his inspiration. The 
 opening sentences are addressed to the aesthetic 
 mood, and present an exquisite picture of lovely 
 nature charged with the joy of the unwearied and 
 unsophisticated beholder: 
 
 " In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury 
 
IReliQion* 45 
 
 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 spir- 
 itual 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. The mystery of nature 
 was never displayed more happily. The corn and 
 the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and 
 the never-broken silence with which the old bounty 
 goes forward has not yielded yet one word of ex- 
 planation." From this richly sensuous strain he 
 passes to the felicitous expression of the beauty of 
 holiness, not for an instant forgetting the subjection 
 of the mind to the principles that rule alike in art 
 and morals, not for an instant magnifying the par- 
 ticular above the general. The sentiment of virtue, 
 he declares, is a reverence and delight in the pres- 
 ence of certain divine laws before which the great 
 world shrinks at once into a mere illustration and 
 fable of the mind. ''Thought may work cold and 
 intransitive in things and find no end or unity; but 
 the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart 
 gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign 
 over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eter- 
 nity, do seem to break out into joy." The first 
 
46 IRalpb TRUalbo lEmereon- 
 
 suggestion of positive departure from the doctrines of 
 the Christian Church came in a sentence so filled 
 with the magic of feeling that the delicate removal of 
 one of the pillars of orthodoxy could hardly be real- 
 ised. '' This sentiment (of virtue)," the serene voice 
 continued, '' is divine and deifying. It is the beati- 
 tude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it 
 the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital 
 mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by 
 following the great, and hopes to derive advantages 
 from another, by showing the fountain of all good to 
 be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, 
 is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says 
 ' I ought ' when love warms him; when he chooses, 
 warmed from on high, the good and great deed; 
 then, deep melodies wander through his soul from 
 Supreme Wisdom." 
 
 Teaching much more dynamic was to follow, and 
 was heard with dismay by many who had gathered 
 to attend the address. Emerson cut clearly through 
 the fogs of semi-Liberalism with a crystalline elo- 
 quence. Of Christ he declared that He belonged to 
 the true race of prophets, that He saw the mystery 
 of the soul, and, ''drawn by its severe harmony, 
 ravished with its beauty. He lived in it, and had His 
 being there "; that '' alone in all history He estimated 
 the greatness of man," that He saw ''that God incar- 
 nates Himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew 
 to take possession of His World." But this was not 
 the Christ taught by the Church. "The idioms of 
 
IReUgion. 47 
 
 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." The first 
 defect of Christianity was pointed out to be its exag- 
 geration of the personal, the positive, and the ritual, 
 its dwelling ''with noxious exaggeration about the 
 person of Jesus." ''The soul knows no persons," 
 was the oracular sentence which has formed the text 
 for so many a Liberal sermon since that fiery July 
 day. Nor did the doctrine of miracles performed by 
 Christ escape the shining blade of this independent 
 mind. Christ spoke of miracles, "for He felt that 
 man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth ; and 
 He knew that this daily miracle shines as the charac- 
 ter 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." 
 
 With a desire, not now misunderstood by the truly 
 religious thinker, to identify the Holy Spirit in man 
 with the spirit of Christ and with the immanent 
 mind of God, Emerson prayed the young students 
 of Divinity not to degrade the life and dialogues of 
 Christ by insulating them and making them peculiar, 
 but instead to let them "lie as they befel, alive and 
 warm, part of human life and of the landscape and 
 of the cheerful day." He besought his hearers to 
 search the living revelation of God in the Moral 
 Nature, and to look within themselves for intuitive 
 knowledge of the divine laws, to "go alone; to 
 
48 1?alpb lKIlal^o lemereon* 
 
 refuse the good models, even those which are sacred 
 in the imagination of men, and dare to love God 
 w^ithout mediator or veil." 
 
 In this address practically all that was essential in 
 Emerson's belief was stated without explanation and 
 without arrogance but with a perfectly definite moral 
 purpose. Whatever he preached thereafter in the 
 domain of ethics was merely a different expression of 
 the convictions embodied with more than his usual 
 care for obvious construction and composition in his 
 appeal to the young men who were about to teach 
 in the name of religion. A few were stirred by the 
 imaginative verity of his outlook and by the poetry 
 of his message. Theodore Parker, for one, went 
 home and recorded in hisjournal : ''My soul is roused 
 and this week I shall write the long-meditated ser- 
 mons on the state of the Church and the duties of 
 these times. " This fairly represents the nature of En\- 
 erson's influence even to this day. As he would 
 have wished, his mission has been to rouse the souls 
 of others to the expression of their own thoughts. 
 The fact that he did not often pin himself to anything 
 like a doctrinal declaration, that he never failed to 
 leave in his work an avenue of escape for the imagina- 
 tion into the region of eternal mystery, has given 
 him his peculiar hold upon spiritual minds of all 
 classes of belief. The difference between him and 
 the other '' mystics" and reformers of his time might 
 fairly be compared to the difference between any 
 great painter and the Preraphaelites. The latter rep- 
 
IReligion* 49 
 
 resented fragments of truth as if they comprised the 
 whole ; the master, on the contrary, continually sug- 
 gests the curving of the spheral universe and the 
 presence of hidden corollaries and even antipodal 
 truths harmonised in exquisite generalisation. Meta- 
 physicians and psychologists found Emerson an im- 
 possible man with whom to argue, since he calmly 
 stated that he could not possibly give one argument 
 on which any of his doctrines stood. ''1 do not 
 know what arguments mean in reference to any ex- 
 pression of a thought," he said, and it is conceivable 
 that his position of mediator between truth and man, 
 the position of Christ Himself to orthodox believers, 
 but tenable, according to Emerson's creed, by any 
 listener at the gates of conscience, seemed to many 
 reverent souls presumption. It gave him, however, 
 that access to the simple mind by which moral lead- 
 ers are distinguished from theologians. One of his 
 congregation said with sincerity: ''We are very 
 simple people ; we cannot understand anyone but 
 Mr. Emerson," and despite his occasional lapses into 
 a vaguely metaphysical dialect disturbing to our real- 
 isation of his greatness, the larger part of his writing 
 on religion is limpid with pure conviction. He told his 
 hearers that if the moral sentiment is in the heart, 
 God is there ; that when the half gods of tradition 
 and rhetoric depart, the way is made clear for belief 
 in the one true and immanent Deity; that the laws of 
 God are the same wherever manifested in Nature or 
 in the human heart, that all the religions of the world 
 
50 IRalpb Mal&o j£mcvBon. 
 
 have their origin in one religious sentiment, and that 
 there is a force always at work to make the best bet- 
 ter and the worst good. He told them to learn to 
 walk alone with God and to receive from Him the 
 vital principle of rectitude ; to lay aside dogma and 
 liturgy as cumbersome garments hindering the free 
 movement of the spirit ; to be incurious of immor- 
 tality and to ask no questions of the Supreme Power, 
 to work with high aims and to love work, to fill 
 their hearts with kindness and throw themselves joy- 
 fully into the sublime order. The words oftenest upon 
 his lips were ''joy," ''beauty," "love." Matthew 
 Arnold found his temper of serene optimism the chief 
 element in his wisdom, and hardly to be overrated. 
 John Morley, on the other hand, is inclined to resent 
 somewhat the indifference with which he regarded 
 '*the world's bitter puzzles." His reluctance to 
 dwell upon Sin and Death seems to this sound critic 
 to indicate a certain wilfulness in his point of view. 
 " He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the 
 cruelty, the utter despicableness to which humanity 
 may be moulded. If he saw them at all, it was 
 through the softening and illusive medium of general- 
 ised phrases. Nor was he ever shocked and driven 
 into himself by ' the immoral thoughtlessness ' of men. 
 The courses of Nature, and the prodigious injustices 
 of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor 
 awe. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible Erinnys, 
 daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substi- 
 tutes a fair-weather abstraction named Compen- 
 
r 
 
hat 
 
 i'Ct- 
 
 :i to 
 
 the 
 
 and 
 
 ic free 
 
 r, 
 
 ove work, to fill 
 
 wtht esjoy- 
 
 .... The words oftenest upon 
 
 beauty," '^love." Matthew 
 
 „r . ,.^*v^\^r^ the chief 
 
 Ralph PValdo Emerson. -overrated. 
 
 From the portrait hy Scott. In Concord' Pt^h r. ^^ reSeill 
 
 whicii lit regarded 
 actance to 
 r^nd 5 seems to this sound critic 
 
 ;s in his point of view. 
 .. ., for the vileness, the 
 leness to which humanity 
 iw them at all, it was 
 ve medium of general- 
 r shocked and driven 
 ;htlessness ' of men. 
 and ' ^^us injustices 
 
 neither horror nor 
 terrible Erinnys, 
 ubsti- 
 .omoen- 
 
IReligiom 51 
 
 sation." Perhaps Arnold's attitude is the fairer of 
 the two. 
 
 Emerson's religion was constructive to the highest 
 degree, and those who judge it fragmentarily miss its 
 beneficent purpose. In his essay on the ''fair- 
 weather abstraction named Compensation " he does 
 not so much ignore evil as recognise in it the tragedy 
 of lost opportunity for good. " Under all this run- 
 ning sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and 
 flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss 
 of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or 
 a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, 
 excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up 
 all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature, 
 truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the 
 absence or departure of the same. Nothing, False- 
 hood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade 
 on which as a background the living universe paints 
 itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it ; it cannot 
 work, for it is not. It cannot work any good ; it can- 
 not work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is 
 worse not to be than to be." This is not very 
 different from the Biblical teaching that whoso 
 findeth Christ findeth life and that he who sinneth 
 against Christ wrongeth his own soul, that all 
 who hate Christ love death. 
 
 The virtue of Emerson's "gospel " as it is called by 
 those who decline to call it philosophy, lies in its ex- 
 traordinary breadth. '' He had not a broad intel- 
 lect," said Carlyle, ''but it was clear and sometimes 
 
52 IRalpb Mal&o j£mcveon. 
 
 even profound." Yet breadth is certainly the dis- 
 tinction of a religious belief with which neither 
 science nor art can quarrel, to which the religions of 
 the past have contributed and which has combined 
 so fruitfully with the religion of the later day. 
 Much has been claimed for Emerson's teaching that 
 is not found in it by the candid inquirer, but the 
 strongest element of its ethical influence has not been 
 too widely dwelt upon. It consists in his recognition 
 of ethical law as related to or identical with the fun- 
 damental law in all other departments of human ac- 
 tivity. The '' unity of nature " has been a phrase of 
 vague suggestion with many writers and a theme of 
 irresistible fascination with a few, but no one has 
 more persistently elucidated its interior meaning 
 than Emerson ; none has traced its illustrations 
 through more varied fields of thought ; and none has 
 spent upon it more passionate faith. It was this ap- 
 prehension of underlying law that made him an evo- 
 lutionist before Darwin and Spencer and caused him 
 to accept without hesitation or delay their discoveries 
 in scientific truth as they reached him. 
 
 He considered that all nature is moral, but it is 
 even more significant that he saw all morality as law, 
 not less purely the outcome of system and order in the 
 universe than is the geological structure of the eternal 
 hills. The '* new teacher " described in the Divinity 
 School address is one who '* shall see the identity of 
 the law of gravitation with purity of heart." Such a 
 teacher would necessarily perceive that ''the history 
 
IRelifiion. 53 
 
 of Nature, from first to last, is incessant advance 
 from less to more, from rude to finer organisation, the 
 globe of matter thus conspiring with the principle of 
 undying hope in man/' Such a teacher would inev- 
 itably insist upon the postponement of private ends 
 to public good and would find in all high types of 
 civilisation the natural evolution of the individual 
 morality. And such a teacher would see also that 
 the severity of law is the secret of beauty in form, 
 and would rejoice with the joy of the artist in obedi- 
 ence to its commands. No, it was not Emerson 
 whose intellect was narrow. Beholding his exultant 
 journey through the various regions dominated by 
 man's imagination, in his hand the wand of recon- 
 cilement we can think only of the concluding stanzas 
 in his poem The Sphinx : 
 
 Up rose the merry Sphinx, 
 
 And crouched no more in stone; 
 She melted into purple cloud, 
 
 She silvered in the moon; 
 She spired into a yellow flame; 
 
 She flowered in blossoms red; 
 She flowed into a foaming wave; 
 
 She stood Monadnoc's head. 
 
 Thorough a thousand voices 
 
 Spoke the universal dame: 
 Who telleth one of my meanings, 
 
 Is master of all I am. 
 
 Critics of Emerson from within the pale of organ- 
 ised Christianity have found him unappreciative of the 
 significance of the Christian message ; inconsistent ' 
 
54 IRalpb Malbo Cmereon^ 
 
 in his estimates of Christ ; and limited in his 
 religious influence by the " vagueness" of his doc- 
 trines. None of these charges is thoroughly well- 
 founded. His appreciation of Christianity is positive 
 though not exclusive. As a very young man he 
 wrote to his aunt 'Mt is certain that the moral world, 
 as it exists to the man within the breast, is illus- 
 trated, interpreted, defined by the positive institutions 
 that exist in the world ; that in the aspect disclosed 
 to a mind in this hour opening in these parts of the 
 earth, Christianity appears the priest, the expounder 
 of God's moral law. It is plainly a fit representative 
 of the Law-giver." 
 
 In a sermon delivered from the pulpit he had 
 renounced as a permanent abiding place, he said : 
 ''The perspective of time, as it sets everything in the 
 right view, does the same by Christianity. We learn 
 to look at it now as a part of the history of the world ; 
 to see how it rests on the broad basis of man's moral 
 nature, but is not itself that basis. . . . Christ- 
 ianity is the most emphatic affirmation of spiritual 
 nature. But it is not the only nor the last affirma- 
 tion. There shall be a thousand more. Very incon- 
 sistent would it be with a soul so possessed with the 
 love of the real and the unseen as Christ's to set 
 bounds to that illimitable ocean. He never said : 
 ' All truth have I revealed.' He plainly affirms the 
 direct contrary : ' I will send you another Teacher, 
 another Comforter, even the Spirit of truth ; he will 
 guide you into all truth.' " 
 
IReligiom 55 
 
 It seems a late day at which to point out that Em- 
 erson's extraordinary perception of the value in re- 
 ligions that have influenced innumerable believers 
 toward excellence of life, does not diminish the im- 
 portance of the tribute he pays to Christianity and 
 Christ. It is almost superfluous to add that his repe- 
 titions of the truths of Christianity in his own care- 
 fully chosen language do not indicate indifference to 
 their source so much as appreciation of their unlim- 
 ited application. The defence of his opinions and 
 mental attitude toward religion has indeed the colour 
 of impertinence in a generation which gratefully has 
 accepted his contribution to spiritual happiness, and 
 none of his doctrines, vague or definite as they may 
 appear to individual critics, more deeply touches the 
 heart of the present age than his determined consider- 
 ation of happiness raised to its highest power as the 
 final good of the soul. He early declared himself like 
 Milton ''enamoured of moral perfection" and pas- 
 sionately affirmed that it had separated him from 
 men, had watered his pillow and driven sleep from 
 his bed, had tortured him for his guilt and had in- 
 spired him with hope. To show that its reward lay 
 in the exquisite delight of the soul was the work of his 
 life. What has crudely been called his '' shallow " or 
 his ''ineffectual" optimism is widely removed from 
 blind cheerfulness. It is the joy of the spiritual artist 
 who perceives the harmonies of the universe behind 
 its accidental traits, and he has done more than any 
 of his contemporaries to elevate the minds of his 
 
56 
 
 IRalpb Malbo lemereon. 
 
 followers to a plane from which they can perceive large 
 moral forces working toward great ends. Of his re- 
 ligious influence, using the words in the sense most 
 appropriate to his breadth of view, nothing more de- 
 scriptive can be said than is embodied in the Seventh 
 Grace of the ideal Buddhist Recluse : *' He exhales 
 the most excellent and unequalled sweet savour of 
 righteousness of life." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 NATURE. 
 
 EARLY in 183 1 Emerson's young wife had died, 
 and immediately after the severing of his 
 bonds with the church his heaUh so much 
 declined as to necessitate a European trip for its bet- 
 terment. He went in the winter season, in a little 
 trading brig, and met the various life of the ancient 
 towns to which his rough boat brought him with 
 sad indifference. The cathedrals only seem to have 
 stirred his love of beauty and they prompted him 
 to record his hope that the end of the century would 
 find in New England carving and colour and inscrip- 
 tion on the walls of the great churches that surely 
 must arise there. 
 
 He went first to Sicily,thence to Naples and Rome, 
 Florence and Venice, and later to London by way of 
 Paris, to Edinburgh and the home of Carlyle. He 
 was not sure that he grew '' much wiser or any bet- 
 ter " for his travels, but he returned with health re- 
 stored, and began at once to plan and work upon his 
 
 slow-growing book Nature. |The title he chose with 
 
 57 
 
58 IRalpb Malbo lemerson. 
 
 reference to its most comprehensive meaning, and the 
 text contains chiefly reflection upon Nature as sym- 
 bolic of spirit. It was thus, certainly, that he most 
 often thought of it in his constant interrogation of the 
 visible world for suggestions of the unseen. \ His 
 aunt had long before directed him to the woods and 
 to the mountains as the sacred places in which God 
 most freely spoke to man ; but not until he had 
 reached his full maturity did he turn spontaneously 
 to country solitudes for his inspiration. Then, at last, 
 the gracious beauty of hill and sky and sweet wild 
 growth took possession of his consciousness, and 
 held for him poetic interest. His relations to Nature 
 became intimate, not as Thoreau's were, through ex- 
 amination of minute appearances, but in perhaps a 
 deeper sense through the kinship he felt with forms 
 of creation governed by the same laws that ruled his 
 own activities. 
 
 It was supremely characteristic that among the 
 opulent impressions provided by the fervent summers 
 and heroic winters of New England none was more 
 constant or compelling than that made by the stars 
 in their courses. In the mysterious and visionary 
 heavens these shining bodies, aloof and splendid, 
 stood to him for revelation of the eternal light by 
 which he guided his footsteps. His book of Nature 
 opens with an eloquent apostrophe to them. 
 
 'Mf a man would be alone let him look at the 
 stars. The rays that come from those heavenly 
 worlds will separate between him and what he 
 
IRature- 59 
 
 touches. One might think the atmosphere was 
 made transparent with this design, to give man, in 
 the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the 
 sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great 
 they are ! If the stars should appear one night in a 
 thousand years, how would men believe and adore ; 
 and preserve for many generations the remembrance 
 of the city of God which had been shown ! But 
 every night come out these envoys of beauty and 
 light the Universe with their admonishing smile." 
 Through his later writings also the wide sky and the 
 clear radiance of the planets lend their singular exal- 
 tation to his expression of himself. To *' Intel- 
 lect " he says : 
 
 Go, speed the stars of Thought 
 On to their shining goals. 
 
 The man of character he sees beneath the open 
 heaven — 
 
 Stars rose; his faith was earlier up: 
 Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
 Deeper and older seemed his eye. 
 
 In the Adirondack wilderness he finds a '' melan- 
 choly better than all mirth " watching the changing 
 skies. 
 
 And that no day of life may lack romance, 
 The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down 
 A private beam into each several heart. 
 
 Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
 Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home. 
 
6o IRalpb IKHalbo lEmereon. 
 
 When Monadnoc speaks it lifts the mind toward 
 the celestial roof above its towering head, and thus 
 determines the accomplishment of the coming pil- 
 grim : 
 
 I will give my son to eat 
 
 Best of Pan's immortal meat, 
 
 Bread to eat, and juice to drain ; 
 
 So the coinage of his brain 
 
 Shall not be forms of stars, but stars. 
 
 Not pictures pale, but Jove and Mars. 
 
 In looking upon any landscape far or near, the 
 *' point of astonishment " seems to him the meeting of 
 the sky and earth '* which may be seen from the 
 first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghan- 
 ies." Why, indeed, should man travel when '*the 
 stars at night stoop down over the brownest, home- 
 liest common, with all the spiritual magnificence 
 which they shed on the Campagna or on the marble 
 deserts of Egypt " ? 
 
 Mourning for his son, he cries in extreme misery; 
 
 For this losing is true dying ; 
 This is lordly man's down-lying, 
 This his slow but sure reclining, 
 Star by star his world resigning, 
 
 and later rebukes his individual longing with the 
 austere question. 
 
 Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, 
 Whose streams through Nature circling go? 
 Nail the wild star to its track 
 On the half-climbed Zodiac ? 
 
IRature* 6i 
 
 And in the wild exultant poem which he calls 
 The Dcemonic Love there is the most impressive pic- 
 ture of any, strangely revealing the effect on the 
 mind of wonder flowing from the mysteries of the 
 natural world : 
 
 Unknown, albeit lying near 
 
 To men, the path to the Daemon sphere; 
 
 And they that swiftly come and go 
 
 Leave no track on the heavenly snow. 
 
 Sometimes the airy synod bends, 
 
 And the mighty choir descends, 
 
 And the brains of men thenceforth, 
 
 In crowded and in still resorts, 
 
 Teem with unwonted thoughts: 
 
 As, when a shower of meteors 
 
 Cross the orbit of the earth. 
 
 And, lit by fringent air, 
 
 Blaze near and far, 
 
 Mortals deem the planets bright 
 
 Have slipped their sacred bars, 
 And the lone seaman all the night 
 
 Sails, astonished, amid stars. 
 
 For accidental Nature, picturesque nooks, local 
 scenes, momentary effects, Emerson had little care. 
 He looked upon the landscape as he looked upon 
 persons and characteristics with his mind fixed upon 
 the whole of which the particular object of his regard 
 formed a part. Here again he worked as an artist, 
 an artist who, had his medium been pigment, fre- 
 quently would have painted Nature in moods akin to 
 those of Corot and Daubigny, revealing her serene 
 and large significance, sensible of her charms, but 
 interpreting them with a certain severity, a climbing 
 
 x 
 
62 IRalpb Walbo iBmcvBon. 
 
 I, 
 
 aspiration toward the upper regions of truth. I In 
 many ways he suggests Corot, his native elegance 
 of style, the distinction of his images, his piercing 
 individuality united to his generalising vision, his 
 fusion of colour in a serene grey harmony from which 
 the sense of colour is never absent, his blithe exalta- 
 tion in the presence of natural objects, all these bring 
 to mind the pictures of the great humble master of 
 French landscape, seeking his foreground in a distance, 
 far enough removed to yield a true perspective. 
 
 Only an indifferent reader could assume, however, 
 that Emerson, because he saw broadly, was inaccur- 
 ate in his seeing. To read one of his more localised 
 descriptive poems is to live for an hour among the 
 sights and sounds of the country, precisely and ten- 
 derly realised.! The whole poem Musketaqtiid, for 
 example, is filled with such clear and delicate im- 
 agery as appears in the following lines : 
 
 For me in showers, in sweeping showers, the spring 
 
 Visits the valley; — break away the clouds, — 
 
 I bathe in the morn's soft and silvered air, 
 
 And loiter willing by yon loitering stream; 
 
 Sparrows far off, and nearer, April's bird, 
 
 Blue-coated — flying before from tree to tree, 
 
 Courageous sing a delicate overture 
 
 To lead the tardy concert of the year. 
 
 Onward and nearer rides the sun of May; 
 
 And wide around, the marriage of the plants 
 
 Is sweetly solemnised. Then flows amain 
 
 The surge of summer's beauty; dell and crag, 
 
 Hollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade, 
 
 Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliflF 
 
 Has thousand faces in a thousand hours. 
 
mature* 63 
 
 iNearly all the poems have touches of landscape, 
 bright and lovely or dusky and haunting, or some- 
 times buoyantly conceived in symbolic dress, and in- 
 formed with the genius of antiquity.! To this last 
 group belongs such a Botticelli drawing as this from 
 May-Day, 
 
 I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth, 
 
 Stepping daily onward north 
 
 To greet staid ancient cavaliers 
 
 Filing single in stately train. 
 
 And who and who are the travellers ? 
 
 They were Night and Day, and Day and Night, 
 
 Pilgrims wight with step forthright. 
 
 I saw the Days deformed and low, 
 
 Short and bent by cold and snow 
 
 The merry Spring threw wreaths on them. 
 
 Nothing could be less like the conventional figure 
 of spring in modern poetry. The youth of the sea- 
 son is there, but in the bright free dress of the an- 
 cient past ; such an image as that of Pallas taming 
 the Satyr, lusty-limbed and powerful beneath the 
 languid grace and frailty of line drooping about 
 her like a clinging garment. One could almost be- 
 lieve that in the poet's plain New England frame 
 abode the ghosts of the early Italians and earlier 
 Greeks who saw nature with such frank eyes and 
 subtle minds. These are the moments when Emer- 
 son yielding his spirit to intuitive pre-occupations is 
 most himself, most different from all who surrounded 
 him, taught him, or learned of him. Reading him in 
 his mood of unchastened splendour, when his power 
 
64 IRalpb TKIlalbo lemerson^ 
 
 to create forms of pure loveliness unites with his 
 ethical purpose, it is possible to believe him one of 
 the original few belonging to no time or place, but to 
 eternal history. His hand moulds what his mind 
 evokes with the spontaneous impulse of the maker. 
 But it is quite alone with Nature that he attains his 
 loftiest peak. How wearily he drops to earth in com- 
 pany is plainly written on the surface of the Adiron- 
 dack journal, a poetic record of a camping expedition 
 led by W. J. Stillman, with such inspiring associates 
 as Agassiz and Lowell and others of distinctive intel- 
 lectual quality. With them journeyed Emerson to 
 the wilderness which was not wilderness enow 
 to his exacting faculty. His commemorative poem 
 teems with the images made familiar by scores of 
 writers upon nature. We hear of the trees of the 
 forest not as mysterious singers rehearsing runes 
 which come from the heart of the universe, but as 
 conifers, five-leaved, three-leaved, and two-leaved ; 
 one fifteen feet, one eight feet in girth. We hear of 
 plants sought by the botanist, orchis and gen- 
 tain, whip-scirpus, rosy polygonum, hypnum, and 
 hydnum, and of birds belonging to the place, the 
 eagle, osprey, raven, woodpecker, and heron ; of 
 lizard, salamander, shrew, dragon-fiy, minnow, and 
 moth, and of the lusty occupations that engage ama- 
 teur woodsmen. The seer is ploughing contentedly 
 in harness, subduing his interrogative mind to the 
 objects of his companions' curiosity. 
 
 His watchfulness to discern the spiritual causes of 
 
Iftature* 65 
 
 what he felt, to gain some hint of the undiscoverable 
 secret beneath the mask of things was apparent to 
 Mr. Stillman in the Adirondack poem as in no other 
 of his works, but to the reader excluded from per- 
 sonal share in the agreeable experience, and judging 
 only by the reflection in the poem itself it is signifi- 
 cant chiefly as showing the power of society to 
 quench fires lighted in solitude. 
 
 In his autobiography Mr. Stillman gives an inci- 
 dent of Emerson's life in camp illustrating how far the 
 apostle of forbearance was swung out of his orbit by 
 his intimate contact with new activities and interests. 
 At the outset of the expedition he had with some re- 
 luctance purchased a rifle in honour of conformity, 
 an act that restrained the sceptical Longfellow from 
 joining the company. When the day of the hunt 
 arrived he who had named the birds without a gun 
 yielded to the potent influence of '' mob fury," and 
 announced that he must understand this passion to 
 kill, and at night he went out jack-hunting in pursuit 
 of the alien knowledge. 
 
 Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds 
 Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist. 
 
 Utterly unable to see anything resembling a deer 
 when the signal to shoot was given, he refrained until 
 the lucky animal took fright and ran, snorting scorn of 
 his inefficient enemy. Emerson found no other oppor- 
 tunity for deer-hunting and was obliged to renounce 
 his momentary ambition to become a red-slayer. 
 
66 IRalpb Malbo jemereon* 
 
 His defeat was characteristic. No man more intelli- 
 gently admired skill of hand and fitness to meet the 
 practical conditions of life. He respected the farmer 
 ''deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, 
 and timely," the '' continuous benefactor" ; he bade 
 ''men of cloth" bow to "the stalwart churls in over- 
 alls" ; he praised the "all round" New England lad 
 who " teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, 
 preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys 
 a township, and so forth "; but of this ability to per- 
 form the plain crude task he had the smallest possible 
 measure. A spade in his hand was an instrument of 
 torture, and he was helpless in the presence of an 
 arable plot of ground calling for the humble craft of 
 an ordinary gardener. " The genius of reading and 
 gardening," he declares, "are antagonistic," and his 
 experience taught him to meddle with no problems 
 of the soil. His description of the havoc wrought by 
 a stroll about his limited estate has reached the heart 
 of many a bookish recluse acquainted with the 
 strange seizures that drive pen-weary fingers to delv- 
 ing in the good brown earth at irregular and un- 
 studied intervals. 
 
 " With brow bent, with firm intent,the pale scholar 
 leaves his desk to draw a freer breath and get a just- 
 er statement of his thought, in the garden-walk. He 
 stoops to pull up a purslain or a dock that is choking 
 the young corn, and finds there are two ; close be- 
 hind the last is a third ; he reaches out his hand to a 
 fourth, behind that are four thousand and one. He 
 
IRature* 67 
 
 is heated and untuned, and by and by wakes up 
 from his idiot dream of chickweed and red-root 
 to remember his morning thought and to find that 
 with his adamantine purposes he has been duped 
 by a dandelion." 
 
 ^ In Nature Emerson saw the perfect theme for 
 scholarship abounding in fresh inspirations, each as 
 novel as the moonrise and sunset of the day, and in 
 urging American students to turn to these he was 
 guiltless of imposing upon them his own method, 
 although he led them toward his own ideal. His 
 counsel to the young writer suggests that he had in 
 mind the life of his friend Thoreau and the swarm of 
 nature-lovers who have followed lazily in that pleas- 
 ant path. 
 
 '' But go into the forest," he says, ''you shall 
 find all new and undescribed. The honking of 
 the wild geese flying by night; the thin note 
 of the companionable titmouse in the winter 
 day; the fall of swarms of flies, in autumn, from 
 combats high in the air, pattering down on the 
 leaves like rain; the angry hiss of the wood-birds; 
 the pine throwing out its pollen for the benefit of 
 the next century; the turpentine exuding from the 
 tree; — and indeed any vegetation, any animation, 
 any and all, are alike unattempted." ^ Such a 
 passage reveals what the poet of Brahma might 
 have made of nature-study in the narrower sense, 
 had he not devoted himself to his larger task. The 
 
 ^ Literary Ethics. 
 
68 IRalpb Mal&o jEmereon^ 
 
 one thing he could never have been is what he 
 called " a fop of the fields," and v/hat Carlyle desig- 
 nated as a '' view-hunter," self-consciously worship- 
 ping and saying to himself: ''Come, let us make a 
 description ! " He felt sensitively the obloquy at- 
 taching to the sentimentalist on his knees in the 
 public field, and acknowledged that, ''ordinarily, 
 whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or 
 from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write 
 on nature, they fall into euphemism " ; but he could 
 not renounce the right of returning often to this old 
 theme: "The multitude of false churches accredits 
 the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the 
 homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concern- 
 ing which no sane man can affect an indifference or 
 incuriosity."^ The genuine man of science he re- 
 spected wholly as he respected the poet, but he 
 visited his wrathless scorn upon botanisers and nat- 
 uralists inspired by no broader aim than arbitrary 
 analysis of external characteristics, the young 
 scholars who 
 
 Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, 
 And all their botany is in Latin names. 
 
 Unless they felt, with Linnaeus, in the presence of 
 an unfolding blossom that God in His glory was 
 passing near them, they were devastators and in- 
 vaders worthy of rebuffs by the offended genius of 
 the natural world. 
 
 ' Essay on Nature. 
 
IRature* 69 
 
 For scientific research and discovery of the high 
 imaginative type he had, as one w^ould expect, the 
 most profound admiration. His lines on the laying 
 of the first trans- Atlantic cable are exultant: 
 
 Thought's new-found path 
 Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways, 
 Match God's equator with a zone of art, 
 And lift man's public action to a height 
 Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses, 
 When linked hemispheres attest his deed. * 
 
 All news of such achievement added assurance to 
 his belief in the unity between the spiritual and ma- 
 terial worlds; and it is interesting to reflect that the 
 light in which he saw the universe is the light 
 which has shone in the minds of some of the most 
 advanced psychologists and philosophers of the 
 present day. Late in life John Fiske announced the 
 mental state to which his inquiry of scientific facts 
 had brought him, and the pages upon which he 
 recorded it might have issued with hardly the 
 change of a word from the study in which Emer- 
 son listened to the voices of the spirit. How truly 
 Emersonian, for example, is such a passage as 
 this: 
 
 ''In getting rid of the Devil and regarding the 
 universe as the multiform manifestation of a single 
 all-pervading Deity, we become for the first time 
 pure and uncompromising monotheists, — believers 
 in the ever-living, unchangeable, and all-wise Heav- 
 
 * The Adirondacks. 
 
70 IRalpb HClal&o lEmer^on. 
 
 enly Father, in whom we may declare our trust 
 without the faintest trace of mental reservation. 
 
 '' If we can truly take such a position, and hold 
 it rationally, it is the modern science so apt to be 
 decried by the bats and owls of orthodoxy that just- 
 ifies us in doing so. For what is the philosophic 
 purport of these beautiful and sublime discoveries 
 with which the keen insight and patient diligence of 
 modern students of science are beginning to be 
 rewarded ? What is the lesson that is taught alike by 
 the correlation of forces, by spectrum analysis, by 
 the revelations of chemistry as to the subtle be- 
 haviour of molecules inaccessible to the eye of sense, 
 by the astronomy that is beginning to sketch the 
 physical history of countless suns in the firmament; 
 by the palaeontology which is slowly unravelling the 
 wonders of past life upon the earth through millions 
 of ages ? What is the grand lesson that is taught by 
 all this ? It is the lesson of the unity of nature. 
 To learn it rightly is to learn that all the things that 
 we can see and know, in the course of our life in 
 this world, are so intimately woven together that 
 nothing could be left out without reducing the 
 whole marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else 
 may be true, the conviction is brought home to us 
 that in all this endless multifariousness there is one 
 single principle at work, that all is tending toward 
 an end that was involved from the very beginning, 
 if one can speak of beginnings and ends where the 
 process is eternal. The whole universe is animated 
 
IRaturc* 71 
 
 by a single principle of life, and whatever we see in it, 
 whether to our half-trained understanding and nar- 
 row experience it may seem to be good or bad, is an 
 indispensable part of the stupendous scheme."^ 
 
 In similar tone and temper Professor Royce has 
 recently discussed the spirit of modern philosophy, 
 using Emerson's own phraseology as the most 
 appropriate expression of his deepest conviction, — 
 even while he assures his reader of his independence 
 of mystical processes: '' My reason for believing that 
 there is one absolute World-Self, who embraces and 
 is all reality, whose consciousness includes and in- 
 finitely transcends our own, in whose unity all the 
 laws of nature and all the mysteries of experience 
 must have their solution and their very being, — is 
 simply that the profoundest agnosticism which you 
 can possibly state in any coherent fashion, the deep- 
 est doubt which you can any way formulate about 
 the world or the things that are therein, already pre- 
 supposes, implies, demands, asserts, the existence 
 of such a World-Self. The agnostic, I say, already 
 asserts this existence — unconsciously, of course, as 
 a rule, but none the less inevitably. For, as we shall 
 find, there is no escape from the infinite Self except 
 by self-contradiction. Ignorant as 1 am about first 
 causes, I am at least clear, therefore, about the Self. 
 If you deny him, you already in denying affirm him. 
 You reckon ill when you leave him out. Him when 
 you fly, he is the wings. He is the doubter and the 
 
 ' Through Nature to God. 
 
72 IRalpb IHHalbo iBmereon. 
 
 doubt. You in vain flee from his presence. The 
 wings of the morning will not aid you. Nor do I 
 mean this as any longer a sort of mysticism. The 
 truth is, I assure you, simply a product of dry logic. 
 When I try to tell you about it in detail, I shall 
 weary you by my wholly unmystical analysis of 
 commonplaces."^ 
 
 Professor Shaler refers to the ** sense of unity with 
 the whole of Nature " as '' the largest lesson that the 
 naturalist gains from his study of the realm," and 
 from it he turns hopefully toward larger lessons and 
 happier convictions: ''Looking forward on the path 
 on which men are so rapidly advancing, we can dis- 
 cern in some part the state to which he is to attain 
 when his reconciliation with the Nature about him 
 is more completely effected. We can see that the 
 meaning of man's organic history is to be borne in 
 upon him with such effect as to give him a per- 
 spective undreamed of by the ancients. He is to see 
 himself as far more truly divine in origin than the 
 old ideas of his creation led him to believe.""^ 
 
 When we consider that Emerson came by intui- 
 tion to the elementary and stupendous conviction 
 beyond which modern science, philosophy, and re- 
 ligion have not yet reached, that he happened by 
 what some of us would call mere accident upon the 
 fortunate opening to his book of thought from which 
 all its contents flowed consistently and sponta- 
 neously, we can hardly fail to recognise in him one 
 
 ' The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, ' The Individual. 
 
IRature* 7z 
 
 of the inexplicable men, one of the artists born with 
 the true vision whose work is happiness because 
 its direction is fixed by an inner certainty of right. 
 Maeterlinck warns us that the poet privileged to form 
 hypotheses and to forge his way ahead of reality 
 often finds that when he imagines himself to be far 
 in advance, he will have done no more than turn in 
 a circle. Such was not Emerson's experience. If 
 the minds most loyally devoted to study of the 
 knowable find in him inspiration, and can still say, 
 with Professor Tyndall, that he is a profoundly re- 
 ligous influence in the supreme sense of the word, 
 it is because he was such a poet as he has him- 
 self described : *' a beholder of ideas, and an utterer 
 of the necessary and causal." To call him original 
 conveys to the conventional understanding a false 
 impression since he uttered truth which from time to 
 ' time has enlightened the souls of men in all parts 
 of the world. But he was fundamental; and it is 
 merely recognising his universal quality flowering in 
 the delicately austere environment of New England 
 thought to class him with the artists who stand 
 alone, ''the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody." 
 His most acute American critic, George Willis 
 Cooke, expresses his attitude toward all local phe- 
 nomena when he describes his feeling for Concord 
 as having no special significance. ''Concord had 
 beauties of its own, but Concord was a part of the 
 universe. It was worthy of study because repre- 
 sentative of the whole; it was the whole for which 
 
74 IRalpb Malbo lEmeraon. 
 
 he sought, the universal for which he yearned. 
 Concord was no Mecca to him; he saw no special 
 sacredness in its flowers, rivers, and ponds." Yet 
 there was no virtue of the pleasant town where his 
 forefathers had lived, and where, after his second 
 marriage, he made his home, that he did not grate- 
 fully acknowledge. His house was on the outskirts 
 of the village, with ample space about it, and his 
 walks in the neighbouring fields and pastures gave 
 him the ordered and invigorating joy which inter- 
 preters of Nature find in her large and simple aspects. 
 Other writers have made the sky and friendly land- 
 scape in that delectable region familiar to us in all its 
 homely and lovable detail, but our imagination is 
 seldom roused as by Emerson's poetic interpretations 
 of it, into which the impressions of the actual world 
 fell like summer rain, '' copious but not troublesome 
 to his invulnerable essence." We see his most 
 characteristic relation to Nature in the poem on 
 Monadnoc Afar, which he left unprinted: 
 
 Dark flower of Cheshire garden, 
 
 Red evening duly dyes 
 Thy sombre head with rosy hues 
 
 To fix far-gazing eyes. 
 Well the Planter knew how strongly 
 
 Works thy form on human thought; 
 I muse what secret purpose had he 
 
 To draw all fancies to this spot. 
 
 In that octave of brief lines and Saxon words we 
 have the very colour and genius of his art; its sensi- 
 
mature* 
 
 75 
 
 tive response to the loveliness of visible things, its 
 preoccupation with the message of the invisible. 
 The secret of his influence is revealed in every poem 
 and in every sentence of prose directly addressed to 
 the natural world; he increases our sense of capacity 
 for illimitable life. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 CARLYLE. 
 
 WHEN Emerson reached Edinburgh in the 
 course of his European trip, he had 
 much ado to discover the whereabouts 
 of Thomas Carlyle, then roaring unchecked his criti- 
 cism of life from a solitary farm among desolate 
 heathery hills, unknown as yet to the multitude 
 presently to wrangle over his vociferous dithyrambs, 
 ' ' with clamours dissonant. " Carlyle, however, was 
 of more importance to Emerson than Rome or Lon- 
 don, and the ''young American from Boston " per- 
 severed until he found the ''good, wise, and 
 pleasant" youth in Scotland whom he sought. 
 The meeting was fortunate. Emerson was wel- 
 comed for the homage he brought to the lonely 
 Craigenputtock household, and also because the 
 Carlyles found him "one of the most lovable crea- 
 tures in himself" they had ever looked upon. Em- 
 erson in turn was able to record that he had never 
 seen more amiableness than was in Carlyle's count- 
 enance, and that he loved him for his amiability, a 
 
 grateful comment to remember after the turmoil of 
 
 76 
 
Wni --ched Edinburgh in the 
 
 11 lb European trip, he had 
 much ado to discover the whereabouts 
 >l Thomas Carlyle, then roaring unchecked his criti- 
 i life from ThOifMs ^O^rtM ^^^^S desolate 
 W\\\s,Frhfk.M*^ymilng4)^ c'^t^. skth^ Hiultitude 
 ^o wrangle over ' '^t^s, 
 
 ^ dissonant. ^^^ 
 
 ^ tri Fmpr T LOU- 
 
 _yuui]^ rvi! pcl- 
 
 ' f . T - J ., and 
 
 J sought. 
 
 n was wel- 
 
 t to the lonely 
 
 ' cause the 
 
 St lovable crea- 
 
 , upon. Em- 
 
 ' that he had never 
 
 in Carlyle's count- 
 
 -, his amiability, a 
 
 f after the turmoil of 
 
discussion spent by later critics upon his sick and 
 sorry temper. 
 
 At Craigenputtock Emerson stayed over one 
 night and *' talked and heard talking to his heart's 
 content," then mounted the hill to ''vanish like an 
 angel " from the eyes of his host. The friendship 
 that grew out of those few hours of walking over 
 the wide country, discoursing on the questions that 
 interested the two sincere thinkers, was, on Emer- 
 son's side at least, a model in the qualities of unself- 
 ish devotion, kind forbearance, and wise frankness. 
 It failed to break even under the strain of Carlyle's 
 plunging humour, to which so many principles held 
 sacred by Emerson were entrusted. For the reader 
 interested in tracing correspondences and differences 
 it is an amusing task to follow the thread of likeness 
 in Sartor Resartus, which reached America through 
 Fraser's Maga:{ine before it was published there in 
 1836, and in the essays and addresses written by 
 Emerson in the same decade. 
 
 It is not difficult to find in the first free flowing 
 of Carlyle's genius certain general ideas, many of 
 them directly imported from Germany, which are 
 reproduced with the same frank appropriation in Em- 
 erson's early work, to be firmly knit into the fabric 
 of his later thought. Originality to both writers 
 meant the use of ideas sanctioned by the intuition. 
 Neither was careful of sources, and Emerson in par- 
 ticular shared the gifts his reading gave him with an 
 open liberality that defied criticism. 
 
78 IRalpb Malbo lEmeraon. 
 
 *M give you fair warning," he wrote to Herman 
 Grimm, after reading his Essays, ''that, as I alone in 
 America, at this day possess this book of yours, I in- 
 tend to use my advantage. 1 advise you to watch 
 me narrowly. I think 1 shall reproduce you in lec- 
 tures, poems, essays, — whatever I may in these 
 months be called to write. 1 have already been 
 quoting you a good many times, within a few days, 
 and it was plain, nobody knew where 1 became so 
 suddenly learned and discerning." 
 
 What he thus sportively confessed he advo- 
 cated in his serious writing. ''The brave man quotes 
 bravely," he said, but also insisted that one must 
 be an inventor to read well; that the mind must be 
 braced by other minds to independent thinking, not 
 supported in eleemosynary idleness. With his multi- 
 tudinous quotation, and his light-hearted indebted- 
 ness to nearly every book which he found it worth 
 his while to read, he has kept as free as Shakespeare 
 from plagiarism in the true sense of that ugly word. 
 His transmuting faculty turned to account every 
 scrap of science and every generalisation of philo- 
 sophy that matched his conception of life, — moral life, 
 which was all he recognised as fit for contemplation. 
 Carlyle's denouncement of outworn symbols may be 
 found throughout Emerson's writings on religion. 
 Dependence on character in place of dependence on 
 institutions was advocated first stormily by Carlyle, 
 and later, tranquilly, by Emerson. Fichte's ideal of 
 the Literary Man, sympathetically interpreted by 
 
Carl^Ie* 79 
 
 Carlyle is a recognisable ancestor of Emerson's ideal 
 scholar; such a sentence as "the healthy moral na- 
 ture loves Goodness, and without wonder wholly 
 lives in it," might have been written by either Emer- 
 son or Carlyle; the theory that matter is an expression 
 of the world-spirit received from both the immediate 
 welcome of the idealistic nature. Neither of them 
 explained how he arrived at the conclusions that 
 have been the end of so many arguments among the 
 saints and sages whose mouths are stopt with dust. 
 Neither of them created a philosophy, and nothing 
 could be more absurd than to say — as Carlyle un- 
 fortunately did say — that Emerson took his ''sys- 
 tem " largely from Sartor Resartus and other of 
 Carlyle's early writings, ''working it out, however, 
 in a way of his own." The way in which he worked 
 out such ideas as the two held in common led to the 
 substitution of joy in virtue for pain and self-chastise- 
 ment, of faith in mankind for exclusive dependence 
 upon special men, of love for intolerance, of beauty 
 and serenity for energy. 
 
 In the matter of style his independence of Carlyle 
 is obvious. He pleaded a defective sense of humour 
 in extenuation of his indifference to the heavy wit of 
 Sartor Resartus. As a matter of fact, his sense of 
 humour was too fine and too exacting to accept 
 mannerism and artifice as worthy of the Comic Muse. 
 In the playful use of words he was not perhaps facile; 
 and he was wisely shy. In private speech his wit 
 was not so closely constrained, and some excellent 
 
8o IRalpb Mal&o lEmerson* 
 
 sayings are quoted from his merrier hours, the best, 
 perhaps, a comment inspired by the introduction 
 of an uncongenial person: ''Whom God hath put 
 asunder, let not man bring together." But on his 
 printed page his ideas must wear, as he said, ''their 
 Greek coat.*' Superfluity and verbiage were win- 
 nowed out of his product as elements of ugliness, 
 where to Carlyle they would have presented them- 
 selves as instruments of force. 
 
 In the letters for many years exchanged by Emer- 
 son and Carlyle after their day at Craigenputtock, 
 we find Emerson the warmer and richer of the two 
 in expressions of affection. Under the delicate re- 
 straint characterising his style here as elsewhere 
 burns a quiet ardour that makes easy the reader's 
 acceptance of his statement that a new person was a 
 great event to him and hindered him from sleep. 
 From this new friend he hoped as usual more than 
 he realised, but he freed the essence of his sentiment 
 from all triviality and exaggeration, and lived with it 
 to the end of his days. Lowell speaks of "this 
 loyalty of his that can keep warm for half a century," 
 and his intercourse with Carlyle covered almost that 
 space of time without faltering under the most prac- 
 tical of tests. 
 
 His sturdy theory of friendship is suggested in his 
 essay on that interesting relation: 
 
 " I wish that friendship should have feet, as well 
 as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the 
 ground, before it vaults over the moon; ... we 
 
Carlisle* 8i 
 
 cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too 
 fine, and does not substantiate his romance by the 
 municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and 
 pity. . . . The end of friendship is a commerce 
 the most strict and homely that can be joined; more 
 strict than any of which we have experience. . . . 
 We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and 
 offices of man's life and embellish it by courage, wis- 
 dom, and unity. It should never fall into something 
 usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, 
 and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery." 
 Many writers have spoken with as much wisdom 
 and as gracefully, and it is to the credit of our 
 humanity that so many also have rhymed act to 
 word and exemplified their teaching in their practice. 
 Certainly, however, the ideal advocated has never 
 been more sincerely followed than by Emerson him- 
 self in this friendship of his own. Nothing could 
 more convincingly demonstrate his modesty and 
 loyalty, and his willingness to undertake uncon- 
 genial labour for the benefit of others than a simple 
 enumeration of his efforts, beginning early and last- 
 ing long, to promote Carlyle's interests in this 
 country. 
 
 Sartor Resartus was first published in America 
 in 1836 as an independent volume at the instigation 
 of a young engineer named Le-Baron Russell. The 
 preface was written by Emerson, and Carlyle found 
 it '' such as no kindest friend could have improved." 
 In the space of a year and a half the book was 
 
82 IRalpb IKHal&o Cmerson. 
 
 reported to have sold to the extent of more than 
 eleven hundred copies, and someone in talking with 
 Emerson remarked that Carlyle's friends might have 
 made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor 
 themselves instead of leaving it with a bookseller. 
 Instantly Emerson arranged to print the French Revo- 
 lution in that way, and wrote joyously to Carlyle of 
 the details of publication, concluding: 
 
 ''Then if so good a book can have a tolerable sale 
 (almost contrary to the nature of a good book, 1 
 know), 1 shall sustain with great glee the new rela- 
 tion of being your banker and attorney." After this, 
 nearly every letter contained some allusion to ques- 
 tions involved in this " new relation," for which Emer- 
 son developed an admirable talent. *'You may be 
 assured," he writes, 'M shall on this occasion sum- 
 mon to the bargain all the Yankee in my constitution 
 and multiply and divide like a lion." 
 
 The book was published on the 25th of December, 
 1837, ^nd Emerson counted upon sending his friend 
 at least seven hundred dollars as the outcome of a 
 year's sales. This sum was exceeded by a number 
 of dollars, and Carlyle wrote to his English correspond- 
 ents with even more enthusiasm than he betrayed 
 in his letters to Emerson, of the comfort it conveyed. 
 To Emerson he wrote: *'You have been very brisk 
 and helpful in this business of the Revolution Book, 
 and 1 give you many thanks and commendations. It 
 will be a very brave day when cash actually reaches 
 me, no matter what the number of the coins, whether 
 
Carl^Ie* 83 
 
 seven or seven hundred, out of Yankee-land; and 
 strange enough, what is not unlikely, if it be the first 
 cash 1 realise for that piece of work, — Angle-land 
 continuing still ///solvent to me! "^ And he added a 
 bit of rhodomontade to the effect that he was now 
 beginning to despise the question of ways and 
 means, thus apostrophising poverty in the vein of 
 Teufelsdrockh: 
 
 ''Thou beggarliest Spectre of Beggary, that hast 
 chased me ever since I was man, come on then, in 
 the Devil's name, let us see what is in thee! Will 
 the Soul of a man, with Eternity within a few years 
 of it, quail before thee? " 
 
 When the money did arrive he gave ardent thanks 
 to ''the mysterious, all-Bounteous Guide of men" 
 and to his ' ' true Brother far over the sea. " The true 
 brother, meanwhile, had been turning aside from his 
 personal tasks to push through the publication of two 
 volumes of Carlyle's Miscellanies, issued on the same 
 plan as the history, with reference to the utmost 
 benefit to the author. The letters reveal endless at- 
 tention to detail on Emerson's part; endless consulta- 
 tion with the graceful author (who was not always 
 conveniently prompt with his answers), and the exer- 
 cise of faculties quite unaccustomed to such arduous 
 claims. The first formal account of the costs and 
 sales of the French Revolution was forwarded to Car- 
 lyle on the 25th of April, 1839, and Emerson wrote 
 of it: 
 
 ^ The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence. 
 
84 IRalpb Mal&o JBmcveon. 
 
 ''Behold my account! A very simple thing, is it 
 not! A very mouse, after such months, almost years, 
 of promise! Despise it not, however; for such is my 
 extreme dulness at figures and statements that this 
 nothing has been a fear to me a long time; how to 
 extract it from the bookseller's promiscuous account 
 with me and from obscure records of my own."^ 
 
 The little sheet of items and figures, punctiliously 
 made up, drew from Carlyle a manly utterance of 
 warm feeling. ''A reflection 1 cannot but make," he 
 said, 'Ms that at bottom this money was all yours; 
 not a penny of it belonged to me by any law except 
 that of helpful friendship," and he bids Emerson re- 
 joice that, thanks to him and the books, "and to 
 Heaven over all," he is for the present no longer poor, 
 but has more money in his possession than for a 
 dozen years preceding, which, despite his invocation 
 to beggary, he found "a blessedness really very 
 considerable." 
 
 For six years the making and sifting of book- 
 sellers' accounts, and the transmission of varying 
 amounts of money accruing from the sales, contin- 
 ued without special incident, Carlyle receiving in all 
 about two thousand dollars from Emerson's man- 
 agement of his affairs. 
 
 Then in the spring of 1843 Carlyle sent to Emer- 
 son, in advance of the English publication, his book 
 called Past and Present, hoping thus to prevent 
 pirated republication in America. Emerson was 
 
 ' The Carlyle-Evierson Correspondence. 
 
Carl?le* 85 
 
 obliged to report an evil condition of the book mar- 
 ket, brought about within a few months by the 
 cheap press. " Every English book of any name or 
 credit," he wrote, " is instantly converted into a 
 newspaper or coarse pamphlet, and hawked by a 
 hundred boys in the streets of all our cities for 25, 
 18, or 12 cents; Dickens's Notes for 12 cents, Black- 
 wood's Magazine for 18 cents, and so on." 
 
 His energy arose, however, to meet the new de- 
 mand upon it, and, with much sagacity, after ''per- 
 plexing debate with the booksellers," he made 
 arrangements, first with one firm and then with 
 another, still sending Carlyle occasional remittances, 
 amounting in three years to something less than 
 five hundred dollars. Finally, in 1846, he made 
 what seemed to Carlyle ''the best of Bargains" 
 with the firm of Wiley & Putnam, who agreed to 
 pay a certain royalty on all the works of Carlyle 
 which they were free to publish, much to Emerson's 
 relief, it may be supposed. References to accounts 
 and remittances now drop out of the correspondence, 
 with Emerson's valour thoroughly proven. And it 
 should be added that Carlyle, also, had shown some 
 activity in the republication of Emerson's Essays in 
 England, which was not, however, due to his own 
 impulse, but sprang from the suggestion of Eraser, 
 his publisher. 
 
 There is little of Emerson's genius in his cor- 
 respondence with Carlyle; but of his character, which 
 was the positive basis of his genius, there is much. 
 
86 IRalpb Malbo lemereon. 
 
 His mild breadth of vision, his excellence of temper, 
 and his freedom from egoistic absorption in his af- 
 fairs diffuse a soft radiance of personality in contrast 
 with the fitful gleam and shadow of Carlyle's uncer- 
 tain humour; and the warmth of his nature is more 
 apparent in these letters than in any others accessible 
 to the public. A curious strain of tenderness mingled 
 with reverence shows itself in all his phrases, some- 
 what studied and elaborate in form, but breathing 
 pure sincerity. For many years he sent reiterated 
 invitations and appeals to Carlyle to come with 
 his wife to America and find a home in the Em- 
 erson household. The advantages offered by the 
 New England institution called the ''Lyceum" he 
 thought peculiarly adapted to Carlyle's needs, as 
 to his own, the lecture being a substitute for the ser- 
 mon as flexible as the heart of either could desire. 
 Deducing from his personal experience, he wrote : 
 
 ''The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an 
 obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of 
 those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much 
 from that of those under it, as to embarrass the con- 
 science of the speaker, because so much is attributed 
 to him from the fact of standing there. In the Ly- 
 ceum nothing is presupposed. The orator is only re- 
 sponsible for what his lips articulate. Then, what 
 scope it allows! You may handle every member and 
 relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates, 
 or St. Paul say that cannot be said here ? The audi- 
 ence is of all classes, and its character will be deter- 
 
Carlple* 87 
 
 mined always by the name of the lecturer. Why 
 may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, 
 your philosophy, and become that good despot which 
 the virtuous orator is ? " ^ 
 
 Nor did he forget to add to his list of the Lyceum's 
 virtues the worldly profit to be extracted from it ; 
 and again he multiplied and divided '' like a lion," in 
 order to give Carlyle an accurate impression of the 
 outgo and income to be expected from a lecturing 
 tour in America. ''You may board in Boston in a 
 ' gigmanic ' style for $8 per week, including all do- 
 mestic expenses," he wrote in 1835. '* Eight dollars 
 per week is the board paid by the permanent resi- 
 dents at the Tremont House,— probably the best 
 hotel in North America. There and at the best 
 hotels in New York, the lodger for a few days pays 
 at the rate of $1.50 per day." He concluded his 
 estimate with the assurance that he had given '' rates 
 of expenses where economy is not studied." To the 
 present age such a picture of cheapness and oppor- 
 tunity, combining suggestions of the ''plain living 
 and high thinking, ' since become a byword, brings 
 a sense of regret that the cool, clear social atmosphere 
 in which spiritual voices had so loud a sound has 
 completely passed. In a denser air of more complex 
 claims it is possible that the peculiar freshness and 
 pungency of Emerson's utterance would have been 
 less sustained. He seems in his Essays to dwell in a 
 land where there is ample room for the mind to move 
 
 ' The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence. 
 
88 IRalpb Mal&o Cmereom 
 
 without encountering material obstacles to its gen- 
 eralisation. He felt the opposite influence in Car- 
 lyle's work and defined it with an acute appreciation 
 of the sense of mass conveyed by it, a sense in which 
 his own writings are so notably lacking. 
 
 '' I thought as 1 read this piece," he said, referring 
 to the Diamond Necklace, " that your strange genius 
 was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma 
 of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is 
 this style; so vast, enormous, related to all the 
 world, and so endless in details. I think you see as 
 pictures every street, church, parliament-house, bar- 
 rack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and 
 ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims 
 thereabouts, and make all your own. Hence, your 
 encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the 
 virtues and vices of your panoramic pages. Well, it 
 is your own; and it is English, and every word stands 
 for somewhat, and it cheers and fortifies me."^ 
 
 If Carlyle's genius is the aroma of Babylon, Emer- 
 son's is the aroma of Shiloh, where the gentle Eli 
 exhorted his people to give over the worship of 
 strange gods and to follow the moral law. Carlyle 
 found his friend's benign detachment and abstract vis- 
 ion unsatisfying, and urged upon him the kind of art 
 in which he himself was conspicuously successful. 
 *' You tell us with piercing emphasis," he said, *'that 
 man's soul is great; show us a great soul of a man in 
 some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such 
 
 ^ The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence. 
 
Carlple. 89 
 
 a message, and you will feel by and by that you are 
 called to this. 1 long to see some concrete Thing, 
 some Event, Man's Life, American Forest or piece of 
 Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, 
 well Emersonised, depictured by Emerson, filled with 
 the life of Emerson, and cast far from him then to 
 live by itself." 
 
 Had Emerson attempted such a task it would 
 have been approached in the spirit he brought to his 
 orations, and the result might easily have been his- 
 tory or biography of the sort that illuminates from 
 within, showing the play of moral forces through all 
 forms of human energy. It is interesting to conject- 
 ure how he would have borne himself among the 
 crowding figures of history. In Carlyle's French 
 Revolution what he found admirable was the pre- 
 sence of humanity. "' We have men in your story," 
 he told the author, ''and not names merely; always 
 men, though 1 may doubt sometimes whether I have 
 the historic men." His affectionate interest was not 
 warped into prejudice; he insisted, with sufficient 
 moderation surely, that the style might be ''more 
 simple, less Gothically efflorescent." "You will 
 say," he added, "no rules for the illumination of 
 windows can apply to the Aurora Borealis. How- 
 ever, 1 find refreshment when every now and then a 
 special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp 
 and business-like terms. This character-drawing in 
 the book is certainly admirable, the lines are ploughed 
 furrows; but there was cake and ale before though 
 
90 IRalpb IKHal&o Cmerson* 
 
 thou be virtuous. Clarendon surely drew sharp lines 
 for me in Falkland, Hampden, and the rest without 
 defiance or sky-vaulting." 
 
 A quarter of a century later the time was past for 
 constructive criticism between the two, and concern- 
 ing Frederick the Great Emerson had only words of 
 soaring congratulation. Even in his journal he de- 
 clared it to be '* infinitely the wittiest book that ever 
 was written; — a book that one would think the Eng- 
 lish people would rise up in mass and thank the au- 
 thor for by cordial acclamation." He had, however, 
 too much the seeing eye to miss Carlyle's essential 
 shortcoming in looking dispassionately at his total 
 effect. On his second visit to him, made fourteen 
 years after the first, he was able to admire anew, 
 and even found himself *' taken by surprise" by 
 qualities he had not guessed before. But in his notes, 
 with one of his amazing and acute juxtapositions, he 
 clearly defined the destructive weakness that under- 
 mined the work of strength: 
 
 *' In Carlyle as in Byron, one is more struck with 
 the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly 
 superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes 
 good hard hits all the time. There is more character 
 than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly re- 
 sembling Samuel Johnson." 
 
 The correspondence lasted until 1872, nine years 
 before Carlyle's death, and left the writers almost 
 where it found them, both in friendship and in men- 
 tal attitude. Each had maintained a gentle courtesy 
 
I 
 
i^- 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
 Samuel Bradford, and William H. Fiirness. 
 
 From a. photograph by Gutekunst, PhiladtJphia, i8ys 
 
Carlisle, 91 
 
 toward the opinions of the other, tolerating disagree- 
 ment with that ''beautiful behaviour" defined by 
 Emerson as the finest of the fine arts. Each continued 
 to find his friend after many years a fresh delight. 
 ''I clatter my chains with joy," wrote Emerson on 
 the receipt of the last volumes oi Frederick the Great, 
 *' as I did forty years ago, at your earliest gifts." Time 
 had brought a measure of fame to each, but discern- 
 ing critics found Carlyle exhausted by repetition of 
 his message and the ever-increasing emphasis laid 
 upon it, while Emerson was inexhaustible as a source 
 of mental cheer, so perfect had been the harmony 
 of his development and the unity of his conception. 
 Carlyle's belief in human nature, at first apparent 
 through his exaggerated denunciation, had waned 
 and given way to what Lowell called a deep disdain, 
 but what perhaps was more truly a perverse ignor- 
 ance of universal human qualities, and a growing, 
 dark despair of moral improvement in mankind. 
 ''Alas! then," he wrote in the French Revolution, 
 "is man's civilisation only a wrappage, through which 
 the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as 
 ever? Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal 
 in her as well as a Celestial." The Infernal became 
 continually clearer to his vision, and the Celestial 
 more clouded to his infrequent upward glance. The 
 pessimism threatening his capacity for lasting service 
 at the outset of his course had become deepened and 
 fixed by the time he reached its end, and he passed 
 out of life like a spent torch which, bravely as it had 
 
« • 
 
 92 1?alpb Mal&o JEmereon* 
 
 burned and flashed, had failed to light one of the 
 inextinguishable altar-fires kept alive by the faith- 
 ful worshippers of goodness. 
 
 With Emerson it was otherwise. His moral 
 optimism saw goodness environing the world and 
 flowing into every humblest heart held open to it. 
 The beauty of holiness revealed itself to him wher- 
 ever he looked ; and within himself he found assur- 
 ance that in unity with the moral order is gained 
 eternal peace beyond the chaos and horror of acci- 
 dent and crime. As life enriched him with mild 
 experience and the fruit of contemplation, he con- 
 sistently studied and taught the comfort of his 
 serene faith. '' How dear, how soothing to man, 
 arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, 
 effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappoint- 
 ments." Beside his happy freedom from complaint 
 and idle interrogation of insoluble mysteries, such a 
 voice as Carlyle's sounds like the noisy whining of 
 undisciplined childhood. Yet the two men were at 
 one in their love of the truth under formula and 
 sham, and the bonds uniting them were recognised 
 by both to the last. 
 
 i 
 
<( 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 MAN, THE REFORMER." 
 
 DURING the interval between the first and 
 second meetings of Carlyle and Emerson 
 the life of the latter ran serenely in chan- 
 nels that were narrow but deep. He was touched 
 by his share of the frost and darkness that recur 
 inevitably in normal human experience. His home 
 in Concord had been planned for the inclusion of his 
 brother Charles in his family, but before it was in 
 order Charles had died, leaving Emerson a mourner. 
 
 *'You must be content henceforth with only a 
 a piece of your husband," he wrote to his wife, " for 
 the best of his strength lay in the soul with which 
 he must no more on earth take counsel." 
 
 In 1 84 1 he lost his eldest boy, and readers of 
 the Threnody know to what noble uses he turned 
 his grief. His work, after he left the pulpit of the 
 Second Church, continued to be that of an ethical 
 teacher, but he was oftener on the lecture platform 
 than in the pulpit. 
 
 "You cannot preach to people unless they will 
 
 93 
 
94 IRalpb XKHal&o lemereon* 
 
 hear," he wrote to his brother William, and in his 
 earlier lectures he even abandoned what he called 
 his ''ethics and theologies" for natural history, 
 which gave him admirable illustrations of his un- 
 alterable theory of the unity in nature. As early as 
 1833, immediately after his return from Europe, he 
 gave an address before the Natural History Society, 
 in which, as in his later writings, he showed his 
 striking appreciation of the larger scientific spirit. 
 '' As books can never teach the use of books, neither 
 does science, when it becomes technical, keep its 
 own place in the mind." Its place in the mind was 
 what he never forgot or misunderstood. 
 
 For about three years he supplied the pulpit at 
 East Lexington, near Concord, and for a longer time 
 he continued to preach occasionally to hearers will- 
 ing to accept him on his own terms of doctrine and 
 without question. Obviously he longed to move 
 men's hearts from, the place of prophecy and worship 
 to which he had been dedicated. It is impossible to 
 think of him as without susceptibility to the beauty 
 and lovable quality of the institutions he was 
 forced by his conscience to renounce. Unity, too, 
 for which he had such constant concern, must have 
 seemed to him a treasurable element in religious 
 worship, even while he sacrificed to individuality of 
 judgment. But the great thing was to speak truth, 
 and this he could do most freely from the Lyceum, 
 the praises of which he had sung to Carlyle. 
 
 In 1840 he wrote in his journal that in all his lee- 
 
 1 
 
it 
 
 flDan, tbe IReformer/' 95 
 
 tures he had taught one doctrine, the infinitude of 
 the private man, to find this readily accepted, "even 
 with loud commendation," so long as he called 
 the lecture Art, or Politics, or Literature, or the 
 Household, but that as soon as he called it Religion 
 everyone was shocked, although it was only the 
 application of the same truth to a new class of facts. 
 His lectures were certainly received with growing 
 enthusiasm, Lowell writing of the Phi Beta Kappa 
 speech in 1837, that it was ''an event without 
 any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene 
 always to be treasured in the memory for its pictur- 
 esqueness and its inspiration." It is not now easy to 
 realise the ''enthusiasm of approval " or the "grim 
 silence of foregone dissent " in the listeners crowding 
 the aisles and clustering at the windows. Neither is 
 it easy to understand the academic point of view that 
 was startled by the homely allusions to "the meal 
 in the firkin, the milk in the pan." The address 
 contains nothing startling to the mind of the present 
 day, and the amount of shock it conveyed to its 
 audience measures with considerable approach to 
 accuracy the change that has taken place in the 
 American point of view in the last seventy years. 
 The young lecturer told the breathless auditors that 
 life and action are more necessary than books to the 
 true scholar, that the scholar should trust himself 
 and go down into the secrets of his own mind to 
 learn the secrets of all minds, that he should not let 
 himself be influenced even by genius and should 
 
96 IRalpb IKHalbo j£mer9om 
 
 read for inspiration rather than guidance, that the 
 common, the familiar, and the low are as worthy of 
 exploration as the antique and the remote ; that 
 Americans are weakened and intimidated by listen- 
 ing to the courtly Muses of Europe, and that the true 
 office of the American scholar is to walk on his own 
 feet, work with his own hands, and speak his own 
 mind. Broadly interpreted, this teaching has many 
 elements and features in common with Matthew 
 Arnold's teaching to his countrymen on the absorb- 
 ing subject of culture, superficially opposed as the 
 two doctrines appear. 
 
 Perfection resides in an ''inward condition of 
 the mind and spirit and not in an outward set of 
 circumstances," Arnold proclaims almost in Emer- 
 son's words. We must attain this perfection by 
 getting to know ''on all matters which most 
 concern us, the best which has been known and 
 thought in the world ; and through this knowledge, 
 turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our 
 stock notions and habits which we now follow 
 stanchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that 
 there is a virtue in following them stanchly which 
 makes up for the mischief of following them me- 
 chanically." The subtle humour of this is not 
 Emerson's, but the thought was among his most 
 cherished convictions. And the idea of culture as 
 the harmonious development of all the powers for 
 beauty and for the benefit of human nature is at one 
 with Emerson's theory of individual development. 
 
u 
 
 flDan, tbe IRcformer/' 97 
 
 The scholar in the end is ''one who raises himself 
 from private considerations, and breathes and lives 
 on public and illustrious thoughts." But Emer- 
 son adjures the young scholar of America to turn 
 away from European standards and trust his in- 
 stincts, and Arnold urges Englishmen to listen to 
 the criticism of foreigners. Both were conforming to 
 Arnold's belief that ''the real unum necessarium for 
 us is to come to our best at all points." This was 
 what he with his discussion of "Hebraism" and 
 "Hellenism" was aiming at, and this was equally 
 the aim of Emerson's warnings and entreaties. Each 
 held fast to the great assumption that culture in- 
 volves the co-operation of the moral with the intel- 
 lectual sense. Each spoke to the inner need of his 
 public, and to each that public "came round" as 
 Emerson predicted, with the slow swing of the 
 aggregate mind. 
 
 Arnold could not address Emerson's counsel, 
 " Trust thyself " to the common Englishman of his 
 time who, together with the common American, 
 was, he thought, more than enough disposed al- 
 ready to trust himself, but he was quite ready to tell 
 us that we could not heed Emerson too diligently or 
 prize him enough when he spoke of the happiness 
 eternally attached to the true life in the spirit. And 
 he recognised the double lesson to be learned from 
 his teaching, the lesson for England, and the lesson 
 for America : "To us," he said in his American lec- 
 ture on Emerson, "to us he shows for guidance his 
 
98 IRalpb HClalbo lEmereon. 
 
 lucid freedom, his cheerfulness and hope; to you 
 his dignity, delicacy, serenity, elevation." None of 
 these qualities was absent from the oration which 
 Doctor Holmes somewhat conventionally called 
 ''our intellectual Declaration of Independence." 
 
 The year following the Phi Beta Kappa speech 
 came the Divinity School Address, and during the 
 intervening months ten lectures were delivered in 
 the form of a series under the title oi Human Cul- 
 ture. Parts of these lectures appeared later in the 
 Essays which were sent out as separate papers on 
 subjects more or less connected with an ethical in- 
 tention, but without any outward suggestion of unity. 
 Emerson would perhaps have cast additional light on 
 his attitude of mind for the general reader had he 
 retained for the Essays the title of the lecture series 
 and thus emphasised the idea of an inclusive culture, 
 drawing from all forms of human activity; '' a disci- 
 pline so universal as to demonstrate that no part of 
 a man was made in vain." It was the idea of a con- 
 structive thinker, and Emerson's service in construct- 
 ive criticism of life is frequently underestimated. 
 
 In the essay on Heroism, which probably is almost 
 identical with the lecture of that title, we find little 
 of hero-worship in the sentimental sense of the 
 word. For a young man, recently engaged in oppos- 
 ing public opinion at the peril of his own interests, 
 Emerson looked with extraordinary detachment upon 
 the quality he illustrated. Nothing is more com- 
 mon than to see men drunk with the virtue they are 
 
u 
 
 fIDan, tbe IReformcr/' 99 
 
 practising, and unwilling to give it less than the high- 
 est and most pompous place in the list of divine 
 attributes. What, then, could be more refreshing 
 than Emerson's description of the heroic class. 
 
 '* Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. 
 The great will not condescend to take anything seri- 
 ously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, 
 though it were the building of cities or the eradica- 
 tion of old and foolish churches and nations which 
 have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. 
 Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this 
 world behind them, and play their own game in 
 innocent defiance of the Blue Laws of the world; and 
 such would appear, could we see the human race 
 assembled in vision, like little children frolicking 
 together, though to the eyes of mankind at large 
 they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and 
 influences." 
 
 According to the custom already fixed by Emer- 
 son, the abstract idea of heroism in the lecture was 
 presented in a generalised form. There was one 
 pointed exception, however, that of Elijah Lovejoy's 
 then recent martyrdom. Lovejoy was a Presby- 
 terian minister, and editor of the St. Louis Observer 
 through which he strove to awaken public sentiment 
 to the evils of slavery. He was driven from St. 
 Louis to Alton, Illinois, where he again established 
 a paper and continued his anti-slavery work. Three 
 of his presses were destroyed, and he was requested 
 by the citizens of Alton to retire from the charge of 
 
 .LofC. 
 
loo IRalpb Mal&o lEmereon. 
 
 his paper. This he refused to do, and ordered a 
 new press. Upon its arrival a mob gathered and 
 demanded it. Lovejoy and a small band of sup- 
 porters were attacked and Lovejoy was shot dead. 
 
 Emerson evidently felt that this was a time to 
 bring home to his hearers the practical application of 
 his doctrines, and it is told of him that toward the 
 end of his lecture, his audience thrilling to his ac- 
 count of heroism in other lands and ancient times, 
 he looked steadily down into their eyes with a signi- 
 ficant gravity, and reminded them of their own 
 hero. '' It was but the other day that the brave 
 Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for 
 the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when 
 it was better not to live." 
 
 The end of the lecture is touched by the sadness 
 of premonition, and it is not impossible that Emer- 
 son's clear mind was already discerning the calamity 
 of civil strife a quarter of a century in the future. 
 His sturdy optimism bent for a moment beneath the 
 innate melancholy of the human heart reviewing 
 human destiny: 
 
 '' In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, 
 in the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, 
 who does not envy those who have seen safely to 
 an end their manful endeavour ? Who that sees 
 the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates 
 Washington that he is long already wrapped in his 
 shroud, and for ever safe ; that he was laid sweet in 
 his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated 
 
 i 
 
'' fIDan, tbe IRef ormer/' i o i 
 
 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 conver- 
 sation 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." 
 
 After the controversy caused by the Divinity 
 School Address, Emerson expected small audiences 
 for his lectures, but his next course, on the broad 
 subject of Human Life, was largely attended. In 
 1840 and 1 84 1 he was too much occupied with 
 getting out his volume of Essays and with the pro- 
 ject of the transcendental magazine called The Dial, 
 to undertake regular lecturing. The one lecture 
 that he did give, on Man, the Reformer is interesting 
 as indicating his temper toward the stirring of dis- 
 content with the existing order that pushed its way 
 to the surface in New England about this time at so 
 many separate points. Although he was fervent 
 and early in preaching the reform of the Church and 
 of methods of religious worship, he was in no sense 
 what is commonly called a professional reformer. 
 Fanaticism annoyed him and repelled him, and he 
 was quick to observe and analyse the weakness of 
 the systems for social regeneration springing up 
 about him. None of their follies escaped his kind 
 and penetrating gaze. He was a critic but he was 
 
I02 IRalpb Malbo lemeraon. 
 
 not a contriver. He possessed none of the Yankee 
 ingenuity that found its account in making mechan- 
 ical toys which would run for a limited space of 
 time and attract the attention of the idle world with- 
 out winning its respect. Truth only, and personal 
 regeneration roused his imagination and compelled 
 his faith. Such communities as Brook Farm, in 
 which the members attempted to combine agricul- 
 ture, scholarship, and art to their common benefit, 
 he looked upon with suspicious sympathy as the 
 sincere efforts of sincere men to better the world but 
 as '* away from his work." He observed that pro- 
 fessed philanthropists, ''it is strange and horrible to 
 say," are apt to be altogether odious, to be shunned 
 as " the worst of bores and ranters." How many of 
 them must he have been unable to shun in his hos- 
 pitable home at Concord ! The days were brim- 
 ming with protests against Church and State, against 
 meat -eating and slave - keeping, against drinking 
 and against civilised apparel, against the subjection 
 of women and against class distinctions. Emerson 
 had the same objection to dogmatism in reform, he 
 said, as to dogmatism in conservatism, yet he was 
 far too conscious of the problem of suffering in the 
 world not to respect the class that spent itself fool- 
 ishly but honestly on ineffectual schemes for bringing 
 about happiness for the masses. 
 
 He felt the pain of the wretched and the poor 
 without the frenzy for revolutionary methods 
 impelling his warm-hearted and hot-headed com- 
 
)kee 
 
 ot 
 i\- 
 uil 
 ?d 
 arm, in 
 ombine agricul- 
 cholarsi aii lO their common benefit, 
 
 iie looked wiui suspicious sympathy as the 
 
 A sincere men to better the world but 
 ,' from his work." He observed that pro- 
 philanthropists, " it is strange and horrible to 
 -ire apt to ifaflm^t^awthorft£^o be shunned 
 •x'nr<;t ■■ 'f bf • p^„„; „ ph(itog<-aph. many ot 
 
 the • hos- 
 
 hrim- 
 
 drinking 
 
 ibjection 
 
 Hmerson 
 
 in reform, he 
 
 yet he was 
 
 -ring in the 
 
 that spent itself fool- 
 
 emes for bringing 
 
 ^ hed and the poor 
 ;iutionary methods 
 ' hot-headed com- 
 
(( 
 
 flDan, tbe IReformer/' 103 
 
 panions. His way of changing existing conditions 
 was by conforming his private life to his ideal. '' I 
 think we must clear ourselves, each one," he says, 
 ''by the interrogation, whether we have earned our 
 bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our en- 
 ergies to the common benefit ; and we must not 
 cease to tend to the correction of flagrant wrongs, 
 by laying one stone aright every day." 
 
 This was not wholly the method of the Brook 
 Farmers, whose interesting social venture made so 
 deep an impression upon their contemporaries, but 
 Emerson in his account of the enterprise made ob- 
 vious its charm, with the element of childishness 
 that both modified and increased it : 
 
 "The Founders of Brook Farm should have 
 this praise," he said, "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, mas- 
 querade, did not permit sluggishness or despon- 
 dency ; 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 behaviour. The art of letter writing, it 
 is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were 
 
I04 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon* 
 
 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." Then he placed his wise finger upon 
 the point of weakness: ''People cannot live to- 
 gether in any but necessary ways. The only candi- 
 dates who will present themselves will be those 
 who have tried the experiment of independence and 
 ambition, and have failed ; and none others will 
 barter for the most comfortable equality the chance 
 of superiority. Then all communities have quarrelled. 
 Few people can live together on their merits. There 
 must be kindred, or mutual economy, or a common 
 interest in their business or other external tie." 
 
 Emerson, nevertheless, was sufficiently swayed 
 by the general movement of the society with whose 
 members he was intimate to attempt one or two 
 individual innovations in his own household. There 
 was a serious and kindly but wholly ineffective 
 attempt to introduce a common table for the family 
 and the servants ; an arrangement that would un- 
 doubtedly have pleased Emerson who was con- 
 stantly oppressed by the personal service of paid 
 attendants, and who was always ready to ''respect 
 the burden." The servants did not, however, so 
 readily yield the independence of their separate 
 table and the matter was dropped. It also troubled 
 Emerson that his roof sheltered so few people and 
 he invited the Alcotts to make their home with him, 
 a catastrophe averted by the good sense of Mrs. 
 
'' flDan, tbe IReformer/' 105 
 
 Alcott. But in the main he was content to fulfil and 
 not destroy the law in even the simple matter of 
 family organisation. Thoreau he left to his hut, 
 Ripley to his farm, without undue expostulation or 
 supercilious thanksgiving that he was not as they, 
 but with a fixed determination to go his individual 
 way according to his individual judgment, which on 
 the whole accorded with the judgment of the ma- 
 jority in questions of practical living. 
 
 Mr. Burrell Curtis, who with his brother was one of 
 the Brook Farm boarders, happily describes Emerson 
 as the "sympathising leader and moderating pa- 
 tron" of the reforms that sprang about him, although 
 the moderation was frequently more conspicuous 
 than the leadership. Mr. Curtis looks back to his 
 influence as powerful for good in the years between 
 1835 and 1842 when the young Curtises were fresh 
 from school and ready for high philosophy and lowly 
 tasks. '' His large endowment of cheerful humour, 
 of intellectual acuteness, and of sober common sense 
 did not prevent his holding persistently aloft, in an 
 exceptional degree, the torch of the ideal in every- 
 thing ; and though his thought was usually charac- 
 terised by profundity, comprehensiveness, and severe 
 balance, — albeit it was often too fine-spun and 
 mystical, — he was so sanguine, and so optimistically 
 enamoured of his ideals, as not unfrequently to over- 
 look the exorbitancy and impracticability of some of 
 them. He was an ardent apostle of 'liberty' even 
 to the apparent obeying of one's ' whims' ; but he 
 
io6 IRalpb Malbo JEmcxBon. 
 
 was an equally ardent and strenuous apostle of 
 ' law ' in its highest or most stringent senses. 
 Nature's law (which includes the moral law) ordains 
 liberty also ; and while Emerson stands on the one 
 hand stoutly for freedom, independence, self-reliance, 
 heroism, nay, even inconsistency and nonconformity — 
 he stands on the other hand as piously and im- 
 movably, like a rapt saint, for obedience to natural 
 and moral law. Our coming into contact with this 
 New England 'movement' (called in our time 
 'Transcendentalism '), and especially with its leader 
 and moderator, proved to be the cardinal event of 
 our youth ; and I cannot but think that the seed 
 then sown took such deep root as to flower con- 
 tinuously in our later years, and make us both the 
 confirmed ' Independents ' that we were and are, 
 whilst fully conscious at the same time of the obliga- 
 tion of living in all possible harmony with our fel- 
 lows." This final sentence admirably describes 
 Emerson's conscious and unconscious conduct of life. 
 The utmost possible independence and ''all possible" 
 harmony with his environment formed precisely the 
 goal at which he aimed, and which he came as near 
 to reaching as anyone whose efforts are recorded. 
 
 In the Lecture on the Times read at the end of 
 1 84 1 the subject of reform is again treated and addi- 
 tional emphasis laid on its darker aspects. The fol- 
 lowing passages show the moderator with his wand 
 of leadership held low : 
 
 "The young men who have been vexing society 
 
'' flDan, tbe IReformer/' 107 
 
 for these last years with regenerative methods seem 
 to have made this mistake ; they all exaggerated some 
 special means, and all failed to see that the Reform of 
 Reforms must be accomplished without means. 
 
 ''The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal 
 justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. 
 They are quickly organised 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 ardour 
 what are called the greatest benefits of mankind, 
 are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect 
 us as the insane do. They bite us and we run mad 
 also. 1 think the work of the reformer as innocent 
 as other work that is done around him ; but when 1 
 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 clamour. It is a buzz in 
 the ear. I cannot feel any pleasure in sacrifices which 
 display to me such partiality of character. We do 
 not want actions but men ; not a chemical drop of 
 water, but rain ; the spirit that sheds and showers 
 actions, countless endless actions. . . . Whilst 
 therefore I desire to express the respect and joy I feel 
 before this sublime connection of reforms now in their 
 infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the para- 
 mount duties of self-reliance. . . . We say then 
 
io8 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon. 
 
 that the reforming movement is sacred in its origin ; 
 in its management and details timid and profane. 
 These benefactors hope to raise man by improving 
 his circumstances ; by combination of that which is 
 dead they hope to make something alive. In vain. 
 By new infusions alone of the spirit by which 
 he is made and directed can he be re-made and 
 re-inforced." 
 
 In this attitude of mind lies the explanation of 
 Emerson's apparent inconsistencies. We find him 
 advocating reform and deprecating reforms. In 
 writing to a lady who wanted him to assist in 
 calling a convention for the purpose of agitating the 
 subject of the political rights of women, he said that 
 he did not deny the wrongs of women. If they felt 
 wronged then they were wronged. But he did not 
 like the idea of a public convention called by women, 
 nor did he fancy the idea of women wishing for po- 
 litical rights, and he imagined that ''a woman whom 
 all men would feel to be the best " would decline 
 such privileges if they were offered. Yet on account 
 of his sympathy with all movements of the mind 
 toward individual freedom he allowed his name to be 
 used, expressing privately his regret that the occasion 
 was a public one. When he was urged to join the 
 Brook Farmers, he declared himself an unpromising 
 candidate for any society. ''At the name of a so- 
 ciety," he said, ''all my repulsions play, all my quills 
 rise and sharpen." Yet he wrote in his journal that 
 he approved every wild action of the experimenters. 
 
 I 
 
fi 
 
 flDan, tbe IReformer/' 109 
 
 When he made his first speech on Slavery, in 1837, 
 he spoke strongly for the right of free speech, but 
 feebly against the sin of slavery. It was not until 
 seven years later that his indignation flamed beyond 
 the bounds of his earlier judgment. In his address 
 on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the 
 Negroes in the British West Indies, he depicts the 
 submergence of his milder mood by the passion of 
 human sympathy. It was not a day to be forgotten 
 by those who heard his rich baritone uttering these 
 words : 
 
 ''Forgive me, fellow-citizens, if I own to you, 
 that in the last few days that my attention has been 
 occupied with this history, I have not been able to 
 read a page of it without the most painful compari- 
 sons. Whilst I have read of England, I have thought 
 of New England. Whilst I have meditated in my 
 solitary walks on the magnanimity of the English 
 Bench and Senate, reaching out the benefit of the 
 law to the most helpless citizen in her world wide 
 realm, I have found myself oppressed by other 
 thoughts. As I have walked in the pastures and 
 along the edge of the woods, I could not keep my im- 
 agination on those agreeable figures, for other im- 
 ages that intruded on me. I could not see the great 
 vision of the patriots and senators who have adopted 
 the slave's cause ; they turned their backs on me. 
 No : 1 see other pictures, — of mean men. I see very 
 poor, very ill-clothed, very ignorant men, not sur- 
 rounded by happy friends, — to be plain, — poor black 
 
no IRalpb TKIlalbo JEmereon. 
 
 men of obscure employment as mariners, cooks, or 
 stewards, in ships, yet citizens of this our Common- 
 wealth of Massachusetts, — freeborn as we, — whom 
 the slave-laws of the States of South Carolina, Geor- 
 gia, and Louisiana have arrested in the vessels in which 
 they visited those ports and shut up in jails so long 
 as the vessel remained in port, with the stringent ad- 
 dition, that if the shipmaster fails to pay the costs of 
 this official arrest and the board in jail, these citizens 
 are to be sold for slaves to pay that expense. This 
 man, these men 1 see, and no law to save them. 
 Fellow-citizens this law will not be hushed up any 
 longer." 
 
 After this there came in steady sequence Anti- 
 Slavery speeches of noble and chivalrous tone. And 
 thus it was with all the vital questions of Emerson's 
 day. His reserve, his cautious balancing of opposing 
 sides, his dislike of haste and of misrule, gave a 
 weight to his final judgment that could not have 
 been won in any other way. Ultimately he was 
 found on the side of all enduring measures for the 
 amelioration of evil conditions. The trait to which 
 Mr. Sanborn pays eloquent tribute in the little Beacon 
 Biography which, within its narrow limits, is the best 
 that has been written for Emerson, the trait of 
 ''instinctive prudence which kept him out of com- 
 promising situations, and left so little ground for 
 humiliation and vain regrets," is the trait that made 
 of him the ideal reformer, in whose hands safely 
 could be left the issues of society and government. 
 
 % 
 

n- 
 
 >•'- 
 
 , ;^..o ^o long 
 
 iic stringent ad- 
 
 iis to pay the costs of 
 
 board in jail, these citizens 
 
 laves to pay that expense. This 
 
 ii 1 see, and no law to save them. 
 
 'ti7pn^ this law will not be hushed up any 
 
 Frank B. Sanborn. >, ^^^ ^^^i- 
 
 f^rom a photograph by H. G. Smith, Bostou, x , \ni\ 
 
 'erson's 
 
 r r, 
 
 nosing 
 gave a 
 
 u 
 
 he ^ 
 s for 
 The trait to w^ 
 ..te in the little i. 
 Hi narrow limits, is the I 
 for Emerson, the trait 
 * xh kept him out o** 
 left so little ground 
 is the trait that n 
 in whose hai 
 >ciety and gover 
 
f( 
 
 fIDan, tbe IReformer/' 1 1 1 
 
 '' It was not caution," his old friend says, '' nor cold- 
 ness nor selfish regard, but like the watchful care of 
 a guardian spirit, such as the Demon of Socrates, so 
 much disputed." His followers, like those of Socra- 
 tes, might learn from him to ''become good men and 
 true, capable of doing their duty by house and house- 
 hold, by relations and friends, by city and fellow- 
 citizens." If the conjunction of his name with that 
 of the mighty Athenian should seem presumptuous, 
 one has only to remember that Socrates also was 
 once ''a young man in a library," a young artist, 
 convinced of his commission to promote the intel- 
 lectual and moral improvement of mankind. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE DIAL. 
 
 WITH this attitude toward unassimilated 
 measures of reform, it is not strange that 
 Emerson regarded the project of a Trans- 
 cendental magazine with some distrust beneath his 
 sincere sympathy with the aims of its founders. No 
 one, in fact, was so strongly impressed by its pos- 
 sibilities as to wish to assume personal responsibility 
 for it, and it was at least a year after it was first sug- 
 gested as a practicable scheme before the first number 
 was published. Its establishment grew out of numer- 
 ous discussions among the members of the Transcen- 
 dental Club who desired an organ through which 
 they could speak their message to the outer world. 
 This club, which was called at first the ''Sympo- 
 sium," was merely an informal gathering of a few 
 very earnest people who met together to talk about 
 the subjects in which they all were interested. These 
 people, among them Theodore Parker, Margaret Ful- 
 ler, Emerson, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, and 
 Elizabeth Peabody, were, according to the prospectus 
 
 112 
 
ZbcMal 113 
 
 of The Dial, possessed in common of *'the love of 
 intellectural freedom and the hope of social pro- 
 gress," and were '' united by sympathy of spirit, not 
 by agreement in speculation." Emerson repudiated 
 the idea held by many outsiders that some move- 
 ment in literature, philosophy, or religion was on 
 foot or even in the air. " There was no concert," he 
 said, ''only here and there two or three men or 
 women who read and wrote, each alone, with un- 
 usual vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having 
 fallen upon Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, 
 then on Carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy. Other- 
 wise, their education and reading were not marked, 
 but had the American superficialness, and their 
 studies were solitary." The order of the meetings 
 as described in one of Alcott's Conversations was of 
 an extreme simplicity. There was no chairman, but 
 the senior member took precedence to the extent of 
 inviting the other members to make remarks, and 
 Mr. Alcott artlessly adds: " 1 believe there was seldom 
 an inclination on the part of any to be silent." There 
 appears, however, to have been singularly little self- 
 confidence on the part of all concerned in The Dial, 
 Margaret Fuller writes shortly before its publication, 
 '*We cannot show high culture and I doubt about 
 vigorous thought," and she expected, in accepting 
 the post of editor, to write but little, to hazard only 
 ''a few critical remarks, or an unpretending chalk- 
 sketch now and then." The spirit in which the 
 attempt was made is defined by Emerson in the 
 
 8 
 
114 IRalpb TKIlalbo lEmerson^ 
 
 introductory article of the first number, with all 
 his habitual regard for exact statement, though with 
 less than his habitual distinction of style: 
 
 '*The Editors to the Reader. 
 
 *'We invite the attention of our countrymen to 
 a new design. Probably not quite unexpected or 
 unannounced will our journal appear, though small 
 pains have been taken to secure its welcome. Those 
 who have immediately acted in editing the present 
 number can not accuse themselves of any unbecom- 
 ing forwardness in their undertaking, but rather of a 
 backwardness, when they remember how often in 
 many private circles the work was projected, how 
 eagerly desired, and only postponed because no indi- 
 vidual volunteered to combine and concentrate the 
 free-will offerings of many co-operators. With some 
 reluctance the present conductors of this work have 
 yielded themselves to the wishes of their friends, 
 finding something sacred and not to be withstood in 
 the importunity which urged the production of a new 
 journal in a new spirit. 
 
 ''As they have not proposed themselves to the 
 work, neither can they lay any the least claim to an 
 option or determination of the spirit in which it is 
 conceived, or to what is peculiar in the design. In 
 that respect, they have obeyed, though with great 
 joy, the strong current of thought and feeling, which, 
 for a few years past, has led many sincere persons in 
 New England to make new demands on literature and 
 to reprobate that rigour of our conventions of religion 
 
ZbcWinl 115 
 
 and education which is turning us to stone, which 
 renounces hope, which looks only backward, which 
 asks only such a future as the past, which suspects 
 improvement and holds nothing so much in horror 
 as new views and the dreams of youth. 
 
 '' With these terrors the conductors of the present 
 journal have nothing to do, — not even so much as a 
 word of reproach to waste. They know that there 
 is a portion of the youth and of the adult population 
 of this country who have not shared them; who 
 have, in secret or in public, paid their vows to truth 
 and freedom; who love reality too well to care for 
 names; and who live by a faith too earnest and too 
 profound to suffer them to doubt the eternity of its 
 object, or to shake themselves free from its authority. 
 Under the fictions and customs which occupied 
 others, these have explored the Necessary, the Plain, 
 the True, the Human, and so gain a vantage-ground 
 which commands the history of the past and present. 
 
 '' No one can converse much with different classes 
 of society in New England without remarking the 
 progress of a revolution. Those who share in it 
 have no external organisation, no badge, no creed, 
 no name. They do not vote, or print or even meet 
 together. They do not know each others' faces or 
 names. They are united only in a common love of 
 truth and love of its work. They are of all condi- 
 tions and constitutions. Of these acolytes, if some 
 are happily born and well-bred, many are, no doubt, 
 ill dressed, ill placed, ill made, with as many scars of 
 
ii6 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon. 
 
 hereditary vice as other men. Without pomp, with- 
 out trumpet, in lonely and obscure places, in solitude, 
 in servitude, in compunctions and privations, trudg- 
 ing beside the team in the dusty road, or drudging a 
 hireling in other men's cornfields, schoolmasters v/ho 
 teach a few^ children rudiments for a pittance, minis- 
 ters of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone 
 women in dependent condition, matrons and young 
 maidens, rich and poor, beautiful and hard-favoured, 
 without concert or proclamation of any kind, they 
 have silently given in their several adherence to a 
 new hope, and in all companies do signify a greater 
 trust in the nature and resources of man than the 
 laws or the popular opinions will well allow. 
 
 '' This spirit of the time is felt by every individual 
 with some difference — to each one casting its light 
 upon the objects nearest to his temper and habits of 
 thought: to one coming in the form of special reforms 
 in the state; to another in modifications of the vari- 
 ous callings of men, and the customs of business; to 
 a third, opening a new scope for literature and art; 
 to a fourth, in philosophical insight; to a fifth, in the 
 vast solitudes of prayer. It is in every form a protest 
 against usage, and a search for principles. In all its 
 movements it is peaceable, and in the very lowest 
 marked with a triumphant success. Of course it 
 rouses the opposition of all which it judges and con- 
 demns; but it is too confident in its tone to compre- 
 hend an objection, and so builds no outworks for 
 possible defence against contingent enemies. It has 
 
Zl)C 2)iaL 1 1 7 
 
 the step of Fate, and goes on existing like an oak or 
 a river, — because it must. 
 
 '' In literature this influence appears not yet in 
 new books so much as in the higher tone of criti- 
 cism. The antidote to all narrowness is the com- 
 parison of the record with nature, which at once 
 shames the record, and stimulates to new attempts. 
 Whilst we look at this, we wonder how any book 
 has been thought worthy to be preserved. There 
 is somewhat in all life untranslatable into language. 
 He who keeps his eye on that will write better 
 than others, and think less of his writing and of 
 all writing. Every thought has a certain imprison- 
 ing, as well as uplifting quality, and, in proportion to 
 its energy on the will, refuses to become an object 
 of intellectual contemplation. Thus, what is great 
 usually slips through our fingers; and it seems won- 
 derful how a lifelike word ever comes to be written. 
 If our ournal shares the impulses of the time, it can 
 not now prescribe its own course. It can not fore- 
 tell in orderly propositions what it shall attempt. All 
 criticism should be poetic, unpredictable; supersed- 
 ing, as every new thought does, all foregone thoughts, 
 and making a new light on the whole world. Its 
 brow is not wrinkled with circumspection, but serene, 
 cheerful, adoring. It has all things to say, and no 
 less than all the world for its final audience. 
 
 ''Our plan embraces much more than criticism; 
 were it not so, our criticism would be nought. Every- 
 thing noble is directed on life, and this is. We do 
 
ii8 IRalpb Malt)0 lemereon* 
 
 not wish to say pretty or curious things, or to reiterate 
 a few propositions in varied forms, but, if we can, to 
 give expression to that spirit which lifts men to a 
 higher platform, restores to them the religious senti- 
 ment, brings them worthy aims and pure pleasures, 
 purges the inward eye, makes life less desultory, and, 
 through raising man to the level of nature, takes 
 away its melancholy from the landscape, and recon- 
 ciles the practical with the speculative powers. 
 
 ''But perhaps we are telling our little story too 
 gravely. There are always great arguments at hand 
 for a true action, even for the writing of a few pages. 
 There is nothing but seems near it, and prompts it, — 
 the sphere in the ecliptic, the sap in the apple-tree, 
 every fact, every appearance, seem to persuade to it. 
 
 "Our means correspond with the ends we have 
 indicated. As we wish, not to multiply books, but 
 to report life, our resources are not so much the pens 
 of practised writers, as the discourse of the living, 
 and the portfolios which friendship has opened to us. 
 From the beautiful recesses of private thought; from 
 the experience and hope of spirits which are with- 
 drawing from all old forms, and seeking in all that is 
 new somewhat to meet their inappeasable longings; 
 from the secret confession of genius afraid to trust 
 itself to aught but sympathy; from the conversation 
 of fervid and mystical pietists; from tear-stained dia- 
 ries of sorrow and passion; from the manuscripts of 
 young poets; and from the records of youthful taste 
 commenting on old works of art, — we hope to draw 
 
ZbcMal 119 
 
 thoughts and feelings which being alive can impart 
 life. 
 
 '' And so with diligent hands and good intent we 
 set down our Dial on the earth. We wish it may 
 resemble that instrument in its celebrated happiness, 
 that of measuring no hours but those of sunshine. 
 Let it be one cheerful, rational voice amidst the 
 din of mourners and polemics. Or to abide by our 
 chosen image, let it be such a dial, not as the dead 
 face of a clock, — hardly, even, such as the gnomon 
 in a garden, — but rather such a Dial as is the Garden 
 itself in whose leaves and flowers and fruits the sud- 
 denly awakened sleeper is instantly apprised, not 
 what part of dead time, but what state of life and 
 growth, is now arrived and arriving." 
 
 In the group of chief contributors, a group that 
 at this time formed an important part of Emerson's 
 milieu, Alcott holds, perhaps, the most prominent 
 ' place and presents, certainly, the most pictorial and 
 peculiar figure. At the meetings of the Club he was 
 among the members least inclined to silence. He 
 had many thoughts and opinions in common with 
 Emerson, but held them nebulously, and, unless he 
 could have speech for his medium, he was practically 
 helpless to convey them. Emerson pressed him to 
 let go his fantastic yet curiously intelligent and far- 
 sighted schemes for the education of the human race, 
 and write, but when he did write not even so loyal 
 a supporter as Emerson could find many of what he 
 called the ''anchylosed" pages good reading. Yet 
 
I20 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon* 
 
 with his friends Alcott seems to have had an almost 
 irresistible charm. Mr. Woodbury's fine description 
 of him at the high tide of his personal influence gives 
 a certain reality to his place in Emerson's mind; so 
 difficult to appreciate at the distance of more than 
 half a century: 
 
 ''Who that met him in the conversa:{ioni which 
 he made so popular can forget the experience; the 
 master's ' solar face ' framed in that wealth of hair in 
 which the white breath of his soul had been caught 
 and kept; his pleasant fervours; his irresistible hyper- 
 boles; his colours, dilatations, magniloquence, glori- 
 ous soarings to the great might-have-been; sublime 
 and ideal chimeras ; the winning wilfulness with 
 which he presented a sometimes erroneous philoso- 
 phy; his pictures, delicate rather than distinct, and 
 somewhat bleached as if conceived amid etiolated 
 conditions; his fugitive answerings, orphic, subtle, 
 like quicksilver, and even when merely amoebasan, 
 the participants having dropped out, and the ground 
 beneath sounding hollow to every ear but his, so 
 surpassingly complete and master-like, always satis- 
 fying the questioner, who enjoyed if he could not 
 acquiesce." 
 
 Theodore Parker, to whose sturdy English and 
 aggressive spirituality The Dial owed a large part of 
 its meagre popularity, stood at the other end of the 
 line from Alcott. A great student, acquiring with 
 avidity, but failing somewhat in original discern- 
 ment; a notable orator in the conventional sense of 
 
ZbcWial 121 
 
 the word, finding it easy to weep and to make 
 others weep; an uncompromising moralist without 
 the poetic apprehension of the source and signifi- 
 cance of morals; his thundering virtue and his ex- 
 uberant sentiment repelled Emerson as Alcott's vast 
 idealism attracted him. Nevertheless, although he 
 was never able to regard Parker with that rare and 
 deep affection accorded to the few friends he re- 
 ceived as intimates, Emerson analysed his character 
 with justice and insight. 
 
 '' His commanding merit as a reformer," he 
 wrote of him after his death, "is this, that he in- 
 sisted beyond all men in pulpits that the essence 
 of Christianity is 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 
 gloss over municipal corruptions, or private intem- 
 perance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or 
 unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the rob- 
 bery 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 a 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." No doubt the absence of 
 aesthetic preoccupations and what Dr. Chadwick has 
 called the ''flat-footed, downright fashion of his 
 mind " formed the most obvious barrier between 
 Parker's intelligence and Emerson's, but beyond 
 
122 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 
 
 these the ''one fault " to which Emerson referred 
 in the same memorial speech, the lack of measure, 
 made a radical division. " He overestimated his 
 friends — I may well say it — and sometimes vexed 
 them with the importunity of his good opinion 
 whilst they knew better the ebb which follows un- 
 founded praise." It is significant that The Dial's 
 most acceptable contributor from the popular point 
 of view should have been one so little acceptable to 
 Emerson, with precisely the reverse condition in the 
 case of Alcott, a friend whom Emerson certainly did 
 not underestimate, and who, according to Dr. Hig- 
 ginson, was by all odds the least popular of the 
 writers for the new magazine. Between the two 
 lay a body of talent decidedly above the average. 
 George Ripley, who undertook the business man- 
 agement and was active in the organisation of the 
 scheme, was Parker's close friend and sympathetic 
 with his aims and ideas. He was a professional 
 writer in more than one sense, the management of 
 words as tools of expression coming easily to him. 
 His criticisms are marked by the instinctive mental 
 revision to which a writer may be born, but the 
 secret of which can never be wholly imparted. He 
 was characterised by Carlyle as ''the Socinian min- 
 ister, who left his pulpit in order to reform the world 
 by cultivating onions," and it is quite possible that 
 he will be longer known as the organiser of Brook 
 Farm than as a writer. 
 
 His principal associate on The Dial was Margaret 
 
.') 1 w^ I I I 1 I >^( 
 
 rcierred 
 
 isure, 
 
 cl his 
 
 /exed 
 
 inion 
 
 )ws un- 
 
 . that The Dials 
 
 ntributor from the popular point 
 
 ave been one so little acceptable to 
 
 precisely the reverse condition in the 
 
 \lcott, a friend whom Emerson certainly did 
 
 not underestimate, and who, according to Dr. Hig- 
 
 i, was by all odds the least popular of the 
 
 ^ for the ne^ Between the two 
 
 body of-t' Bromon /llcotU...r^ the average. 
 
 ^ From a photograph. 
 
 pir.L. *^ ' ness man- 
 
 ui aiiu ••->" of the 
 
 •npathetic 
 fessional 
 ment of 
 to him 
 rked by the i tive mei 
 
 ro which a writer may be born, but the 
 •hirh rnn never be wholly imparted. 
 
 ■o... .J C'^rW\c^ ,he Socinian n 
 
 u\. ,>..i :..r \r^ feform the v^'< 
 
 iiite possible i 
 organiser of ^' 
 
 ' tu Dial was M: 
 
ZhcWml 123 
 
 Fuller, a remarkable member of the Transcendental 
 circle, born some fifty years too early to come into 
 the now ample reward of " women's work " in litera- 
 ture and scholarship. The wasteful New England 
 of her youth and prime poured her unusual talents 
 on the bare earth as David poured out the water 
 brought at the peril of life from the well of Bethle- 
 hem. Her name is no longer interesting as a maker 
 of literature, yet literature of a singular excellence 
 she undoubtedly made. Mr. Higginson's sympa- 
 thetic biography shows her temperament in the light 
 of common day, and it is a temperament to reward 
 study. By the side of Emerson, whom she ardently 
 admired and dauntlessly criticised, she holds her 
 own both in thought and feeling. Her unwillingness 
 to confine her tastes and sympathies to the meagre 
 best prescribed by him undoubtedly accounts in part 
 for the dissipation of her energies. She had neither 
 his severe capacity for ignoring what was away from 
 his work, nor for deciding definitely what work was 
 to be invariably and exclusively followed as the 
 Path, the Way, of individual salvation. Sisterly 
 sacrifices and the bearing of many burdens not her 
 own persistently interfered with her intellectual pur- 
 poses, and her editorship of The Dial is a conspicu- 
 ous instance of her generous, but at times, certainly, 
 excessive zeal. She could not bring absolute faith 
 to the favourite Transcendental doctrine that being 
 was better than doing. The contrast between the 
 life of Socrates, the thinker, and that of Jesus who 
 
124 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon* 
 
 preached in the field, plucking ears of corn on the 
 Sabbath day, led her to question if it were not 
 deeper and truer to live in action than in thought. 
 Not less impatient than Emerson of futile and child- 
 ish methods in reform her curiosity extended as his 
 did not, to interrogation of the facts of ignorance 
 and vice and misery. Her mysticism was worn as a 
 garment merely, and the firm body of her intellect 
 moved most freely when she threw off its entangling 
 folds. If she was eager and theoretic she was also 
 dispassionate and discriminating, and she insisted 
 upon a decent background of scholarship for her 
 literary performance. The picture of her solitary 
 study in the Harvard College Library, the only 
 woman who had up to that time ventured within 
 its precincts for references necessary to the satisfac- 
 tory accomplishment of a literary task, suggests 
 the enterprise of spirit and her independence of 
 judgment. 
 
 Her literary work, like that of George Eliot, began 
 with translations from the German, and when she 
 was twenty-five she thought of trying whether she 
 had ''the hand to paint as well as the eye to see." 
 If ''the wild gnomes " would but keep from her with 
 their shackles of care for bread she thought she 
 might write into fictitious shape what she knew of 
 human nature, inspired thereto by the novels of 
 George Sand. She never got so far, but the imagin- 
 ation that busies itself with these types of partly 
 developed New England genius, pressed into strange 
 
 i 
 
ZhcWxal 125 
 
 aspects by the restrictions on one side and the op- 
 portunities on the other of their environment, finds a 
 certain reward in conjecturing the farthest flight her 
 capabilities under more favouring conditions might 
 have made. Not less typically womanly than Marian 
 Evans, she was at once less simple and less pedan- 
 tic, and while it is impossible to think of a Middle- 
 march as under any circumstances issuing from her 
 pen, it must also be admitted that she seldom wrote 
 anything so dull or so didactic as Theophrastus Such. 
 The work she put into The Dial was most of it 
 hastily prepared and represents only the crude idea 
 unmellowed by revision. Read as a whole it is sur- 
 prisingly sound and astute, however, and true to a 
 high critical standard. 
 
 If Alcott may be said vaguely to stand for phi- 
 losophy, Parker for practical morals, and Margaret 
 Fuller for criticism, Henry Thoreau must represent 
 science on its most engaging side. He brought to 
 the magazine a continuous record of facts, delicately 
 observed and poetically described. He was a loving 
 reader of the best poetry of the past and was deeply 
 saturated with the spirit of the Elizabethan period, 
 but when he came to his own work he found it to 
 lie not in libraries but in the woods. Like nearly all 
 of his collaborators, he has given expression in his 
 writings to sentiments and opinions identical with 
 those held by Emerson. For example, in 1836, a 
 year before the lecture on The American Scholar 
 was delivered, we find him declaring that although 
 
126 IRalpb Malbo Emereon* 
 
 Americans had rejected the tea of Great Britain that 
 country still supplied them with food for the mind, 
 and that few American authors were content to write 
 of the homely robin redbreast and the straggling 
 rail-fences of their native land. His superficial re- 
 semblance to Emerson deepened the impression of 
 his indebtedness to the influence of that dominating 
 mind, but his passionate interrogation of the details 
 of external nature led him into paths upon which 
 Emerson declined to wander. He was that rare 
 combination of naturalist and poet, an ''outdoor 
 man," with an inward glance at the soul. His was 
 a classical temper united to the eye of an Indian. 
 His skill of hand gave him superiority to ''things" 
 without the contempt for them so often expressed 
 by the abstract thinker, so pungently expressed by 
 Emerson himself in his memorable phrase: "Things 
 are in the saddle and ride mankind." 
 
 Therefore, although it is said that Thoreau's mode 
 of speaking and his intonation caught the trick of 
 Emerson's so nearly that the two could hardly be 
 separated in conversation, his mind did not catch 
 the peculiar flavour of Emerson's but developed one 
 unique and delectable, as different from that of others 
 as wild fruit is from the cultivated. 
 
 With this cluster of talented young writers, all in 
 their fourth decade except Thoreau who was only 
 three and twenty, each different from the rest in all 
 but earnestness and general direction of purpose, 
 there was every reason to predict for The Dial a 
 
.LI ^»^^i 
 
 ,t Britain thai 
 
 the mind, 
 
 It to write 
 
 igling 
 
 il re- 
 
 .IppnPi . . '" of 
 
 juess to *'' • that dominating 
 
 but his i^ i.iierrogation of the details 
 
 ernal nature led him into paths upon which 
 Fmer<;on declined to wander. He was that rare 
 .lion of naturalist and poet, an outdoor 
 man • with an inward^ glance at the soul. His was 
 a clissical temper united to the eye of an Indian. 
 His skill of ^^■"MenPV-DvJ'fiorm'iiioTiiy to things 
 
 "thftllt '' From a itid engraving. ' eXpreSSeO 
 
 . essed by 
 
 t>y the ab^ ,.,^i„g, 
 
 Emerson him 
 
 » the j„ 
 
 tusmode 
 
 me trick of 
 rly that the two could hardly be 
 onversation, 1 nd did not catcl. 
 
 llavour of ' hut developed 
 
 ti a delectabk , lerent from that of ot 
 
 a lit is fror- *''" cultivated. 
 
 this cluster oi talented young writers, 
 ,, decade except Thoreau who was 
 
 venty, each different from the rest . 
 ;s and general direction of pur 
 ^;ry reason to predict for Th, 
 
 V 
 
Zbc'Binl 127 
 
 brighter future than those most interested in it fore- 
 saw, and while their doubtful prognostications were 
 sanctioned by the outcome, it is impossible to ac- 
 count for the failure of The Dial to command a pub- 
 lic on the ground of uninteresting subject matter or 
 a low literary standard. 
 
 When in 1882 it was proposed to issue a reprint 
 of the magazine, George William Curtis wrote of it 
 in the following eulogistic but discriminating strain : 
 
 ''There had been nothing like it in this country, 
 and if Schiller's Horen may have aimed as high, there 
 were not the same favouring circumstances, so that 
 The Dial remains unique in periodical literature. Its 
 purpose was the most varied expression of the best, 
 the most cultivated, and the freest thought of the 
 time, and was addressed to those only who were 
 able to find ' entertainment ' in such literature. There 
 were no baits for popularity. In the modern familiar 
 phrase, each number was a symposium of the most 
 accomplished minds in the country ... it is 
 the memorial of an intellectual impulse which the 
 national life has never lost." 
 
 As such a memorial alone The Dial still deserves 
 attention and certainly no recorder of Emerson's in- 
 dividual effort can afford to ignore the picture it pre- 
 sents of his intellectual surroundings. The puzzle 
 for the modern reader is to analyse the quality by 
 which he was lifted out of them into permanence. 
 
 A month before its appearance The Dial could 
 boast of but thirty subscribers, and upon this insecure 
 
128 IRalpb Malbo lemereon. 
 
 basis it was brought into the world with a fine dis- 
 regard of consequences. Its first number was re- 
 ceived by those who contributed to it in much the 
 same spirit they had shown in forwarding the pro- 
 ject. In place of the elation commonly attending the 
 birth of a printed organ of cherished ideas — such ela- 
 tion as the young Preraphaslites felt in contemplating 
 the Germ, for example, — much dissatisfaction was 
 expressed. Margaret Fuller wrote to Emerson, '' I 
 feel myself how far it is from the eaglet motion I 
 wanted. I suffer in looking over it now." Alcott 
 complained in an Orphic outburst : 'Mt measures not 
 the meridian but the morning ray ; the nations wait 
 for the gnomon that shall mark the broad noon." 
 And Emerson wrote to Carlyle that it contained 
 *' scarce anything considerable or even visible." 
 
 Yet it contained among other things Charles Emer- 
 son's Notes from the Journal of a Scholar, in which the 
 family likeness existing among the minds of the Em- 
 ersons is conspicuous, Thoreau's fine poem Sympathy, 
 and Dwight's Religion of Beauty striking at the out- 
 set an Emersonian note: *'The devout mind is a 
 lover of nature. Where there is beauty it feels at 
 home." It also contained the first instalment of the 
 Orphic Sayings by Mr. Alcott, which, according to 
 Mr. Frothingham, were '*an amazement to the un- 
 initiated and an amusement to the profane," but 
 which Emerson himself pronounced the distinguish- 
 ing feature of the new journal — as beyond all dispute 
 they were ! Except for the extraordinary rhetoric of 
 
^beDiaL 129 
 
 these, the general impression was of a literary maga- 
 zine of a more than usually serious tone but without 
 idiosyncrasy. 
 
 The second number counted among its notable 
 articles Emerson's Thoughts on Modern Literature be- 
 ginning with this characteristic passage : 
 
 ''There is no better illustration of the laws by 
 which the world is governed than Literature. There 
 is no luck in it. It proceeds by Fate. Every Script- 
 ure proceeds out of a greater or less depth of thought, 
 and this is the measure of its effect. The highest 
 class of books are those which express the moral ele- 
 ment ; the next, works of imagination ; and the next, 
 works of science ; — all dealing in realities, — and what 
 ought to be, what is, and what appears. These in 
 proportion to the truth and beauty they involve re- 
 main ; the rest perish." 
 
 Another article in the same number, The Art of 
 Life — The Scholar's Calling, is attributed by Mr. 
 Cooke to F. H. Hedge, but in spirit, if not in form, 
 it bears Emerson's impress to such a degree as to de- 
 ceive the unwary, as the following extracts will serve 
 to demonstrate: '* Of self-culture, as of all other 
 things worth seeking, the price is a single devotion 
 to that object, — a devotion which shall exclude all 
 aims and ends that do not directly or indirectly tend 
 to promote it. . . . Much that he has been ac- 
 customed to consider as most desirable, he will have 
 to renounce. Much that other men esteem as high- 
 est and follow after as the grand reality, he will have 
 
I30 IRalpb XKHal&o lEmer^on* 
 
 to forego. No emoluments must seduce him from 
 the rigour of his devotion. No engagements beyond 
 the merest necessities of life must interfere with his 
 pursuit. A meagre economy must be his income. 
 ' Spare fast that oft with the gods doth diet ' must 
 be his fare. The rusty coat must be his badge. Ob- 
 scurity must be his distinction. . . . In self-cul- 
 ture lies the ground and condition of all culture. 
 Not those who seem most earnest in promoting the 
 culture of Society do most effectually promote it. 
 We have reformers in abundance, but few who in 
 the end, will be found to have aided essentially the 
 cause of human improvement ; either because they 
 have failed to illustrate in themselves the benefits 
 they wished to inculcate, or because there is a ten- 
 dency in mankind to resist overt efforts to guide and 
 control them. The silent influence of example, 
 where no influence is intended is the true reformer." 
 For this number Emerson furnished a long review 
 oi New Poetry by William Ellery Channing, the first 
 part of IVood Notes, a short poem Silence, and two or 
 three notices of books of the month. Much of the 
 remaining prose is so thoroughly saturated with the 
 spirit which has come to be identified with him, as 
 to seem to the casual reader the work of one pen and 
 that pen Emerson's, not always at its best to be sure, 
 but always announcing a consistent body of belief 
 One more extract, in this case from a Letter to a 
 Theological Student, written by Mr. Ripley, to indi- 
 cate the pervasiveness of the Emerson ideal : 
 
ZhcWial 131 
 
 ''No man can preach well unless he coins his 
 own flesh and blood, the living, palpitating fibre of 
 his very heart, into the words which he utters from 
 the pulpit. If he speaks what he has learned from 
 others, what he finds in books, what he thinks it de- 
 corous and seemly that a man should say in his 
 place, he may indeed be a good mechanic in the pul- 
 pit, he may help to hand down a worm-eaten stereo- 
 typed system of theology, to those who have no 
 more heart for it than he has himself; but a true 
 prophet of God, a man baptised with the Holy Ghost 
 and with fire he can never be." 
 
 Even such fragmentary examples show how 
 closely many of Emerson's associates were in sym- 
 pathy with his opinions, and lead us to the one con- 
 clusion, that his opinions have outlasted theirs in 
 influence because the fabric into which he wove 
 them was so skilfully made, because his style, in 
 short was so admirably adapted to his purpose and 
 so artistically composed. 
 
 Yet even he did not escape the onslaught of the 
 scoffers against the early numbers of the innocent 
 Dial, and its more eccentric contributors were butts 
 of unholy mirth from all directions, the Orphic Say- 
 ings opening a vein of dazzling promise to the toiling 
 miners of the newspaper world and furnishing them 
 with ''copy" for continuous use. Mr. Higginson 
 tells us that the serene philosopher showed himself 
 worthy of his title by composedly collecting and 
 labelling the worst parodies of his writings with the 
 
132 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 
 
 precision and neatness characteristic of him and 
 without apparent annoyance. 
 
 Possibly because the editor tried to avoid mishaps 
 by bringing the magazine into harmony with more 
 conventional tastes, the third number, although Em- 
 erson contributed three poems and three prose ar- 
 ticles and Lowell a sonnet, showed a decided falling 
 off in the quality of its contents. It was made for- 
 ever memorable, however, by the appearance on its 
 pages of Emerson's poem The Sphinx, in which his 
 wise spiritual questionings leap into a form so spon- 
 taneous and vital, so individual and robust, so in- 
 stinct with the force and charm of antique aspects 
 of art, as to make us keenly realise the absence of 
 aesthetic standards and interests in a public that did 
 not instantly rise to the recognition of a new poet 
 different in kind from any who had gone before. 
 There was nothing feverish in the admirations of the 
 Transcendentalists. The friends of Morris and Ros- 
 setti might be exulting at Oxford with strange capers 
 over the discovery that '' Topsy " was a ''big poet " 
 but The Sphinx found no reader to dance with ab- 
 original glee at the voice of the living Spirit. Yet 
 the poem flashed and darted over the dull pages 
 of The Dial's third number, as sportive in its genius 
 as some creature of the woods abandoning itself to 
 the joy of motion in unvisited solitudes. The images 
 chosen present a picture purely the fruit of a power- 
 ful imagination. None of Thoreau's native birds and 
 rustic fences enter into its composition. It carries 
 
Zhc Wxal 133 
 
 the reader into the vast desert where the drowsy 
 Sphinx broods over her problem with creation gam- 
 bolling about her. Why indeed should a poet 
 trouble and divert his mind with Brook Farms and 
 other systems of education, when his inner vision 
 dwells on these enchanting phantoms of the mind: 
 
 Erect as a sunbeam 
 Upspringeth the palm 
 The elephant browses 
 Undaunted and calm; 
 In beautiful motion 
 The thrush plies his wings, 
 Kind leaves of his covert! 
 Your silence he sings. 
 
 The waves unashamed, 
 In difference sweet. 
 Play glad with the breezes, 
 Old playfellows meet. 
 
 The deep sense of mystery and wonder by which 
 the poem is pervaded is reminiscent of no other 
 poet. The grotesque shapes and curious conceits 
 have in them no suggestion of artifice; they are the 
 natural outcome of an imagination that sees symbolic 
 pictures without the aid of external objects. One 
 of the Orphic Sayings in the same number of The 
 Dial with The Sphinx declares that '' to apprehend a 
 miracle, a man must first have wrought it; he knows 
 only what he has lived and interprets facts in the 
 light of his experience." In some prior existence, 
 then, the quiet poet of Concord must have lived no- 
 madic under the wide Egyptian heavens, working 
 
134 IRalpb Malbo jemereom 
 
 the vastness and splendour of nature into his art with 
 such angular forms as the Egyptian decorator used 
 in painting his mummy cases, and regarding the ele- 
 ments as comrades of the desert places. The penul- 
 timate stanza of The Sphinx as it was printed in The 
 Dial emphasises the extraordinary mood of exuberant 
 fancy in which the poem was conceived, the third 
 and fourth lines reading: 
 
 She hopped into the baby's eyes, 
 She hopped into the moon. 
 
 The revised version has gained inexpressibly in 
 beauty, but has lost the artlessness that suggests the 
 atmosphere of primeval myth in which the whole 
 thought is enveloped. The monster, hopping from 
 her lethargic dream to the child's eyes and to the 
 lovely lady of the heavens, produces an effect of un- 
 earthly strangeness that haunts the mind like the 
 miraculous detail of some ancient fairy story ad- 
 justed through slow ages to the apprehension of 
 countless generations of credulous minds. What 
 strikes one now in reading it is not that its philosophy 
 is Eastern nor its expression of faith inspiring, or its 
 mysticism unintelligible, but that its beauty is divine 
 and indescribable, outside of rules and vivid with 
 genius. After this shining achievement of the pure 
 Transcendentalism which Emerson declared could 
 nowhere exist, the fourth number of The Dial opened 
 with an article on The Unitarian Movement in New 
 England, of a rather dreary character. The pleas- 
 ant humdrum sermonising of Dwight's Ideals of 
 
Every-Day Life and a fantastic attempt on the part 
 of Miss Fuller to depict her own soul as a person 
 bearing the name of Leila offer but a moderate 
 feast of reason, and not until Theodore Parker's 
 Honest Thoughts on Labour, and Emerson's Man, 
 the Reformer, published at the request of the Me- 
 chanic's Apprentice's Library Association before 
 which it had been read, were reached did the reader 
 find anything to cheer him. These two papers 
 stamped the fourth number with distinction, but it 
 was obviously declining in weight and interest and 
 bade fair to justify Carlyle's verdict that it was "too 
 spirit-like, aeriform, auroraborealislike." The editor's 
 difficulties were increasing instead of diminishing 
 with time, and there was no prospect of financial 
 success sufficient even to insure the modest salary 
 she had hoped to draw from the profits. She was 
 not yet ready, however, to confess the attempt a 
 failure, and her second volume opens bravely with 
 her own excellent paper on Goethe, and to the first 
 number she also contributes another prose article 
 and five book reviews, one of them a notice of Low- 
 ell's A Year's Life, which she finds '' superficial, full 
 of obvious cadences and obvious thoughts, but 
 sweet, fluent, in a large style, and breathing the life 
 of religious love." J. A. Saxton's Prophecy — Tran- 
 scendentalism — Progress, occupying nearly forty 
 pages, was perhaps a godsend to an editor anxious 
 to fill space, but it hardly fulfilled the conditions an- 
 nounced to would-be contributors, that all articles 
 
136 IRalpb 'Wnalbo Emerson^ 
 
 accepted must combine individuality of character 
 with vigour and accuracy of style. How difficult to 
 maintain this standard proved is shown by the fact 
 that in the next number Miss Fuller herself was 
 obliged to contribute eighty-six of its one hundred 
 and thirty-five pages. Of the remaining forty-nine 
 Emerson's work filled eighteen, and twelve were 
 given up to Dr. Henry More's poem, Cupid's Conflict, 
 sent by Mr. Alcott in place of the original contribu- 
 tion requested of him. It was obvious that The Dial 
 could not long be continued under such conditions. 
 It is amazing that two more numbers were produced 
 before Miss Fuller sent to Emerson what he must 
 long have been prepared to receive, the news that she 
 was forced to give up the editorship. She wrote with 
 dignity of her unrewarded labours and concluded: 
 
 '' I think perhaps Mr. Parker would like to carry 
 it on even under these circumstances. For him or for 
 you it would be much easier than for me, for you 
 have quiet homes and better health. Of course if 
 you do carry it on, I should like to do anything I 
 can to aid you." 
 
 Emerson finally, with much reluctance, consented 
 to nurse The Dial back to life. He undertook to as- 
 sume the editorship rather than have it ''go into the 
 hands that know not Joseph," and with his usual wis- 
 dom he declined to consider a partnership with Mr. 
 Parker or Mr. Ripley, although he wrote to Carlyle, 
 *Terhaps it is a great folly in me who have little adroit- 
 ness in turning off work to assume this sure vexation. " 
 
Zbc Wial 137 
 
 To the last one of the numbers issued under 
 Margaret Fuller's editorship Mr. Alcott contributed 
 an article of his own which he called Days from a 
 Diary. There had been some delay about publish- 
 ing it, and when it appeared it was prefaced by a 
 note from Alcott in which he makes this supremely 
 candid admission : 
 
 '' The Dial prefers a style of thought and diction 
 not mine, nor can I add to its popularity with its chos- 
 en readers. A fit organ for such as myself is not yet, 
 but is to be. The times require a free speech, a wise 
 humane, and brave sincerity, unlike all examples in 
 literature, of which The Dial is but the precursor. A 
 few years more will give us all we desire — the public 
 all they ask." 
 
 It would not have been strange had he looked 
 with some confidence toward Emerson's editorship 
 for this result although for one cause or another it 
 happened that he himself had but one more contri- 
 bution on the pages of The Dial. As a matter of fact 
 the public asked for something quite different from 
 what either he or Emerson desired, and the list of 
 subscribers to The Dial never reached a total of three 
 hundred names. Hereafter, however, the magazine 
 maintained a standard little lower than the best in 
 the line it followed. It was intimately related to the 
 highest culture of the time in America, and the eight 
 numbers of its last two years furnish a unique illus- 
 tration of the kind of literature in which the jewel of 
 Emerson's genius was set. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE DIAL {Continued). 
 
 EMERSON'S first number of The Dial shows 
 that he was bending to his task with the 
 same energetic efficiency displayed by him 
 in conducting Carlyle's affairs. It opens with his 
 introductory lecture on The Times, read at the 
 Masonic Temple in Boston on December 2, 1841, 
 and this was followed by Thoreau's Natural History 
 of Massachusetts, with the following explanatory 
 note: 
 
 '' We were thinking how we might best celebrate 
 the good deed which the State of Massachusetts 
 has done in procuring the Scientific Survey of the 
 Commonwealth, whose result is recorded in these 
 volumes, when we found a near neighbour and 
 friend of ours, dear also to the Muses, a native and 
 an inhabitant of Concord, who readily undertook to 
 give us such comments as he had made on these 
 books, and better still, notes of his own conversation 
 with nature in the woods and waters of this town. 
 
 With all thankfulness we begged our friend to lay 
 
 138 
 
ZhcWial 139 
 
 down the oar and fishing-line, which none can handle 
 better, and assume the pen, that Isaak Walton and 
 White of Selborne might not want a successor, nor 
 the fair meadows, to which we also have owed a 
 home and the happiness of many years, their poet. 
 
 Editor of The Dial." 
 
 In this paper, Thoreau steps easily into his place 
 as a writer on nature, the somewhat academic task 
 of reviewing the records of the Scientific Survey 
 interfering but little with his characteristic charm of 
 style in natural description. What Emerson calls his 
 *' conversation with nature " lost none of its spright- 
 liness by its connection with the facts and figures 
 of the conscientious surveyor, and the delightful 
 poetry of certain passages, that on spearing fish, for 
 example, he never surpassed. It was the begin- 
 ning, in America, of the kind of nature-writing which 
 in late years has inundated the magazines, and in 
 Thoreau's case it was the result of a creative imagina- 
 tion working upon the material that lay about him, 
 which has not by any means been true of all his 
 followers. His articles gave The Dial a freshness and 
 an outdoor sweetness which without him it would 
 have lacked, for not even Emerson would have been 
 able to supply that peculiar element tending to such 
 healthful repose of mind and simplicity of mood. 
 
 A very different but an almost equally interesting 
 feature of the magazine under Emerson's management 
 was the series of selections from the oldest ethical and 
 religious writings of men, introduced by a paragraph, 
 
I40 IRalpb Malbo lemerson. 
 
 the prophetic sound of which has already to a de- 
 gree been justified by the course of study adopted 
 by the modern theologian of the advanced school. 
 
 ''Each nation has its bible, more or less pure; 
 none has yet been willing or able in a wise and devout 
 spirit to collate its own with those of other nations, 
 and, sinking the civil-historical and the ritual por- 
 tions, to bring together the grand expressions of the 
 moral sentiment in different ages and races, the rules 
 for the guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of 
 abandonment to the Invisible and Eternal, — a work 
 inevitable sooner or later, and which we hope is to 
 be done by religion and not by literature." 
 
 The first extracts were taken from the Amicable 
 Instructions of Veeshnoo Sarma, and the series was 
 kept up to the end of the magazine, the selections 
 being made by different persons from the Laws of 
 Menu, the Sayings of Confucius, the Preachings of 
 Buddha, the Desatir, the Chinese Four Books, and 
 the Chaldean Oracles. 
 
 Of the forty-three articles and poems comprising 
 Emerson's first number, he himself contributed fif- 
 teen, Margaret Fuller came loyally to his aid with 
 a twenty-six-page review of the winter's entertain- 
 ments, written with such acuteness and breadth of 
 view as to make it still readable and suggestive after 
 an interval of sixty years. It is amusing to find her 
 arguing with all the force of her metropolitan taste 
 against the Boston suspicion of theatrical perform- 
 ances, and contending that the lecture makes but a 
 
'■*-^}i}tm r-^ 
 
-, , U Li I 
 
 tions, 
 
 uiu liic uLual por- 
 
 ic grand expressions of the 
 
 iiUerent ages and races, the rules 
 
 of life, the bursts of piety and of 
 
 It to the Invisible and Eternal, — a work 
 
 inevitable sooner or later, and which we hope is to 
 
 be done by religion and not bv literature.* 
 
 ^ ........ ^Yie selections 
 
 I irom the Laws of 
 
 rgs of 
 
 . and 
 
 e art! 
 
 comprisi • 
 
 iber. 
 
 . iributed i..- 
 
 
 ilv in his aid with 
 
 
 ...er's entertain- 
 
 
 "nd breadth of 
 
 -uii r( 
 
 estive after 
 
 
 ising to find h( r 
 
 
 etropolitan ta^' • 
 
 
 rical pei 
 
 
 lure makes 
 
cold and unpersuasive substitute for the acted drama. 
 Her influence was ardently thrown on the side of 
 what is still the "new movement" in the theatre- 
 going world, and she urged those interested in the 
 elevation of public taste to ''form themselves into 
 committees of direction for the theatre " instead of 
 trying to put it down without anything to take its 
 place more fully than Emerson's beloved Lyceum. 
 The vivacious tone of this article, and the bright 
 incisive description of Fourierism in Emerson's paper 
 on that subject, together with his vivid paper on the 
 Convention of the Friends of Universal Reform, gave 
 the freshness to the magazine which the earlier 
 numbers had lacked, and infused a gay sympathy 
 with good purposes into its somewhat self-con- 
 sciously virtuous point of view. To read and re- 
 member that neither editor nor contributors received 
 a penny's worth of material reward for their efforts 
 is to wonder at the sturdy quality of the edifice built 
 on a foundation of pure disinterested faith in human 
 nature. Yet the intimate human appeal which has 
 been said to constitute the demand of the magazine 
 audience was conspicuously absent. And this, no 
 doubt, was the secret of the slow response to The 
 Dial's merits on the part of even a Massachusetts pub- 
 lic, in whom, as Margaret Fuller frankly complained, 
 the intellectual qualities were developed out of all pro- 
 portion to the emotional qualities. How pleasantly a 
 plain picture of common human interests varies the 
 most admirable idealism is seen in Emerson's sketch 
 
142 IRalpb Malbo lEmereom 
 
 of the old-fashioned New England farmer with his 
 shrewd criticism of the Agricultural Survey's Report 
 and his immovable skepticism concerning the benefits 
 conferred by legislature upon the agriculture of Mass- 
 achusetts. More of such character drawing easily 
 might have turned the fortunes of The Dial. In place 
 of it, papers on literary and social subjects, together 
 with poetry, filled the second number. Emerson 
 had early expressed his conviction that the poetry 
 in The Dial was its most valuable feature, and the 
 very large proportion of poetry to prose in the later 
 years of the magazine illustrates his readiness to carry 
 his theory into practice. The opening article of the 
 second number is an interesting account of Romaic 
 and Rhine ballads by Margaret Fuller, with copious 
 quotations, and in the same number appear eight 
 poems by Thoreau, two by W. E. Channing, and 
 Emerson's Saadi, the last mentioned provoking 
 the reader to ask what it is doing in that galere, 
 with its debonair defiance of the sanction of the 
 moral world, and its outspoken assumption that the 
 poet should keep away from social and national 
 problems: 
 
 Whispered the Muse in Saadi's cot: 
 *' O gentle Saadi, listen not, 
 Tempted by thy praise of wit, 
 Or by thirst and appetite 
 For the talents not thine own, 
 To sons of contradiction. 
 Never, son of eastern morning 
 Follow falsehood, follow scorning, 
 
Jlhc Dial. 143 
 
 Denounce who will, who will deny, 
 And pile the hills to scale the sky; 
 Let theist, atheist, pantheist, 
 Define and wrangle how they list, 
 Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer, — 
 But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer. 
 Unknowing war, unknowing crime, 
 Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme; 
 Heed not what the brawlers say, 
 Heed thou only Saadi's lay. 
 
 ** Let the great world bustle on, 
 
 With war and trade, with camp and town; 
 
 A thousand men shall dig and eat; 
 
 At forge and furnace thousands sweat; 
 
 And thousands sail the purple sea. 
 
 And give or take the stroke of war, 
 
 And crowd the market and bazaar; 
 
 Oft shall war end, and peace return, 
 
 And cities rise where cities burn, 
 
 Ere one man my hill shall climb, 
 
 Who can turn the golden rhyme. 
 
 Let them manage how they may, 
 
 Heed thou only Saadi's lay." 
 
 The poet, then, should let questions of slavery 
 and anti-slavery, temperance and intemperance, 
 women's rights and women's wrongs. Socialism and 
 despotism pass by him, while he minds his rhyme. 
 How grateful Emerson would have been for the 
 mental and moral liberty to follow such a course 
 literally we know from the longing allusions to it, 
 the continual counsel toward it, and the deep appre- 
 ciation of it, scattered through his writings from the 
 beginning to the end of his life. He detested the 
 activity of practical reforms as heartily as William 
 
144 IRalpb Mal&o jemereon* 
 
 Morris detested the active Socialism into which his 
 conscience goaded him, and even the mild and pass- 
 ive Dial bustled on too busily for the tranquillity of 
 mind in which he could work at ease. His judg- 
 ment suggested for the magazine a different tone from 
 that most suited to his own voice in personal utter- 
 ance. He thought it ought to contain '' the best advice 
 on the topics of Government, Temperance, Aboli- 
 tion, Trade, and Domestic Life," and he debated 
 whether it should not be ''a degree nearer to the 
 hodiernal facts " than his own writings were. Thus 
 convinced he published articles on the Hollis Street 
 Council, on English Reformers and American Re- 
 formers, on theologians and systems of theology, 
 and only when he was clothed in the garment of his 
 verse did he cry to the high heavens against the 
 unimportance of all but poetry. In his prose writ- 
 ings, however, he adopted uniformly the poetic view, 
 he looked for relations, and balance, and unity under 
 variety, for harmony and rhythm and all the ele- 
 ments of beautiful design, and if he failed to find 
 them, no amount of excellent intention could make a 
 thing thoroughly right in his eyes. Note, for exam- 
 ple, what he demands in his description of the ideal 
 man in the paper on The Conservative. Here if any- 
 where one might look for partial and practical obser- 
 vation. But looking at the conservative, Emerson 
 saw the whole intention of nature so fragmentarily 
 carried out in the best of us, and, as always, he held 
 this before us for our sane consideration, laying spe- 
 
Margaret Fuller. 
 
 From a photograph by Lawrence. 
 
k^ 
 
Z\)c 2)iaL 145 
 
 cial emphasis on the result of beauty obtained from 
 the perfect adjustment of complementary parts: 
 
 ''And so, whilst we do not go beyond general 
 statements, it may safely be affirmed of these two 
 metaphysical antagonists (Conservatism and Reform) 
 that each is a good half, but an imperfect whole. 
 Each exposes the abuse of the other, but in a true 
 society, in a true man both must combine. Nature 
 does not give the crown of its approbation, namely 
 Beauty, to any action or emblem or actor, but to one 
 which combines both these elements; not to the 
 rock which resists the waves from age to age, nor to 
 the wave which lashes incessantly the rock, but the 
 superior beauty is with the oak which stands with 
 its hundred arms against the storms of a century and 
 gro\ys every year like a sapling; or the river which, 
 ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age 
 to age; or greatest of all, the man who has subsisted 
 for years amid the changes of nature, yet has dis- 
 tanced himself so that when you remember what he 
 was and see what he is, you say, What strides! 
 What a disparity is here! " 
 
 The third number of The Dial's third volume was 
 edited, in Emerson's absence, by Thoreau, and it 
 contains, beside the regular departments, about two 
 thirds the number of contributions boasted by its 
 predecessor, and none of them notable excepting 
 Emerson's lecture on The Transcendent alist and 
 Thoreau's translation of the Prometheus Bound. 
 
 The fourth number, opening with an elaborate 
 
1 46 IRalpb Malbo jemcreom 
 
 descriptive and critical paper on the work of Mr. 
 Alcott, is marked by two contributions, each of 
 unique value for the purposes of any magazine, 
 Transcendental or otherwise. One is an article on 
 George Keats, including the remarks of John Keats 
 upon Milton as scribbled on a fly-leaf of Milton's 
 works; the other a collection of Observations " by 
 Canova translated from Messerini's biography of him. 
 in this number, also, is Emerson's fine paper on 
 Europe and European Books — and the volume closes, 
 not inappropriately, with the lines on friendship ex- 
 tracted from Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose. If the 
 magazine under Emerson's guidance breathed one 
 spirit more than another throughout its pages, it was 
 the kindness of temper and friendliness of tone which 
 marked Emerson's relations, private and public, with 
 the world about him. He could quote with the best 
 of grace Chaucer's scrupulous warning to friendly 
 souls, 
 
 That there be non exceptioune 
 Through changing of intention; 
 That each help each other at her nede, 
 And wisely hele both word and dede, 
 True of meaning, devoid of slouth, 
 For wit is nought without trouth. 
 
 The fourth and last volume of The Dial opens with 
 a long and elaborate discussion of the relative oppor- 
 tunities of men and women, by Margaret Fuller, writ- 
 ten like most of the reformatory articles of The Dial 
 in a moderate and uncontroversial spirit, without the 
 slightest tendency toward the ''screaming" which 
 
Zbc DiaL 147 
 
 Emerson felt to be inseparable from special plead- 
 ing. In fact, among the writings of the present day 
 on the '' Woman Question " Miss Fuller's arguments 
 would have the gentle sound of doves in quiet 
 neighbourhoods, while the freedom she advocated 
 was precisely that for which the most intelligent of 
 her sex have laboured, the freedom to study and to 
 use the opportunities offered by civilisation for the 
 rounding of mind and character into symmetrical and 
 ample forms. Her contribution, and the first part of 
 a formidable review of Social Tendencies, by Charles 
 Lane, left the number sufficiently equipped on the 
 side of social questions, and the remainder of the 
 articles consisted of poetry, essays, and literary re- 
 views. Emerson's Rhea can hardly be compared 
 with The Sphinx or Saadi for unalloyed poetic ele- 
 ments, yet in contrast with the verse that surrounds 
 it there is no lack of glowing imagination in its lines 
 despite their disillusioning theoretic suggestion. His 
 essay on Gifts in the same number has been one 
 of the most widely quoted of his writings, and his 
 criticism on Carlyle is in the first order. Nothing, in 
 its way, could be better than this picture of Carlyle's 
 mind at work with its material: 
 
 ''That morbid temperament has given to his 
 rhetoric a somewhat bloated character, a luxury to 
 many imaginative and learned persons, like a show- 
 ery south wind with its sunbursts and rapid chasing 
 of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its 
 offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes 
 
148 IRalpb lHHalt)o lEmersom 
 
 us often wish some concession were possible on the 
 part of the humourist. Yet it must not be forgotten 
 that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes 
 with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers, — 
 in all this glad and needful venting of his redundant 
 spirits, — he does yet ever and anon, as if catching 
 the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his 
 tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level 
 tone the very word, and then with new glee returns 
 to his game. He is like a lover or an outlaw who 
 wraps up his message in a serenade, which is non- 
 sense to the sentinel but salvation to the ear for 
 which it is meant. He does not dodge the question 
 but gives sincerity where it is due." 
 
 The following passage also must have struck 
 oddly on the ear of the man who all his life ful- 
 minated against poetry and derided the aesthetic 
 faculty : 
 
 '' Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in 
 his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. 
 Yet he is full of rhythm not only in the perpetual 
 melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, 
 and grand returns of his sense and music. What- 
 ever thought or motto has once appeared to him 
 fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him 
 henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper 
 tones and weightier import, now as promise, now 
 as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic rever- 
 beration, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next 
 ages returned the sound." 
 
Zbc Wxnl 149 
 
 From the next number all discussion of social 
 needs and problems was excluded with the exception 
 of Charles Lane's continuation of Sodal Tendencies 
 and his short article on /I Day with the Shakers 
 In A Winter Walk Thoreau's typical mood is 
 delicately, even exquisitely, expressed, and Emer- 
 son's essay on The Comic is ruddy with his finest 
 humour, with that full-blooded delight in the vigor- 
 ous exercise of the mind which he experienced in 
 his best moments and which did not belong to his 
 constitution. Writing in his journal of his lectures 
 he complained of his inability to lay himself out 
 utterly 'Marge, enormous, prodigal," upon each. 
 '' Had 1 such energy that I could rally the lights and 
 mights of sixty hours into twenty, I should hate 
 myself less," he said, and he was right. Nobly 
 conceived and effectively executed as all his finished 
 product is, it is only at rare intervals, and chiefly in 
 his poetry, that his mind seems to spring spon- 
 taneously to its task, poised and muscular and free 
 from weariness, not only powerful but instinct with 
 the consciousness of power. At these times he is 
 on equal terms with the old great masters who went 
 joyously from masterpiece to masterpiece without 
 waiting for nature to renew her nervous forces. 
 From a certain physical languor he needed time and 
 repose and the psychological moment for his self- 
 revelation. The lusty Greek within was imprisoned 
 by the Yankee frailty of body and only occasionally 
 could show his brilliant perfection. But the essay 
 
I50 IRalpb Malbo lemereon^ 
 
 on The Comic breathes hardy health and opulent 
 enjoyment in every line. Where could one find 
 a more enlightening glimpse of Emerson's mental 
 attitude toward his environment of tense ethical 
 effort than here : 
 
 ''There is no joke so true and deep in actual life 
 as when some pure idealist goes up and down 
 among the institutions of society attended by a man 
 who knows the world, and who, sympathising with 
 the philosopher's scrutiny, sympathises also with 
 the confusion and indignation of the detected skulk- 
 ing institutions. His perception of disparity, his eye 
 wandering perpetually from the rule to the crooked 
 lying thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with 
 laughter." 
 
 In this essay, too, as in so many others, we per- 
 ceive Emerson's instantaneous grasp of the pictorial 
 aspect of ideas, the plainer, no doubt, that here they 
 are seen as caricature distinguished by a light facility. 
 The intellect '' compares incessantly the sublime idea 
 with the bloated nothing which pretends to be it, 
 and the sense of disproportion is comedy. " ' ' Among 
 the women in the street, you shall see one whose 
 bonnet and dress are one thing, and the lady herself 
 quite another, wearing withal an expression of meek 
 submission to her bonnet and dress, and another 
 whose dress obeys and heightens the expression of 
 her form." ''No dignity, no learning, no force of 
 character can make any stand against good wit. It 
 is like ice on which no beauty of form, no majesty 
 
Zbc BiaL 151 
 
 of carriage can claim any immunity, — they must 
 walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down 
 they must go, dignity and all." 
 
 These passages and others like them suggest 
 pictures to the mind, literally illustrate the thought, 
 and this always is the case of Emerson in his spon- 
 taneous writing. Nor does he forget to remind the 
 reader that the comic has its relation to his doctrine 
 of unity. There was never a definition closer to 
 the fact than this, so simple and so unendingly 
 suggestive : 
 
 *'The perpetual game of humour is to look with 
 considerate good-nature at every object in existence, 
 aloof, as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it 
 with the eternal whole ; enjoying the figure which 
 each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the 
 unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. 
 Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a 
 horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the 
 connection of things, and contemplate it alone, 
 standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once 
 comic ; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue 
 it from the ludicrous." 
 
 When we consider how constantly his mind 
 dwelt upon the synthesis of nature as the one way 
 to beauty, how he bent upon all relative objects 
 the comprehensive gaze of the artist, how without 
 guidance or inspiration other than came from his 
 own instincts he followed virtue by the flowery 
 path of aesthetic appreciation, we can only echo the 
 
152 IRalpb Malt)o lemereom 
 
 question of his Ode of Beauty which was printed 
 next to his essay on The Comic : 
 
 Who gave thee, O Beauty ! 
 The keys of this breast, 
 To thee who betrayed me 
 To be ruined or blest ? 
 
 and in the final couplet hear the cry of genius for the 
 satisfaction of its need : 
 
 Dread Power, but dear ! if God thou be, 
 Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me ! 
 
 The penultimate number of The Dial abjures 
 almost entirely the intractable subject of reform and 
 devotes itself to such purely literary subjects as 
 the modern drama, the poetry of Homer, Ossian, 
 Chaucer, and the translation of Dante. There is 
 one article, by the faithful Charles Lane, on Brook 
 Farm, such as might appear in any sober-minded 
 magazine of the present day, but that is the only 
 suggestion of iconoclastic influences shadowing The 
 Dial from the body of reconstructive sentiment be- 
 hind its sun-loving editor. 
 
 In the next number the long article on Fourierism 
 by Elizabeth Peabody leads the reader deftly through 
 the mazes of that interesting but complex theme, 
 and a notice of the Herald of Freedom, an anti- 
 slavery journal, by Thoreau, strikes a sharp note of 
 defiance to those whose sympathies ''the unpopular 
 cause of freedom " had not reached. Emerson, also, 
 in his address to The Young American called upon 
 
 1 
 
^be Dial 153 
 
 that various individual to obey his heart and be the 
 nobility of the land : 
 
 '' In every age of the world there has been a lead- 
 ing nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose 
 eminent citizens were willing to stand for the in- 
 terests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of 
 being called by the men of the moment, chimerical 
 and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these 
 States ? Which should lead that movement if not 
 New England ? Who should lead the leaders, but 
 the Young American." 
 
 In the Centenary Edition of Emerson's works, Mr. 
 Edward Emerson gives the instance of Charles Rus- 
 sell Lowell, ''one of the young men valued by Mr. 
 Emerson and moved by his teaching," as showing 
 how young leaders of leaders triumphed in the cause 
 of freedom by following the doctrines expressed in 
 this essay, but that was still long in the future when 
 The Dial closed its pages to its unremunerative 
 public. 
 
 Emerson's last contribution to it was the poem 
 called The Visit, commencing — 
 
 Askest, *' How long shalt thou stay?" 
 Devastator of the day ! 
 
 and ending- 
 Speeding Saturn cannot halt ; 
 Linger, — thou shalt rue the fault : 
 If Love his moment overstay, 
 Hatred's swift repulsions play. 
 
154 1?alpb Mal&o lEmereom 
 
 It is not impossible that the little Dial was approach- 
 ing that moment of destiny. At all events Emerson 
 could no longer reconcile himself to permitting such 
 devastation of the day, too short for the business of 
 his life, and w^ith its sixteenth number The Dial went 
 out of existence, singularly without honour in its own 
 country, but the repository, nevertheless, of a few 
 poems and essays which America must still con- 
 sider the incomparable fruit of her sparsely strewn 
 literature. 
 
 1 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 EMERSON ABROAD. 
 
 TOWARD the end of 1846, two years after the 
 expiration of The Dial, Emerson received 
 propositions from various quarters of Eng- 
 land to lecture there, and after a number of months 
 of indecision he set sail for Liverpool on the 5th of 
 October, 1847. One of his reasons for seeking an 
 English audience was to gain the criticism of a people 
 less easily pleased than his countrymen and better 
 equipped to call him to account. ''In the accept- 
 ance that my papers find among my thoughtful 
 countrymen in these days," he wrote in his candid 
 journal, 'M cannot help seeing how limited is their 
 reading. If they read only the books that I do, they 
 would not exaggerate so wildly." No more bracing 
 sentence could have been found to sustain one's 
 belief in his dedication to the best in his art. 
 
 He found an England no less ready than his Amer- 
 ica to listen to his words, and in London his audi- 
 ences drew from the highest levels of the social and 
 literary worlds. Thackeray heard him, and the ac- 
 
 155 
 
156 IRalpb Wnlt^o lEmereon. 
 
 complished Duke of Argyll, and Douglas Jerrold, and 
 William and Mary Howitt, and others more and less 
 notable for intellectual performance. His first course 
 of lectures was given at the Manchester Athen^um, 
 and the subject was Representative Men. He him- 
 self appeared to the English in the aspect of a repre- 
 sentative man, and this country hardly could have 
 had better fortune befall her than to be judged by his 
 merits. During his stay, a letter in the London Ex- 
 aminer urged a repetition of his lectures at prices low 
 enough to admit the poor. '' I feel that it ought to 
 be done," the writer says, '* because Emerson is a 
 phenomenon whose like is not in the world, and to 
 miss him is to lose an important, an informing fact, 
 out of the nineteenth century. ... It seems 
 also probable that a very large attendance of thought- 
 ful men would be secured, and that Emerson's stir- 
 rup-cup would be a cheering and full one, sweet and 
 ruddy with international charity." In the composite 
 portrait we gain of him as he stood in alien halls 
 facing an unaccustomed public, this sweet and ruddy 
 charity is the feature most clearly indicated. We 
 hear also of his somewhat monotonous delivery, of his 
 slight American accent, of his trick of gently rocking 
 his body while speaking, of his indifference to the 
 effect produced upon his audience, of his oval Yankee 
 face, '' rather sallow and emaciated," and of his habit 
 of gliding swiftly away the instant of finishing, with- 
 out giving time for applause. Through the eyes of 
 the Englishmen who attended his lectures we see 
 
 % 
 
lEmeraon Hbroat)* 157 
 
 him tall and thin and very blue-eyed, with in his face 
 a combination of intelligence and sweetness that 
 disarmed those who, like Crabbe Robinson, were 
 prejudiced against him. Clough found him ''the 
 quietest, plainest, unobtrusivest man possible," with 
 looks and voice that gave ''the impression of perfect 
 intellectual cultivation, as completely as would any 
 great scientific man in England — Faraday or Owen, 
 for example, — more in their way, perhaps, than in that 
 of Wordsworth or Carlyle." William Rossetti noted 
 his "upright figure, clear-cut physiognomy, clear 
 elocution, resolved self-possession"; and Goodwin 
 Barmby acknowledged him to be the most beautifully 
 simple and clearest-minded man he had ever met, 
 though he deemed that he needed social sympathy 
 and its gospel of self-sacrifice to make him a whole 
 man. In general his English friends seem to have rec- 
 ognised in him nobility and sweetness and a certain 
 pellucid quality of mind, together with a downright 
 penetrating sincerity that won their respect. So far as 
 they found him lacking it was in warmth of manner 
 and richness of temperament — his Greek vitality 
 not piercing to them through the sheath of his dry, 
 impassive American presence. 
 
 On his side he peered about like an etherealised 
 Diogenes looking not for a man but for a spirit. The 
 spiritual quality in the English, the vein of sensitive 
 imagination, of deep personal sentiment, was not re- 
 vealed to him. He missed it even in Thackeray, of 
 whose books he read but one, Canity Fair, which 
 
158 IRalpb Malbo Cmeraon* 
 
 inspired him with the notion that the most moral of 
 novelists had come to the conclusion that we must 
 *' renounce ideals and accept London." 
 
 Unquestionably the English heart could not be 
 worn upon a sleeve for even so tender and faithful 
 an observer as Emerson to contemplate. He pon- 
 dered traits and customs, and generalised his impres- 
 sions with marvellous acuteness, but they lack — as 
 he said of Fourier's system — one thing, Life. The 
 great towns, the famous people, the social phenomena 
 were too much a spectacle for even his penetrating 
 faculty to probe their appearances to the innermost 
 reality, and his account of them, so interesting and 
 so intelligent, so truly learned and broadly based 
 on large truths, is lacking in the quality he himself 
 would have been the first to miss in a similar report 
 of America and her people. It is not, to use his 
 quaint phraseology, the report of a lover. 
 
 In the hospitable English houses, over the gener- 
 ous tables, he met Macaulay, brilliant, arrogant, and 
 voluble; Dickens, author of what he designated as 
 the poor Pickwick stuff; Stephenson, the old engi- 
 neer, whom he considered '' in every way " the most 
 remarkable man he had seen in England; De Quincey, 
 then a ''very gentle old man," refined, deliberate, 
 poor and plain; Rogers, Hallam, Leigh Hunt, Helps, 
 Clough, Arnold, Patmore, Barry Cornwall, and 
 George Cruikshank. Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 and Landor he had seen on his earlier visit. Tenny- 
 son he met at the house of Coventry Patmore, and 
 
 f\ 
 
j£mcveon abroad* 159 
 
 ''was contented with him at once. . . . Quiet 
 sluggish sense and thought, refined as all the English 
 are, and good-humoured. " He visited beautiful Staf- 
 ford House, and the event, which caused Carlyle "a 
 certain internal amusement" at '"'such a conjunction 
 of opposite stars," drew from Emerson the remark 
 that in the little visit ''the two parts of Duchess and 
 of Palace were well and truly played." " One would 
 so gladly forget," he added, "that there was any- 
 thing else in England than these golden chambers 
 and the high and gentle people who walk in them! " 
 He visited Oxford and had not a word to say of its 
 grey and ancient beauty, but crowded his chapter 
 with facts and statistics; and Winchester Cathedral 
 impressed him chiefly by its dimensions. 
 
 A second visit to Wordsworth found the old man 
 asleep on his sofa, and, unlike the earlier meeting, 
 this one was marked by no original recitation of his 
 poetry. 
 
 In all his wandering Emerson was shown the 
 greatest consideration and esteem. "1 am every- 
 where a guest," he wrote home. "Never call me 
 solitary or Ishmaelite again. 1 began here by refus- 
 ing invitations to staf at private houses, but now I 
 find an invitation in every town, and accept it, to be 
 at home." He wrote, too, that his admiration and 
 his love of the English rose day by day though he 
 withheld his sympathy. Carlyle greeted him with 
 violent friendliness and welcome, sending a letter of 
 invitation to house and hearth to be put in his hands 
 
i6o IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 
 
 the moment he landed, and his sense of personal 
 obligation to all his British hosts was so great that he 
 earnestly charged his wife when a young Englishman 
 visited them, to give him a fire in his bedroom and 
 bread and wine before he went to bed, for if he were 
 cold *Mt would chill my bones," he said, and if he 
 were hungry it ''would make me hungry all my life, 
 they have been so careful of me." 
 
 It was precisely this consideration for material 
 comfort, however, this practical talent for securing 
 the essential elements of physical well-being, that 
 made Emerson feel the difficulty of arriving at 
 spiritual sources. Possibly he, so candid and ready 
 to bestow his best upon his neighbour and to require 
 the best in return, could not entirely realise the 
 native shyness of the British temper in the presence 
 of realities, the curious boyish reticence that keeps 
 them from making of their own great woes or of 
 their own great joys a little song. At all events it 
 was with grateful warmth that he wrote of Clough 
 and Froude, ''the monks of Oxford," who showed 
 him not only kindest attentions, but themselves, in 
 the main, the "brave young British man" showed 
 him only the convenient formulas by which the 
 secrets of heart and soul are most easily hidden: 
 
 "A horizon of brass of the diameter of his 
 umbrella shuts down around his senses. Squalid 
 contentment with conventions, satire at the names 
 of philosophy and religion, parochial and shop-till 
 politics and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of life 
 
 i 
 
iS<\ s» wo^"^ 
 
i6o 1 Cmcreon^ 
 
 ^ of person J i 
 
 t that he 
 
 Jishman 
 
 om aiui 
 
 „_. ..he were 
 
 ly boneb, I IV ou.w, and if he 
 
 would make me hungry all my life, 
 
 t 1 so careful of me." 
 
 It \v:is ely this consideration for material 
 
 comfort, however, this practical talent for securing 
 the essential elements of physical well-being, that 
 made Emerson feel the difficulty of arriving at 
 spiritual sources. Possibly he, so candid and ready 
 
 to bestow hMp^AP'm(5^'MI/§^^^'' ^"^ t^ ''^^"''^ 
 the hesX^i),^^^,^,^^^^),^^,,,},ji^^ realise the 
 native shyn nper in the presence 
 
 of :e that ke^ 
 
 1 vvoes or ot 
 
 their 4. At all events it 
 
 of Cloui^'i 
 d," who showed 
 
 but themselves. In 
 
 •'^ Rntish man "showed 
 .1 luiuiuice by which the 
 ' most easily hidden* 
 of the diameter oi 
 vvn around his senses. S( 
 ih co: ^. satire at the i 
 
 of and religion, >chial and sh 
 
 y of usagfe, betray the ebb ^ 
 
 i 
 
jBmcvBon Hbroab. 16 1 
 
 and spirit. As they trample on nationalities to re- 
 produce London and Londoners in Europe and Asia, 
 so they fear the hostility of ideas, of poetry, of 
 religion, — ghosts which they cannot lay; and having 
 attempted to domesticate and dress the Blessed Soul 
 itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are 
 tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that 
 will sweep their system away. The artists say: 
 'Nature puts them out'; the scholars have become 
 unideal. They parry earnest speech with banter and 
 levity; they laugh you down, or they change the 
 subject. *The fact is,' they say over their wine, 
 * all that about liberty, and so forth, is gone by; it 
 won't do any longer.' The practical and comfort- 
 able oppress them with inexorable claims, and the 
 smallest fraction of power remains for heroism 
 and poetry." 
 
 Yet no doubt an opposite picture equally true 
 might have been drawn of the English in Emerson's 
 time, of which he himself might have asked as did 
 the British auditor concerning his discourse on Plato, 
 what connection it all had with the subject, to receive 
 the same answer: ''None, my friend, save in God." 
 In fact, that same year, a young Transcendental- 
 ist was taking his Master's Degree at the London 
 University, whose subsequent picture of England 
 was to abound in high imagination, transmuting into 
 the most rich and glowing poetry the solid material- 
 ism of Lombard Street and the House of Lords. 
 
 If, however, Emerson failed to discern through 
 
1 62 IRalpb Malbo lemeraon* 
 
 the shell of English formality, — through what he 
 characterised as the ''hard enamel" varnishing 
 every part of the mature and finished Englishman, — 
 the dreamy sensibility, the visionary faculty, pro- 
 tected by it, he at least took home with him no vain 
 or shallow thought concerning the people or the 
 institutions he had studied. Dr. Richard Garnett in 
 his admirable biography says of English Traits : 
 
 *' Emerson is so little concerned with the fashion 
 of the day, and so much with the solid foundations 
 of English life that his book should endure as long as 
 these do. It should be a mirror for England to con- 
 sult from time to time, and see whether, in gaining 
 the more spiritual look which Emerson missed, her 
 countenance has lost any of the frankness and reso- 
 luteness which he found." Contemplative of deep 
 truths and haunted by the vision of spiritual graces, 
 he had, nevertheless, a sure and seeing eye for the 
 externals of human nature, and his description of the 
 new phenomena engaging his attention, although it 
 was full of quiet humour, had not, as Dr. Garnett 
 punctiliously affirms, a single sneer or touch of venom 
 in its occasional sarcasm. He saw the English as 
 brothers and as the descendants of the great race of 
 men from whom he had drawn so much of inspira- 
 tion and joy; he moved among them taking notes for 
 his own instruction and for that of his fellow 
 Americans to whom then it was a more or less rare 
 thing to visit Europe; and in the process sincerely 
 and wisely undertaken he learned much about the 
 
 I 
 
lemeraon abroad 163 
 
 national character that ordinarily is discovered, if at 
 all, only after years, not weeks, of familiar intercourse. 
 At times, too, with his eyes fixed on those annoying 
 established forms the inflexibility of which was not 
 softened for him by their lovely vesture of human 
 associations, he caught the sign of a life deeper than 
 any he saw and was reminded of a beauty interior 
 and sacred which cant and simony and sanctimony 
 could not obliterate from the national soul. 
 
 *' But the religion of England,— is it the Estab- 
 lished Church ? no; is it the sects ? no; they are 
 only perpetuations of some private man's dissent 
 and are to the Established Church as cabs are to a 
 coach, cheaper and more convenient, but really the 
 same thing. Where dwells the religion ? Tell me 
 first where dwells electricity or motion or thought or 
 gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. Elec- 
 tricity cannot be made fast, mortared up, and ended, 
 like London Monument or the Tower, so that you 
 shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the 
 English do with their things, forevermore; it is pass- 
 ing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, 
 a surprise, a secret, which perplexes them and puts 
 them out. 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." 
 
1 64 IRalpb Malbo lEmereom 
 
 It was a superb feat, from one point of view, for 
 this home-keeping man, liking nothing so little as 
 travel, to gather a traveller's harvest with such care- 
 ful and skilful husbandry, and no reader of English 
 Traits would guess the riddle of homesick mood and 
 weary spirits that accounted for some of its lapses 
 and omissions. He was oppressed by the sense of 
 difference existing between the traditions of an Eng- 
 lishman and those of an American, and possibly, also, 
 by the sense which he had gone out to seek of stand- 
 ing before a tribunal of high training and perfected 
 culture. It followed naturally that in his private in- 
 tercourse he was not quite the same as when in his 
 own environment. Carlyle, who had come to dislike 
 many of his opinions, spoke of his talent as ''not 
 quite as high" as he had expected. ''We had im- 
 mense talking with him here," he wrote, "but find 
 that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon." 
 Emerson's account of one of these occasions on which 
 there was immense talking throws a certain light on 
 the half part taken by him in the conversations. 
 After visiting Stonehenge in company with Carlyle, 
 he stopped at the house of Arthur Helps and spent 
 there a rainy Sunday, which induced "much dis- 
 course." 
 
 " My friends asked whether there were any Amer- 
 icans — any with an American idea — any theory of 
 the right future of that country ? Thus challenged, 
 I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, 
 neither of presidents nor of cabinet ministers, nor of 
 
 
jemereon Hbroab^ 165 
 
 such as would make of America another Europe. I 
 thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said, 
 'Certainly yes; — but those who hold it are fanatics 
 of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to 
 your English ears, to which it might be only ridicu- 
 lous, — and yet it is the only true.' So 1 opened the 
 dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and 
 anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured 
 a kind of hearing for it. I said: 'It is true that 1 have 
 never seen in any country a man of sufficient valour 
 to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that 
 no less valour than this can command my respect.' " 
 
 It is plain to every one that from this doctrine the 
 mind of Carlyle could indeed get little cud to chew 
 upon, and later, on the way to Winchester, when 
 his friends plied him with questions as to the Amer- 
 ican landscape and the American houses, his own 
 house, for example, Emerson felt too keenly the lack 
 of intimate acquaintance between the two countries 
 to undertake description. ''Men of genius," says 
 Bagehot, "with the impulses of solitude, produce 
 works of art whose words can be read and re- 
 read and partially taken in by foreigners to whom 
 they could never be uttered, the very thought of 
 whose unsympathising faces would freeze them on 
 the surface of the mind." To this extent Emerson 
 was a foreigner in England, even with the friend of 
 his heart, and he could not reveal the charm of his 
 country to those who did not love her fair wild face. 
 
 "There, I thought, in America," he writes in his 
 
1 66 IRalpb TtWalbo lemereon. 
 
 book of records, '' lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, 
 almost conscious, too much by half for the man in 
 the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the 
 rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, 
 steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; and on 
 it man seems not able to make much impression. 
 There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alle- 
 ghany pastures, in the sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie, 
 still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, 
 long since driven away from the trim hedgerows and 
 over-cultivated garden of England. And, in England, 
 I am quite too sensible of this. Every one is on his 
 good behaviour and must be dressed for dinner at six. 
 So 1 put off my friends with very inadequate details 
 as best 1 could." 
 
 Thus Emerson's great personal charm and lovable 
 presence fought against odds to win the affections of 
 the English. Carlyle, in a letter to his sister, depicts 
 him at one of the London dinners with ''quantities 
 of Lords, Townwits (Thackeray, &c.), and beautiful 
 ladies," as keeping ''very quiet, mild modest eyes, 
 lips sealed together like a pair of pincers, and nobody 
 minded him much." A writer in Blackwood* s Maga- 
 :(ine, who was present at one of these dinners, the 
 one whither De Quincey was coerced by secret plot- 
 ting, expresses his surprise that the American philo- 
 sopher did not philosophise in public, but chatted of 
 small things in a simple way. It was his instinctive 
 resource in associating with persons whom he found 
 "rich, plain, polite, proud, and admirable," who 
 
jEmereon Hbroab* 167 
 
 nevertheless failed to appeal to his imagination. But 
 he parted from them with warmth of feeling on 
 both sides. He ''had not been aware there was so 
 much kindness in the world/' he said. That he had 
 made his impression on liberal hearts has been evi- 
 denced in many ways, and when tidings reached 
 England that his house had been burned down, his 
 friends in that country expressed their desire to join 
 with his friends at home in helping to rebuild it. 
 
 Before he returned, he spent twenty-five days in 
 Paris, which he liked better than London. He wrote 
 home that he had all winter been admiring the Eng- 
 lish and disparaging the French and was then correct- 
 ing his impressions. He liked the cleanly beauty of 
 Paris, the gayety and good-humour of the crowds in 
 the midst of revolution, the fire and fury of the peo- 
 ple discussing social questions, and he found the 
 universal good-breeding a " great convenience.'* It 
 was June when he returned to England to finish his 
 lectures there and take back with him to America 
 ''a contentedness with home " sufficient for the rest 
 of his days. 
 
 He had given in England the very best of his de- 
 veloped thought. He had lectured on the Mind and 
 Manners of the XIX. Century, on the Powers and 
 Laws of Thought, the Relation of Intellect to Natural 
 Science, the Tendencies and Duties of Men of 
 Thought, on Politics and Socialism, on Poetry and 
 Eloquence, Natural Aristocracy, Representative Men, 
 and Domestic Life. It does not appear that his 
 
1 68 IRalpb IHHal&o iBmcvBon. 
 
 audiences felt themselves specifically enlightened, 
 though the more responsive felt themselves stimu- 
 lated. His most captious reviewer found him ''sug- 
 gestive." But his influence was of the kind that 
 gathers weight with time. Mr. Julian Hawthorne 
 speaks of a Lord Mayor who wished to meet him be- 
 cause his essay on Self-Reliance had started him on 
 the road to success, and of a Coroner of London who 
 carried the Essays about with him through many 
 years. These were isolated examples of an effect 
 diffused through the unliterary as well as the literary 
 regions of society, an effect which has grown in Eng- 
 land as well as in America until, if Emerson could 
 walk once more among us, we should find that only 
 a small proportion of reading men of the present gen- 
 eration had escaped his direct or indirect influence. 
 Matthew Arnold wrote sadly in his volume of the 
 Essays : 
 
 "O monstrous, dead, unprofitable world! 
 • That thou canst hear, and hearing, hold thy way. 
 A voice oracular hath pealed to-day. 
 To-day a hero's banner is unfurled. 
 Hast thou no lip for welcome ? " So I said. 
 Man after man, the world smiled and passed by, 
 A smile of wistful incredulity, 
 As though one spake of noise unto the dead: 
 Scornful and strange and sorrowful, and full 
 Of bitter knowledge. 
 
 But the world is neither dead nor unprofitable, and 
 it was one of Emerson's highest qualities that he 
 consistently perceived its capacity for progress along 
 
lemereon abroa&* 169 
 
 spiritual paths. As with individuals, he courteously 
 assumed its interest in ''starry wisdom " such as he 
 offered it. 
 
 When he was once more in America, he naturally 
 lectured at once upon England to an eager public, 
 and, naturally too, considering the time and his com- 
 paratively untravelled audience, he put into his lec- 
 tures much positive information and illustration of 
 his impressions. They resembled family letters, in 
 which it was taken for granted that the writer was 
 speaking for intimates and not for criticism. After 
 seven years the lectures were pruned and prepared 
 for the Press, their general form and content remain- 
 ing unchanged. It was then that the English knew 
 how the quiet gentleman whom they had cordially 
 honoured had regarded them, and it was to their 
 credit as much as to Emerson's that they accepted in 
 such good temper the salient, sincere, and not wholly 
 adequate picture whose features they frankly recog- 
 nised as belonging to the national countenance. 
 Carlyle declared that English Traits was worth all 
 the books ever written by New England upon the 
 Old. ''We do very well with it here," he added, 
 " and the wise part of us besV 
 
 There was, however, one old man at Bath to 
 whom English Traits was an occasion for character- 
 istic and not entirely flattering utterance. In the 
 first part of the book, Emerson had gone back three 
 and twenty years to his first European journey. At 
 that time he had gone down to visit Landor at his 
 
I70 IRalpb MalJ)o Cmersom 
 
 Villa Gherardesca under his fig-trees on the southern 
 slope of the Fiesolan hills, and had found him '' noble 
 and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures " and free 
 from the ''Achillean wrath," the ''untamable petu- 
 lance," which he had inferred from his books and 
 from anecdotes about him. The conversation dur- 
 ing that visit and a subsequent one is now widely 
 known, as Emerson reported it. Landor admired 
 Washington, declared that no great man ever had a 
 son, unless it were Philip and Alexander, and Philip 
 he called the greater man. In art he said that he 
 loved the Greeks, and in sculpture them only. He 
 preferred John of Bologna to Michael Angelo; in 
 painting he preferred Raphael; and shared the grow- 
 ing taste for Perugino and the early masters. "The 
 Greek histories he thought the only good; and after 
 them Voltaire's. I could not make him praise Mack- 
 intosh, nor my more recent friends; Montaigne very 
 cordially, — and Charron also, which seemed un- 
 discriminating. He thought Degerando indebted to 
 * Lucas on Happiness ' ! and ' Lucas on Holiness ' ! 
 He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey ? 
 . . . He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than 
 was necessary, and undervalued Burke, and under- 
 valued Socrates; designated as three of the great- 
 est of men, Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon, — 
 much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the 
 three or the six best pears ' for a small orchard ' ; — 
 and did not even omit to remark the similar termina- 
 tion of their names. . . . 1 had visited Professor 
 
 1 
 
jemereon Hbroab* 171 
 
 Amici, who had shown me his microscopes, mag- 
 nifying (it was said) two thousand diameters; and 
 I spoke of the uses to which they were applied. 
 Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same 
 breath, said, 'the sublime was in a grain of dust.' 
 I suppose I teased him about recent writers, but he 
 professed never to have heard of Herschel, not 
 even by name.'' At the end of his account Emerson 
 added: ''Landor is strangely undervalued in Eng- 
 land ; usually ignored and sometimes savagely at- 
 tacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right 
 or wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after 
 year the scholar must still go back to Landor for a 
 multitude of elegant sentences; for wisdom, wit, and 
 indignation that are unforgetable." 
 
 When Landor read these words, the passion for 
 correction that once had led him to make upward of 
 a thousand notes of faults of grammar and expres- 
 sion in two or three of Scott's volumes inspired him 
 to write and publish an open letter to Emerson, in 
 which he contradicted or emended a number of the 
 statements he had made. English reviewers were 
 inclined to read into the letter both more wit and 
 more indignation than are conspicuous to the Ameri- 
 can reader. Landor's irritation was of the mildest 
 so far as its expression went, and in the course of 
 the letter he falls into a tone of pleasant gossip upon 
 an always interesting theme. It would be difficult 
 to match in candid naivete his statement of his own 
 valuation by critics of authority. But the entire 
 
172 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 
 
 document is eloquent of his tremendous paradoxical 
 personality. The passages most closely connected 
 with Emerson's innocent mistakes exhibit his quin- 
 tessential egoism, but were written, one may con- 
 sistently believe, not in a spirit of petulance, but on 
 behalf of that lovely truth so long worshipped in 
 his art: 
 
 '*My Dear Sir, 
 
 '' Your English Traits have given me great pleas- 
 ure; and they would have done so even if 1 had 
 been treated by you with less favour. The short 
 conversations we held at my Tuscan Villa were in- 
 sufficient for an estimate of my character and opin- 
 ions. A few of these, and only a few, of the least 
 important, 1 may have modified since. Let me run 
 briefly over them as I find them stated in your 
 pages. Twenty-three years have not obliterated 
 from my memory the traces of your visit, in com- 
 pany with that intelligent man and glorious sculptor, 
 who was delegated to erect a statue in your capital 
 to the tutelary genius of America. 1 share with him 
 my enthusiastic love of ancient art; but I am no ex- 
 clusive, as you seem to hint 1 am. In my hall at 
 Fiesole there are two busts, if you remember, by two 
 artists very unlike the ancients, and equally unlike 
 each other: Donatello and Fiamingo; surveying them 
 at a distance is the sorrowful countenance of Ger- 
 manicus. Sculpture at the present day flourishes 
 more than it ever did since the age of Pericles; and 
 
'jTP-'-T^. 
 
 K *i-vJv 
 
' on 
 )ed in 
 
 "A 
 
 h Traits have given me great pleas- 
 
 ! i they would have done so even if I had 
 
 I treated by you with less favour. The short 
 
 rr nvprsations we held ai ., Tuscan Villa were 
 
 .ent {§Fm^Mm^^^^^^^^^^ opiu- 
 
 A f^. From a photograph bj/ A. Hosmer. ^- r xi_ i ^ 
 
 the least 
 
 e run 
 
 lii liiy Hull ai 
 mber, b 
 
 surv^ 
 
 , lance oi 
 day fl 
 
 of P( 
 
 1 
 
jEmereon Hbroab* 173 
 
 America is not cast into the shade by Europe. I do 
 prefer Giovanni da Bologna to Michael Angelo, who 
 indeed in the conception is sublime, but often incor- 
 rect, and sometimes extravagant, both in sculpture 
 and painting. I confess 1 have no relish for his 
 prodigious giblet pie in the Capella Sistina, known 
 throughout the world as his Last Judgment. Grand 
 in architecture, he was no ordinary poet, no luke- 
 warm patriot. Deplorable, that the inheritor of his 
 house and name is so vile a sycophant that even 
 the blast of Michael's trumpet could not rouse his 
 abject soul. 
 
 *M am an admirer of Pietro Perugino, and more 
 than an admirer of Raffaello; but I could never rank 
 the Madonna delta Saggiola among the higher of his 
 works; 1 see no divinity in the child, and no such 
 purity in the Virgin as he often expressed in her. I 
 have given my opinion as freely on the Transfigura- 
 tion, The cartoons are his noblest works ; they 
 place him as high as is Correggio in the Dome of 
 Parma; nothing has been, or is likely to be, higher. 
 
 ''We will now walk a little way out of the gal- 
 lery. Let mie say, before we go farther, that 1 do 
 not think ' the Greek historians the only good ones.' 
 Davila, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Michelet, have afforded 
 me much instruction and much delight. Gibbon is 
 worthy of a name among the most enlightened and 
 eloquent of the ancients. I find no fault in his 
 
174 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon- 
 
 language; on the contrary, I find the most exact pro- 
 priety. The grave, and somewhat austere, becomes 
 the historian of the Roman Republic; the grand, and 
 somewhat gorgeous, finds its proper place in the 
 palace of Byzantium. Am 1 indifferent to the merits 
 of our own historians ? indifferent to the merits of him 
 who balanced with equal hand Wellington and Na- 
 poleon ? No; I glory in my countryman and friend. 
 Is it certain that I am indiscriminating in my judg- 
 ment on Charron ? Never have I compared him 
 with Montaigne; but there is much of wisdom, and, 
 what is remarkable in the earlier French authors, 
 much of sincerity in him. 
 
 'M am sorry to have 'pestered you with Southey/ 
 and to have excited the inquiry, ' 1/Vho is Southey ? ' 
 I will answer the question. Southey is the poet 
 who has written the most imaginative poem of any 
 in our own times, English or continental; such is 
 the Curse of Kehama, Southey is the proseman who 
 has written the purest prose; Southey is the critic 
 the most cordial and the least invidious. Show me 
 another, of any note, without captiousness, without 
 arrogance, and without malignity. 
 
 '''Slow rises worth by poverty deprest.' But 
 Southey raised it. 
 
 "Certainly you could not make me praise Mack- 
 intosh. What is there eminently to praise in him ? 
 Are there not twenty men and women at the present 
 hour who excel him in style and genius ? His read- 
 ing was excessive: he had much capacity, less com- 
 
jEmereon Hbroab, 175 
 
 prehensiveness and concentration. I know not who 
 may be the ' others of your recent friends ' whom 
 you could not excite me to applaud. I am more 
 addicted to praise than censure. We English are 
 generally as fierce partisans in literary as in parlia- 
 mentary elections, and we cheer or jostle a candi- 
 date of whom we know nothing. 1 have always 
 kept clear of both quarters. I have votes in three 
 counties, I believe 1 have in four, and never gave 
 one. I would rather buy than solicit or canvass, but 
 preferably neither. Nor am 1 less abstinent in the 
 turbulent contest for literary honours. Among the 
 many authors you have conversed with in England, 
 did you find above a couple who spoke not ill of all 
 the rest ? Even the most liberal of them, they who 
 concede the most, subtract at last the greater part of 
 what they have conceded, together with somewhat 
 beside. And this is done, forsooth, out of fairness, 
 truthfulness, &c. 
 
 '' We now come to Carlyle, of whom you tell us 
 * he worships a man that will manifest any truth to 
 him.' Would he have patience for the truth to be 
 manifested ? or would he accept it then ? Certainly, 
 the face of truth is very lovely, and we take especial 
 care that it shall never lose it[s] charms by famili- 
 arity. He declares that ' Landor's principle is mere 
 rebellion.' 
 
 '' Quite the contrary is apparent and prominent 
 
176 IRalpb Mal5o iBmcveon. 
 
 in many of my writings. I always was a Conserva- 
 tive; but 1 would eradicate any species of evil, politi- 
 cal, moral, or religious, as soon as it springs up, with 
 no reference to the blockheads who cry out, ' I4^hat 
 would you substitute in its place ?' When 1 pluck 
 up a dock or a thistle, do 1 ask any such a question ? 
 I have said plainly, more than once, and in many 
 quarters, that 1 would not alter or greatly modify the 
 English Constitution. I denounced at the time of its 
 enactment the fallacy of the Reform Bill. And here 
 1 beg pardon for the word fallacy, instead of humbug, 
 which entered into our phraseology with two other 
 sister graces. Sham and Pluck. 1 applaud the ad- 
 mission of new peers; and 1 think it well that a large 
 body of them should be hereditary. But it is worse 
 than mere popery that we should be encumbered by 
 a costly and heavy bench of cardinals under the title 
 of Bishops, and that their revenues should exceed 
 those in the Roman States. I would send a beadel 
 after every Bishop who left his diocese, without the 
 call of his Sovran, the head of the Church, for some 
 peculiar and urgent purpose relating to it solely. I 
 would surround the throne with splendour and mag- 
 nificence, and grant as large a sum as a thousand 
 pounds weekly for it with two palaces; no land but 
 what should be rented. The highest of the nobility 
 would be proud of service under it, without the pay 
 of menials. I approve the expansion of our peerage; 
 but never let its members, adscititious or older, 
 think themselves the only nobility; else peradven- 
 
ture some of them may be reminded that there are 
 among us men whose ancestors stood in high places, 
 and who did good service to the country, when 
 theirs were cooped up within borough walls, or 
 called on duty from the field as serfs and villains. 
 
 ''Democracy, such as yours in America is my 
 abhorrence. Republicanism far from it; but there are 
 few nations capable of receiving, fewer of retaining, 
 this pure and efficient form. Democracy is lax and 
 disjointed; and whatever is loose wears out the 
 machine. 
 
 '' I never glorified Lord Chesterfield; yet he surely 
 is among the best of our writers in regard to style, 
 and appears to have formed Horace Walpole's and 
 Sterne's, a style purely English. His letters were 
 placed by Beresford, Archbishop of Tuam, in the 
 hands of his daughters. This 1 remember to have 
 been stated to me by his son. A polished courtier, 
 and a virtuous prelate knew their value; and per- 
 haps the neglect of them at the present day is one 
 reason why a gentleman is almost as rare as a man 
 of genius. 
 
 'M am not conscious that 1 underrate Burke: 
 never have I placed any of his parliamentary con- 
 temporaries in the same rank with him. His lan- 
 guage is brilliant, but not always elegant; which 
 induced me once to attribute to him the Letters of 
 Junius, 1 am now more inclined to General Lee as 
 
178 IRalpb Malbo lemereom 
 
 author. Lord Nugent, an inquisitive and intelligent 
 reader, told me he never could 'worm out the 
 secret ' from his uncle Mr. Thomas Grenville, who, 
 he believed, knew it. Surely it is hardly worth 
 the trouble of a single hour's research. We have 
 better things weekly in the Examiner, and daily in 
 the Times, 
 
 'M do not 'undervalue Socrates.' Being the 
 cleverest of the Sophists, he turned the fraternity 
 into ridicule; he eluded the grasp of his antagonist 
 by anointing with the oil of quibble all that was 
 tangible and prominent. To compare his philosophy 
 (if indeed you can catch it) with the philosophy of 
 Epicurus and Epictetus, whose systems meet, is 
 insanity. 
 
 'M do not 'despise entomology.' 1 am ignorant 
 of it; as indeed 1 am of almost all science. 
 
 '' 1 love also flowers and plants ; but I know less 
 about them than is known by a beetle or a butterfly. 
 
 '' I must have been misunderstood, or have been 
 culpably inattentive if 1 said ' 1 knew not Herschell 
 [sic] by name.' The father's 1 knew well, from his 
 giving to a star the baptismal one of that pernicious 
 madman who tore America from England, and who 
 rubbed his hands when the despatches announced 
 to him the battle of Bunker's Hill, in which he told 
 his equerry that his soldiers had 'got well pep- 
 pered.' Probably I had not then received in Italy 
 the admirable writings of the great Herschell's 
 greater son. 
 
jemeraon Hbroab. 179 
 
 *' Phocion, who excites as much of pity as of ad- 
 miration, was excellent as a commander and as an 
 orator, but was deficient and faulty as a politician. 
 No Athenian had, for so long a period, rendered to 
 his country so many and such great services. He 
 should have died a short time earlier; he should 
 have entered the temple with Demosthenes. On 
 the whole, 1 greatly prefer this last consistent man, 
 although he could not save his country like Epami- 
 nondas and like Washington. 
 
 '' I make no complaint of what is stated in the 
 following page, that ' Landor is strangely under- 
 valued in England.' I have heard it before, but I 
 have never taken the trouble to ascertain it. Here I 
 find that I am 'savagely attacked in the Reviews.' 
 Nothing more likely; I never see them; my acquain- 
 tances lie in a different and far distant quarter. 
 Some honours have, however, been conferred on me 
 in the literary world. Southey dedicated to me his 
 Kehama ; James his Attila ; he and Dickens invited 
 me to be godfather to their sons. Moreover, I think 
 as many have offered me the flatteries of verse as 
 ever were offered to any other one but Louis the 
 Fourteenth. 
 
 *' Accept this memorial, which your name will 
 render of less brief duration, of the esteem in which 
 you are held by 
 
 '* Walter Landor." 
 
i8o IRalpb TKHal&o Emereom 
 
 The qualities enumerated in Emerson's picture 
 of the typical Englishman are many in number, and 
 few of them appear to be the product of preliminary 
 reading. His impressions, in the main certainly, 
 seem to have been formed on the spot and singularly 
 uninfluenced by the observations of others. On the 
 side of merit he placed the logical temper of mind 
 which he found in the Englishman, his resolution to 
 see fair play, his self-respect, and above all his pluck; 
 his affection and loyalty, his cleanliness and simplic- 
 ity, his sincerity, his gravity, and good taste, his frank 
 hospitality and his power of performance. On the 
 other side went his inaccessibility to new ideas, his 
 conceit, the ''wooden prose" that rules his action, 
 his tendency toward fixed forms and the sanction of 
 tradition, his national arrogance and insular limita- 
 tion, his suppression of the imagination and substitu- 
 tion of standards of comfort and utility for higher 
 standards. Emerson in defining these traits used 
 more than usually incisive characterisation and some 
 of his phrases knock on the mind like the strokes of 
 a hammer in a skilful hand: ''The Englishman has 
 accurate perceptions; takes hold of things by the 
 right end, and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. 
 . . . He must be treated with sincerity and 
 reality ; with muffins and not the promise of 
 muffins." " If a bishop meets an intelligent gentle- 
 man and reads fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has 
 no resource but to take wine with him." The 
 Englishman "hides no defect of his form, features, 
 
 t 
 
)£mer0on Hbroab* i8i 
 
 dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks every 
 circumstance belonging to him comes recommended 
 to you." ''Nothing savage, nothing mean, resides 
 in the English heart." ''A saving stupidity masks 
 and protects their perception, as the curtain of the 
 eagle's eye." ''To be king of their word is their 
 pride." There may be difference of opinion as to 
 the truth of these observations, but they are incon- 
 testably not trite. Occasionally the difference in 
 " manners," never a negligible quantity with him, 
 provoked him to a mild ferocity of complaint. The 
 English, he says, " have no curiosity about foreign- 
 ers, and answer any information you may volunteer 
 with ' Oh ! Oh ! ' until the informant makes up his 
 mind that they shall die in their ignorance, for any 
 help he will offer." At the end of his book, how- 
 ever, Emerson printed the speech he made shortly 
 after his arrival at Manchester, as sufficiently agree- 
 ing with the deliberate result of the acquaintance 
 with England recorded on his foregoing pages. In the 
 minds of experienced diners-out it holds its place as 
 the most remarkable after-dinner speech in English an- 
 nals. In it he dwells upon the two qualities that made 
 England the dearest of countries to him after his own. 
 "That which lures a solitary American in the 
 woods with the wish to see England," he says, " is 
 the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race, — its com- 
 manding sense of right and wrong, the love and 
 devotion to that,— this is the imperial trait, which 
 arms them with the sceptre of the globe. 
 
1 82 IRalpb Mal&o lemer^on, 
 
 *Mt is this which lies at the foundation of that 
 aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into 
 strange vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sight 
 of, but which, if it should lose this, would find itself 
 paralysed; and in trade and in the mechanic's shop 
 gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness 
 and solidity of work which is a national characteris- 
 tic. This conscience is one element, and the other is 
 that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that 
 homage of man to man, running through all classes, 
 — the electing of worthy persons to a certain frater- 
 nity, to acts of kindness and warm and stanch 
 support, from year to year, from youth to age, — 
 which is alike lovely and honourable to those who 
 render and those who receive it; which stands in 
 strong contrast with the superficial attachments of 
 other races, their excessive courtesy and short-lived 
 connection." 
 
 It is this that we may as well accept as his most 
 enduring mood toward England. It was the home 
 of literature and morality to him, and what he chided 
 was no more than Wordsworth and Arnold saw to 
 chide, less than had inflamed the mind of Milton to 
 vast expostulation. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 UPON his return to America, Emerson carried 
 his lectures into what was then the Far 
 West, finding in the raw atmosphere of the 
 newly civilised region ample contrast to the ''over- 
 cultivated garden " of England. In going from Phila- 
 delphia to Pittsburgh he spent two nights in the 
 cars, and the third on the floor of a canal boat where 
 the cushion allowed him for a bed was crossed at the 
 knees, he said, by another tier of sleepers as long- 
 limbed as he, ''so that in the air was a wreath of 
 legs." In Illinois he dwelt in cabins, and in Michigan 
 rode in a buggy forty-eight miles to his lecture and 
 twenty more after its delivery. He crossed the Mis- 
 sissippi in a rowboat with only a man and a boy for 
 oarsmen, when much of the rowing was on the sur- 
 face of fixed ice in default of running water, and he 
 faced audiences that rose and walked out of the hall 
 when he failed to interest them. They were made, 
 however, of no stouter stuff than he, and his work 
 
 gained force and body from his rough experience. 
 
 183 
 
1 84 IRalpb Malbo lemersom 
 
 As in England he found much kindness, bringing 
 much to meet it. He was at the height of his power, 
 and his lectures on the Conduct of Life which were 
 written at this time have a ring of decision and a 
 firmness of texture, won no doubt from well-knit 
 England and the positive West. He turned his 
 own discomforts and the rough life with which he 
 came into contact into cheerful arguments for their 
 value. Such a passage as this must have fallen pleas- 
 antly on the ears of those who ''drank the wild 
 air's salubrity " west of the Mississippi: 
 
 ''A Fifth Avenue landlord, a West End house- 
 holder, is not the highest style of man; and though 
 good hearts and sound minds are of no condition, 
 yet he who is to be wise for many must not be pro- 
 tected. He must know the huts where poor men 
 lie, and the chores which poor men do. The first- 
 class minds, /tsop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shakespeare, 
 Franklin, had the poor man's feeling and mortifica- 
 tion. A rich man was never insulted in his life, but 
 this man must be stung. A rich man was never in 
 danger from cold or hunger or war or ruffians, — and 
 you can see he was not from the moderation of his 
 ideas. 'T is a fatal disadvantage to be cockered and 
 eat too much cake. What tests of manhood could 
 he stand ? Take him out of his protections. He is 
 a good bookkeeper, or he is a shrewd adviser in the 
 insurance office; perhaps he could pass a college ex- 
 amination, and take his degrees; perhaps he can give 
 wise counsel in a court of law. Now plant him down 
 
IRepreeentative fIDem 185 
 
 among farmers, firemen, Indians, and emigrants. 
 Set a dog on him; set a highwayman on him; try 
 him with a course of mobs; send him to Kansas, to 
 Pike's Peak, to Oregon; and if he have true faculty, 
 this may be the element he wants, and he will come 
 out of it with broader wisdom and manly power. 
 y€sop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have been taken 
 by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and knew 
 the realities of human life." 
 
 From his European experience he deduced no 
 moral for his countrymen except to stay at home. 
 '' 1 am not much of an advocate for travelling," he 
 said, *'and I observe that men run away to other 
 countries because they are not good in their own, and 
 run back to their own because they pass for nothing 
 in the new places. ... He that does not fill a 
 place at home cannot abroad. He only goes there 
 to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do 
 not think you will find anything there which you 
 have not seen at home ? The stuff of all countries is 
 just the same. Do you suppose there is any coun- 
 try where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle 
 the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the 
 fish ? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. 
 And let him go where he will, he can only find so 
 much beauty or worth as he carries." Admirable 
 doctrine, had every man been an Emerson, yet even 
 he had gained from mixing with a larger crowd. 
 There is evidence in all his after-work of a tendency 
 to stand firmer on the ground. The ''mettle and 
 
i86 IRalpb IHHalbo lemereott 
 
 bottom " which he found in the English character 
 was sufficiently present in his own, and henceforth 
 was treated with more indulgence and given a 
 more equal share with his idealism. His writing 
 became more corporeal without losing its spiritual 
 quality. 
 
 His immediate literary task upon his return from 
 England was the collection of his separate addresses 
 and Nature in one volume. In 1850 he published his 
 lectures on Representative Men, in which he appears 
 as a critic of literature and life in the definite and 
 limited sense commonly given to the word. 
 
 It is a commonplace of popular opinion that a 
 poet is not a good critic. In the presence of genius 
 he is the best. With genius he can deal openly and 
 directly. It is not necessary to ''compare, com- 
 pare," the essential thing is to comprehend with 
 sympathy, to illumine and interpret. Intuitive criti- 
 cism in the hands of a critic who is nothing more 
 becomes a ridiculous affair. For a second-rate mind 
 to cast aside the accumulated standards of centuries 
 and trust to individual judgment for the placing of a 
 talent invites laughter and contempt. Scientific criti- 
 cism based on irksome study and careful measuring 
 is the only refuge for the professional arbiter at work 
 upon the comparatively mean product of ordinary 
 intelligences. But, confronted with a masterpiece, 
 all systems of criticism become in their turn some- 
 what ridiculous. The creative mind is summoned to 
 construe the riddle of creation, and in the meeting 
 
IReprcaentative flDem 187 
 
 of original faculties one feels at least the stir of dis- 
 covery, the tingling thrill of adventure in unexplored 
 regions. Whatever results, it will be the uncommon, 
 the unforeseen, the hidden, and the genuine, that is 
 revealed by this calling of deep unto deep. Instead 
 of the laborious effort of weakness and incapacity 
 to reach the point of understanding, we have the 
 easy movement of equal powers, keeping pace with- 
 out difficulty or weariness. 
 
 ''Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shake- 
 speare," says Emerson, adding "and even he can 
 tell us nothing except to the Shakespeare in us, that 
 is to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour." 
 To consider the Shakespeare of Emerson, the most 
 creative and imaginative of any of the seven essays 
 on Representative Men, is to be instantly aware of a 
 simplicity and humanity in the highest degree un- 
 usual, if not unprecedented, among the works of the 
 multitudinous Shakespearean critics of two centuries. 
 In no other instance has that complex splendour of 
 performance been so inexorably reduced to the simple 
 structure of a few fundamental properties. What 
 audacity, for example, in attempting to realise Shake- 
 speare by co-ordinating his characteristics with the 
 aid of but one quotation from his works, and that 
 the most abstract, indefinite, and mysterious he could 
 readily have found: 
 
 What may this mean 
 That thou dead corse again in complete steel 
 Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon ? 
 
1 88 IRalpb UGlal&o lemereon. 
 
 Piercing through the compact body of poetry and 
 drama to the personality whose relation to the work 
 is the essential matter with him, Emerson draws a 
 bold and beautiful outline of the great master, leav- 
 ing us to debate the likeness and search out the 
 sources of the impression. All his life a lover and 
 student of Shakespeare, he gathered into a few pages 
 the result of his meditation. It has been criticised 
 as a singularly slight performance to spring from such 
 extended preparation, and, truly, German critics and 
 members of Shakespearean societies would find some 
 difficulty in discovering what this extraordinary reader 
 had done with his time. He had done what the 
 modern sculptor Rodin would have done in his place. 
 He had ''possessed" his subject for the purpose of 
 showing intensely and with absence of all negligible 
 detail, its poetic interest. Shakespeare, the Poet, he 
 calls his essay, and the poet only is hewn out for 
 us from the bewildering exuberance of the material. 
 And what is the effect ? That we forget the unique 
 character of the genius discussed and see it as one 
 of the exalting possibilities of human life, as the 
 demonstration that no performance is too divine or 
 too singular to be emulated or surpassed; surely the 
 most enchanting, the most consoling, the most uplift- 
 ing conviction to enter the human heart. 
 
 The essay opens with the recognition of the debt 
 genius owes to the past. '' Every master has found 
 his materials collected, and his power lay in his sym- 
 pathy with his people and in his love of the mate- 
 
IRepreeentative fiDem 189 
 
 rials he wrought in. What an economy of power! 
 and what a compensation for the shortness of life! 
 All is done to his hand. The world has brought 
 him thus far on his way. The human race has gone 
 out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and 
 bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, 
 women, all have worked for him, and he enters into 
 their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the 
 line of tendency, out of the national feeling and his- 
 tory, and he would have all to do for himself, his 
 powers would be expended in the first preparations. 
 Great genial power, one would almost say, consists 
 in not being original at all; in being altogether recep- 
 tive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the 
 spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the 
 mind." Against this background, somewhat elabor- 
 ated and filled in with statements not wholly accu- 
 rate, of the literature from which Elizabethan writers 
 through Chaucer derived, appears the figure of Shake- 
 speare, massive, prodigious, yet mild and beautiful. 
 The quality to which all more particular details are 
 related is the lack of peculiarity and ostentation. 
 " He has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells 
 greatly, the small subordinately. He is wise with- 
 out emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is 
 strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes with- 
 out effort and by the same rule as she floats a bubble 
 in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. 
 This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, 
 narrative, and love songs ; a merit so incessant 
 
I90 IRalpb XPHal&o j£mcveon. 
 
 that each reader is incredulous of the perception 
 of other readers." This is the key, the right key, of 
 unliterary criticism. The attributes chosen are se- 
 lected not for their literary but for their tempera- 
 mental value, and suggest with subtle vagueness a 
 pervading quality of temperament. At one with the 
 best of the modern Shakespearean critics, Emerson 
 finds Shakespeare's whole individuality incorporated 
 in his writings. ''What trait of his private mind 
 has he hidden in his dramas ? " he asks; and answers, 
 '' One can discern in his ample pictures of the gen- 
 tleman and the king, what forms and humanities 
 pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large 
 hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let War- 
 wick, let Antonio the merchant answer for his great 
 heart. So far from Shakespeare's being the least 
 known, he is the one person, in all modern history, 
 known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of 
 economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the 
 conduct of life, has he not settled ? What mystery 
 has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, 
 or function, or district of man's work has he not re- 
 membered ? What king has he not taught state, 
 as Talma taught Napoleon ? What maiden has not 
 found him finer than her delicacy ? What lover has 
 he not outloved ? What sage has he not outseen ? 
 What gentleman has he not instructed in the rude- 
 ness of his behaviour ? " 
 
 The imagination of the reader is obliged to assent 
 to this unsupported description, strictly Emersonian 
 
IRepreeentatlve fiDen. 191 
 
 in its direct dealing with the results of careful think- 
 ing and its avoidance of all processes. In the pages 
 following one quality is somewhat more precisely 
 distinguished from another; the totality of impression 
 in the sonnets, the carrying over of the meaning from 
 line to line in the speeches of the plays are men- 
 tioned; the perfect transformation of experience into 
 poetic expression is dwelt upon, and the sovereign 
 cheerfulness of the '' true bard " receives its ardent 
 tribute; but there is nowhere anything to suggest 
 formal criticism, based upon textual comment and 
 analysis. Yet it is not emotional criticism either. 
 The remark made by Dr. Holmes upon Emerson's 
 literary judgments, that he holds the mirror up to his 
 hero at just such an angle that we see his own face 
 as well, is a clever statement of an obvious truth, but 
 it conveys an impression of idiosyncrasy not entirely 
 justified. In his Shakespeare, for example, we see 
 not so much the face and expression of Emerson's 
 own nature as the body of ideas from which his ideal 
 was composed, and by which he tested all subjects 
 that came under his observation. His individual yet 
 classic standard was applied with consistent fidelity, 
 and he escaped thus the danger of whimsical dis- 
 crimination. That he attended to the larger relations 
 of his subject and was chary of detail does not mean 
 that he invented his descriptions to suit his predilec- 
 tions. If they are vague they are none the less 
 founded on observation as acute and well considered 
 as the most meticulous annotator could desire. 
 
192 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 
 
 Indeed Dr. George Brandes, one of the latest and most 
 learned of the Shakespearean ''scholars," quotes 
 ''that keen observer, Emerson" as having drawn 
 attention to the two entirely different rhythms used 
 in Henry Vlll., the one Shakespearean, the other 
 much inferior. The passage is an excellent example 
 of Emerson's efficiency when he sets his mind to the 
 analysis of specific facts, and shows clear under- 
 standing of poetic distribution of stress, as indeed it 
 should, Emerson in his finer poems exercising that 
 art with rare skill. "In Henry Vlll.," he says: "1 
 think I see plainly the cropping out of the original 
 rock on which his (Shakespeare's) own finer stratum 
 was laid. The first play was written by a superior, 
 thoughtful man with a vicious ear. I can mark his 
 lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's 
 soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, 
 where instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose 
 secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that 
 reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm, 
 — here the lines are constructed on a given tune and 
 the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence." 
 
 It is startling to find at the end of the essay an 
 arraignment of the genius that saw the splendour of 
 meaning in the visible world and was content to 
 turn it into plays. Emerson also shares "the half- 
 ness and imperfection of humanity," and the Puritan 
 training that bred distaste for the theatre in even his 
 beauty-loving mind led him to disdain forms of 
 "public amusement" and to speak of the player 
 
6i 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, \ 
 
 Prom the draithigty S. IV. Rowsc, by permission of .Messrs. Curtis 
 
 .6* Ca,m iron and Messrs. $mall^ Maynard, &*■, Co. 
 
 Copyright, i^oi. 
 
 me 
 
 % 
 
^. 
 
IRepreaentative flDen^ 193 
 
 as a trifler. That Shakespeare was ''a jovial actor 
 and manager " was a fact that he could not marry to 
 the magical poetry of the dramas. This touch of 
 ascetic narrowness is the " concealed thing" limiting 
 his appreciation, and preventing him from seeing 
 quite as much of merit as '' beseemed his work and 
 spirit." 
 
 But the essay as a whole is an extraordinary 
 example of persuasive and potent criticism.. It drew 
 from one of his most hostile English critics this spon- 
 taneous outburst of admiration: 
 
 ''After all that has been written and said of the 
 greatest of dramatists, there is a verdant freshness, a 
 clear insight, a musical rhythm, a sympathy with the 
 higher forms of poetry, in this lecture, which we can- 
 not describe better than by saying as we do with 
 unfeigned simplicity, that they have sufficed to ren- 
 der our admiration of Shakespeare's genius even 
 more reverential than heretofore." 
 
 In the list of authors mentioned by Emerson 
 which Dr. Holmes thought worth while to compile, 
 Shakespeare's name leads the rest, having a hundred 
 and twelve references to its credit. The next name 
 on the list is that of Napoleon by the most surprising 
 of juxtapositions. To read the essay at the begin- 
 ning of which stands his name as ''man of the 
 world," is readily to perceive the fascination he held 
 for the antipodal Emerson. His power to perform, 
 to attain definite ends, to realise positive rewards, 
 
 appealed to the practical nature upon which the 
 
 13 
 
194 IRalpb Malt)o Bmereon* 
 
 dreamer in Emerson took secure stand. As a man 
 of the people, a representative of the common sense 
 and common talent of humanity raised to its highest 
 efficiency, like Shakespeare a hero in demonstrating 
 the greatness to which anyone of us might rise did 
 we follow out our possibilities to their furthest con- 
 clusion, as an efficient, prudent, vigorous intelli- 
 gence, Napoleon called to Emerson's sympathy and 
 admiration. 
 
 ''Napoleon had been the first man in the world 
 had his ends been purely public," is the sentence 
 pronounced upon his achievement and defect. And 
 as with Shakespeare the central quality is made clear 
 to us. Shakespeare shone with matchless charm 
 in the broad altruism of his interests. Napoleon 
 burns his egotism on the mind, and is seen to fail by 
 it as Shakespeare failed by his nobler characteristic. 
 The latter showed himself indifferent to personal 
 ambition even in spiritual causes, and escapes Emer- 
 son's sympathy at the point of declining to live 
 personally on the plane of his vision. Napoleon had 
 no vision beyond his personal welfare. The result 
 was more grossly failure as the world is grosser than 
 spirit, but less deeply felt by the critic discussing it. 
 Emerson, in estimating Napoleon, was unhampered 
 by the sense that he found most oppressive, the 
 sense of possibilities unused. 'Mt was not Bona- 
 parte's fault," is his conclusion. '' He did all that in 
 him lay to live and thrive without moral principle. 
 It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man 
 
IRepreeentative flDen* 195 
 
 and of the world which baulked and ruined him ; 
 and the result in a million experiments will be the 
 same. Every experiment by multitudes or by indi- 
 viduals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. 
 The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the per- 
 nicious Napoleon. As long as our civilisation is 
 essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusive- 
 ness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches 
 will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our 
 laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only 
 that good profits which we can taste with all doors 
 open, and which serves all men." 
 
 It was characteristic of Emerson's occasional striv- 
 ing after a verbal effect that he gave to his paper on 
 Napoleon a title certain to mislead the reader accus- 
 tomed to take words at their current value and 
 meaning. The distinction to his own mind was ob- 
 viously clear, however. The worldly man, the man 
 with temporal aims and practical methods, the man 
 who lived by sight and not by faith, was to him the 
 **man of the world," and Napoleon was these. He 
 was also '' the idol of common men " and the saviour 
 politically of his class. Emerson's recognition of the 
 fact that in spite of his later likings for the prizes 
 of royalty he was thoroughly the representative of 
 the industrious masses, of the laborious, ambitious, 
 wealth-loving ''rabble of the Faubourgs," and that 
 his gifts are like theirs in all but degree, gives to the 
 essay its ringing quality of sound metal. His theory 
 was just and he hammered it out with the pleasure 
 
196 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 
 
 of handling firm stuff. His phrases are sympathetic 
 with the quality of his subject: "Bonaparte knew 
 better than society; and moreover, knew that he 
 knew better" ; '' Bonaparte relied on his own sense 
 and did not care a bean for other people's" ; ''Na- 
 poleon understood his busmess. Here was a man 
 who in each moment and emergency knew what to 
 do next." In such plain straight speaking, Emerson 
 seems to show his sympathy with the side of the 
 Emperor that appealed to him always, apparently, 
 with a sense of personal deficiency. ''He is never 
 weak and literary," he says, using the word as else- 
 where he uses it with a suggestion of contempt, 
 "but acts with the solidity and the precision of 
 natural agents." The praise well fits Emerson's own 
 performance at a time and in a society which wel- 
 comed his thoughts as their own, but which wasted 
 the same thoughts by giving them a "weak and 
 literary " form. However he may have fallen short 
 of the robust vitality he admires in Napoleon and in 
 Montaigne, that particular combination of adjectives 
 could not have been applied at his worst moment. 
 Next to Napoleon on the list made by Dr. Holmes 
 is Plato, "the Philosopher." None of Emerson's 
 writings has been so roughly handled as this lecture, 
 unexampled in individuality and freedom from ac- 
 cepted theory. The learned English critics found it 
 also appallingly free from textual comment and from 
 technical discussion of the Platonic system. A man 
 of thought, certainly, but not of letters in the scho- 
 
IRepreeentatlve fIDem 197 
 
 lastic sense of the word, pronouncing judgment 
 upon Plato as a mere man, and insensitive to the 
 minute significance of his philosophy was a phe- 
 nomenon not to be taken seriously. It was not, 
 however, as a scholar that Emerson approached 
 Plato, but as an independent thinker with a ten- 
 dency not unlike Plato's own toward blending the 
 ideal and the actual. In reading the essay one asks 
 what Carlyle can have meant by his complaint that 
 the figure of Plato is vague and indefinite. Nothing 
 could be less so. In place of the philosopher look- 
 ing small and lost among his theories we see a man, 
 a lecturer, polished, elegant, ironical, who has im- 
 bibed from the East its idea of Unity, of one Deity 
 in which all things are absorbed, and from the civil- 
 isation of Europe the knowledge of variety and de- 
 tail, a cool man, whose warrant and qualification to 
 be the world's interpreter is a superb common sense. 
 ** He is a great average man; one who to the best 
 thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his facul- 
 ties, so that men see in him their own dreams and 
 glimpses made available and made to pass for what 
 they are." This is his representative quality and 
 the one, the only one, Emerson cared to bring out. 
 Whether he could have said more or not, whether 
 he could have competed with dialecticians in the 
 discussion of Plato's theories, is aside from the point. 
 We know, of course, from our acquaintance with 
 his mind that he could not, but what he did do was 
 precisely what he wanted to do, he gave a picture 
 
19^ IRalpb TKIlal&o lemeraon. 
 
 of the relation of a great mind to the universal mind 
 of man. We know from his words the great ideas 
 for which Plato stood and his distinction as a human 
 being, not unimportant information to the small 
 average man toward whom Emerson directed it. 
 This passage shows how clearly he told his simple 
 and impressive tale. 
 
 '' In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive 
 of the two elements (unity and variety). It is as easy 
 to be great as to be small. The reason why we do 
 not at once believe in admirable souls is because 
 they are not in our experience. In actual life they 
 are so rare as to be incredible; but primarily there 
 is not only no assumption against them, but the 
 strongest presumption in favour of their appearance. 
 But whether voices were heard in the sky, or 
 not; whether his mother or his father dreamed 
 that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo; 
 whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not ; 
 — a man who could see two sides of a thing was 
 born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; 
 the upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; 
 the union of impossibilities, which reappears in every 
 object; its real and its ideal power, — was now also 
 transferred entire to the consciousness of a man. 
 
 ''The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract 
 truth he saved himself by propounding the most 
 popular of all principles, the absolute good, which 
 rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made 
 transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by 
 
IReprceentative fIDcn* 199 
 
 drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained 
 by orators and polite conversers; from mares and 
 puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks 
 and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, 
 butchers, and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in 
 himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two 
 poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His 
 argument and his sentence are self-poised and 
 spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become 
 two hands to grasp and appropriate their own." 
 
 Goethe, ''the Writer," and the last of the ''Repre- 
 sentative Men," follows Plato in the list of those 
 from whom Emerson quotes oftenest. His place at 
 the end of the book suggests the esteem in which 
 Emerson held him more truly than the number of 
 quotations derived from him. He was the "law- 
 giver of art," but "not an artist." His aim was 
 culture, and "the idea of absolute, eternal truth, 
 without reference to personal enlargement by it," in 
 Emerson's eyes, is higher. He found Goethe inca- 
 pable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment and 
 therefore less noble than poorer writers, but he did 
 justice to his wisdom, and found his representative 
 quality in his ability to cope with "the rolling 
 miscellany of facts and sciences " characteristic of the 
 nineteenth century. He would have been impossible 
 at any earlier time and stands easily for this. For 
 sane and skilful generalisation this lecture like the 
 others is admirable, and Emerson in the course 
 of it gives this interesting statement of what he 
 
200 IRalpb Wlal^o Emerson* 
 
 himself looks for in every writer; the gospel, that is, 
 by which he is differentiated from his fellow men; 
 
 ''Talent alone cannot make a writer. There 
 must be a man behind the book; a personality which 
 by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there 
 set forth, and which exists to see and state things so 
 and not otherwise; holding things because they are 
 things. If he cannot rightly express himself to-day, 
 the same things subsist and will open themselves to- 
 morrow. There lies the burden on his mind, — the 
 burden of truth to be declared, — more or less under- 
 stood; and it constitutes his business and calling in 
 the world to see those facts through and to make 
 them known. What signifies that he trips and stam- 
 mers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that his 
 methods or his tropes are inadequate ? That mes- 
 sage will find method and imagery, articulation and 
 melody. Though he were dumb it would speak. 
 If not, — if there be no such God's world in the 
 man, — what care we how adroit, how fluent, how 
 brilliant he is ? " 
 
 It was the message of Swedenborg that drew 
 Emerson to him. His close study of natural phe- 
 nomena and his exultant search for their source and 
 cause inspired his sympathy, and his positive pro- 
 nouncement on the side of pure goodness held his 
 respect. For these reasons he devoted more than 
 fifty pages to his qualities, setting him among his 
 Representatives as the mystic. Quite as able as 
 Plato to ''see two sides of a thing," however, he 
 
 h 
 
IRepresentative flDen. 201 
 
 balanced his merits with his defects. '' There is no 
 such problem for criticism as his theological writings," 
 he says, '' their merits are so commanding, yet such 
 grave deductions must be made. Their immense 
 and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie or the 
 desert, and their incongruities are like the last 
 deliration." The lecture on Swedenborg has been 
 praised for its generosity and insight, but it lacks 
 the joy of doing which is the happiest quality of 
 most of Emerson's work. One reads with amused 
 sympathy Dr. Edward Emerson's extract from the 
 manuscript notes "\ hold him responsible for every 
 yawn of mine," and in one of the brilliant quatrains 
 published in the volume of poems this humorous 
 revenge is taken. 
 
 "A new commandment," said the smiling Muse, 
 " I give my darling son. Thou shalt not preach "; 
 Luther, Fox, Behmen, Swedenborg, grew pale. 
 And, on the instant, rosier clouds upbore 
 Hafiz and Shakespeare with their shining choirs. 
 
 With Montaigne, the Sceptic, no such half- 
 heartedness was shown. This warm and genial 
 essayist, too coarse-grained for Carlyle, brought to 
 Emerson the savour that he loved, the savour not of 
 bookish retreats but of exhilarating outer world and 
 healthy human nature enjoying it. He wrote in his 
 journal, ''With all my heart I embrace the grand old 
 sloven. He pricks and stings the sense of virtue in 
 me, the wild gentile stock I mean, for he has no 
 
202 IRalpb IKIlalbo lEmereom 
 
 Grace." The high praise found for this graceless 
 Spur in the lecture is that he is not literary, ''i 
 know not where the book that seems less written. 
 It is the language of conversation transferred to a 
 book. Cut these words and they would bleed." In 
 Emerson's own essays how he strove for this result ! 
 How he heaped illustration upon illustration from 
 real life, from common dooryard life, to avoid 
 ''literary" explanation and description! It is the 
 one point at which his critics may venture to feel 
 a certain pity that he did not wholly fulfil his aim, 
 so bravely conceived and so nearly attained. The 
 effort toward muscularity of phrase is obvious yet 
 the red blood does not always flow in those swift 
 stout sentences of Emerson's prose. Like Steven- 
 son he loved best what was just beyond his physical 
 capacity. But — as with Stevenson — ^the passion for 
 strength and health and sane thinking lifted his 
 delicate genius on sweeping wings and carried it out 
 of the atmosphere of the dusty closet to where it 
 could at least look down with sympathy upon the 
 struggling, brawling world with which it fain would 
 have mingled. The language of Montaigne gave 
 Emerson the same pleasure that he felt '' in listening 
 to the necessary speech of men about their work, 
 when any unusual circumstance gives momentary 
 importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and 
 teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower 
 of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct them- 
 selves and begin again at every half sentence, and, 
 
IRepre^entative flDen* 203 
 
 moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and swerve 
 from the matter to the expression." It was thus 
 that one Cambridge man lashed himself to his 
 hesitating syllables, and, in passing, it is well to 
 recall that his sharp scorn of ill-health, also, that has 
 seemed to many a hardness of heart, had its origin 
 in the pluck that rode down physical weakness and 
 fought the enemy of a frail constitution. Again 
 Stevenson is suggested and that unconsciously cruel 
 reference by Mr. Archer to the '' rosy-gilled, athletico 
 aesthete" who was then declaring life happy from 
 his sick room and finding that suffering could set a 
 keen edge on what remained of the agreeable. 
 
 The lecture on Montaigne seems full of him, so 
 clearly is the man of Les Essais brought before us in 
 his lustiest mood. Yet the greater part of the text 
 has to do with scepticism, and it is curious to find 
 that Emerson's idea of the sceptic is the breadth of 
 a continent away from the ordinary acceptation of the 
 word. Who would not write himself a sceptic if 
 he could be convinced of this persuasive definition. 
 ''This then is the right ground of scepticism, — this 
 of consideration, of self-containing; not at all of un- 
 belief ; not at all of universal denying, nor of univer- 
 sal doubting, — doubting even that he doubts; least 
 of all of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is 
 stable and good. These are no more his moods 
 than those of religion and philosophy. He is the 
 considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting 
 stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man 
 
204 l?alpb Malbo lEmereon* 
 
 has too many enemies than that he can afford to be 
 his own foe; that we cannot give ourselves too many 
 advantages in this unequal conflict, with powers so 
 vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and this 
 little conceited vulnerable popinjay that a man is, 
 bobbing up and down into every danger on the 
 other, it is a position taken up for better defence, 
 as of more safety, and one that can be maintained; 
 and it is one of more opportunity and range; as when 
 we build a house, the rule is to set it not too high 
 nor too low, under the wind but out of the dirt." 
 
 From Emerson's report of Representative Men we 
 learn much of himself, as Dr. Holmes has said, and 
 as will doubtless be said by others so long as he is 
 the subject of discussion. But the final lesson to be 
 learned from the indisputable fact is that Emerson 
 himself represented most of the essential qualities for 
 which he sought human types, '' for the secrets of 
 life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness." 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 POEMS. 
 
 EMERSON delayed until 1847 the first edition 
 of his poems, " uncertain always," he wrote 
 to his brother, whether he had ''one true 
 spark of that fire which burns in verse." It is not 
 probable that to-day any critic of importance could 
 be found to share his doubt. Whatever may be 
 said of his prose there is one thing that must be said 
 by all men of his poetry, that it is the expression of 
 a poet. We may search for lines that do not scan, 
 for endings that do not rhyme, for a metre that does 
 not flow or march or sing, for dialect and collo- 
 quialism, intricacy of diction, and grammatical in- 
 version. We may find any or all of these and we 
 shall not have disturbed by a hair's breadth our 
 inner knowledge that we have been pecking and 
 quibbling over the loveliest product of our national 
 life. '' It is his greatest glory as a poet," Dr. Garnett 
 wrote in his account of Emerson, "to have been 
 the harbinger of distinctively American poetry to 
 
 America." Possibly: but it is not our least glory as 
 
 20 T 
 
2o6 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 
 
 a nation that thus early in our literature one poet 
 could make our wilderness blossom like the rose, 
 and we may hope that somewhere the blessed seed 
 lies waiting for his successor, not yet within the 
 field of vision. 
 
 We may well enough doubt, however, if Emer- 
 son's poetry is ever to be popular poetry. The 
 American people would have fulfilled a high ideal of 
 democracy indeed were that to come about. Every 
 poem is charged with thought and thinking is not 
 popular. But every poem also is an example of 
 Emerson's own theory that poetry is ''the perpetual 
 endeavour to express the spirit of the thing," and it 
 is the presence of the spirit, penetrating and inform- 
 ing the thought, that makes Emerson's poetry perma- 
 nently buoyant. The intellectual element strong as 
 it is in it is borne upward in the flight of powerful 
 sentiment. At one time his essays, so pellucid in their 
 crystallised illustrations, were considered recondite 
 and abstruse, and at the same time his poetry was 
 said to be filled with unintelligible expressions. The 
 day of ''popular science" has since arrived, and 
 the popularisation of subjects formerly reserved for 
 the learned is now so extended that one may go far 
 to encounter readers in difficulty over Emerson's eru- 
 dite allusions. One of his early public was heard 
 not long ago to complain that the Threnody, beauti- 
 ful though it was, contained passages of mysticism 
 too complicated for his understanding. But one re- 
 reading discovered the fact that while the noble and 
 
poem0* 207 
 
 tender emotion retained its power to fill the eyes 
 with tears, the darkness had become light and not 
 a line of obscurity interrupted the mood of exalted 
 resignation induced by the poet's acquiescence in 
 the harmony of natural laws. 
 
 It is then easily conceivable that to the larger 
 number of educated men and women who read 
 poetry, that of Emerson will be continually satisfy- 
 ing. It is inspired by the conviction that in no 
 other way can truth be spoken, a conviction always 
 potent to move sincere minds. And it is raised in- 
 finitely above prose by its delicate sensitiveness to 
 suggestion in place of dogma. '* God himself does 
 not speak prose, but communicates with us by hints, 
 omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects 
 lying all around us." Moreover it is essentially the 
 voice of the age and country to which it belongs in 
 its brevity and concentration. " Poetry teaches the 
 enormous force of a few words, and in proportion 
 to the inspiration checks loquacity." There indeed 
 spoke the American, the man of all men to whom 
 ennui is terrible, and diffuse sentiment ridiculous. 
 If the soul is to be revealed there must be no long 
 preamble to the overwhelming vision, and if we 
 are not stirred beyond the possibility of expan- 
 sive comment we have not seen. This terseness 
 of description has, of course, its defect. It sel- 
 dom conveys the sense of sweet leisure and the 
 quiet influence of natural objects. In this stanza 
 from Saadi its least fortunate aspect is shown, the 
 
2o8 IRalpb Mal&o jemersom 
 
 abruptness of the images having no special fitness 
 to the subject: 
 
 Trees in groves, 
 Kine in droves, 
 
 In ocean sport the scaly herds. 
 Wedge-like cleave the air the birds, 
 To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks, 
 Browse the mountain sheep in flocks. 
 Men consort in camp and town. 
 But the poet dwells alone. 
 
 There is, too, a certain harshness of measure in 
 many of his poems to which our generation re- 
 sponds more readily than the previous one, no 
 doubt, but which is too suggestive of conscious 
 revolution against the insipid melody of much of the 
 poetry of his own day. 
 
 The kingly bard 
 
 Must smite the chords rudely and hard. 
 
 As with hammer or with mace, 
 
 he announces in Merlin, and his intention to make 
 ''each word a poem," to fill each word with sig- 
 nificance, has sometimes given his vocabulary an 
 excess of substance which it takes all the free 
 strong movement of his thought to carry. And it is 
 true that he seldom used any but the simplest pat- 
 tern in his constructions. Octosyllabic and deca- 
 syllabic lines satisfied his idea of *'fit quantity of 
 syllables " for the most part, and metrical intricacy 
 had no charm for him. But to consider him there- 
 
Ipoeme* 209 
 
 fore monotonous or unskilled in producing the 
 effects of art is to judge him superficially. Many 
 are his devices, when the ear is at the point of miss- 
 ing the prick of novelty, to seize its attention and 
 renev/ its interest. Note, for example, how delight- 
 fully the slightly irregular jog-trot of the first stanza 
 of the Ode to Beauty breaks in the second stanza 
 into a pacing measure conveying the very essence 
 of blithe emotion that maketh the heart glad without 
 reason: 
 
 I drank at thy fountain 
 False waters of thirst; 
 Thou intimate stranger, 
 Thou latest and first! 
 Thy dangerous glances 
 Make women of men 
 New-born, we are melting 
 Into nature again. 
 
 Lavish, lavish promiser, 
 Nigh persuading gods to err! 
 Guest of million painted forms 
 Which in turn thy glory warms! 
 The frailest leaf, the mossy bark. 
 The acorn's cup, the rainbow's arc, 
 The swinging spider's silver line 
 The ruby of the drop of wine. 
 
 But it would be a difficult matter to analyse 
 Emerson's prosody. He has at least the happy 
 skill to dispose the stress in his lines where it will 
 emphasise the meaning and he does this without 
 regard to arbitrary rules. The result is sometimes 
 rocky syllables that forbid the climbing voice its 
 
2IO IRalpb Mal&o Cmereon. 
 
 progress. More often it is a mastery of simple 
 resources and intelligent combination. In Threnody 
 the ear of the dullest reader must be caught by the 
 recurrent contrast between the mood of sorrowful 
 but calm reflection and that of a sudden yielding to 
 the sharp pang of grief, each reflected in the metrical 
 movement: 
 
 The eager fate which carried thee 
 Took the largest part of me: 
 For this losing is true dying; 
 This is lordly man's down-lying, 
 This his slow but sure reclining, 
 Star by star his world resigning. 
 
 child of paradise, 
 
 Boy who made dear his father's home, 
 
 In whose deep eyes 
 
 Men read the welfare of the times to come, 
 
 1 am too much bereft. 
 
 The world dishonoured thou hast left. 
 
 O truth and nature's costly lie! 
 
 O trusted broken prophecy! 
 
 O richest fortune sourly crossed ! 
 
 Born for the future, to the future lost. 
 
 Certain mannerisms occur in his poems some- 
 times as irritating defects, sometimes as quaint orna- 
 ment suited to the individual style; and grammatical 
 eccentricities are not lacking. 
 
 In the lines so often quoted by dismayed critics, — 
 
 The fiend that man harries 
 Is love of the best; 
 
 it is certainly open to the reader to place the accusa- 
 
Ipoeme. 211 
 
 tive where he will, but these lines can hardly be called 
 representative. Even where equally forced inversion 
 occurs elsewhere the meaning is seldom obscured 
 by it. Another peculiarity which gives an air of me- 
 diasvalism disliked by exacting critics is the division 
 into two syllables of the ending '' ion " and similar 
 endings. But there is nothing really fixed or formal 
 in the poems to give the dialectic mind its oppor- 
 tunity. The description in Merlin of the true poet 
 takes the precise outline of Emerson's muse : 
 
 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." 
 
 Surprise is a characteristic element in the larger num- 
 ber of the poems. It piques the imagination and star- 
 tles the indolent mind, suggesting old truths by fresh 
 figures of speech and furnishing new points of view 
 for poetic thinkers. This perhaps is to be expected 
 in the work of a writer bent upon discarding outworn 
 formulas and the conventions of prosy civilisations. 
 What is remarkable is the extreme beauty of meta- 
 phor, paradox, and symbol. It is comparatively 
 
212 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon. 
 
 easy to be unexpected and nothing is cheaper than 
 the effect when gained merely by the use of 
 unconventional material in language or thought. 
 But beauty, as Emerson knew well, demands an in- 
 tegral idea beneath individual phrases, it demands 
 the curve and balance of interior harmony, a structu- 
 ral expression pervading and accounting for all seem- 
 ing eccentricity. This first essential was never out 
 of his mind. All his varied rhetoric is chosen to em- 
 phasise the unity of man with God and with Nature. 
 Against this noble background his most brilliant col- 
 ours melt into harmony, his crudest forms appear 
 majestic or at least organic. His unstained art, fresh 
 and tonic with unflagging inspiration, has the merit 
 he depicts in the May morning — 
 
 None can tell how sweet, 
 
 How virtuous, the morning air ; 
 
 Every accent vibrates well ; 
 
 Not alone the wood-bird's call, 
 
 Or shouting boys that chase their ball, 
 
 Pass the height of minstrel skill, 
 
 But the ploughman's thoughtless cry. 
 
 Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat, 
 
 And the joiner's hammer-beat, 
 
 Softened are above their will, 
 
 Take tone from groves they wandered through, 
 
 Or flutes which passing angels blew. 
 
 All grating discords melt, 
 
 No dissonant note is dealt, 
 
 And though thy voice be shrill 
 
 Like rasping file on steel, 
 
 Such is the temper of the air, 
 
 Echo waits with art and care, 
 
 And will the faults of song repair. 
 
poeme* 213 
 
 And even apart from this harmonising under- 
 play of significance, even as dislocated fragments, 
 many of his descriptive details are invested with 
 penetrating interest. Salient characteristics of a 
 scene or of a mental image flash across the under- 
 standing like the swift bright wings of tropical birds. 
 Nothing could be more running over 'with the tu- 
 multuous gladness of an early springtime than this 
 other stanza from May-Day — 
 
 Where shall we keep the holiday, 
 
 And duly greet the entering May ? 
 
 Too strait and low our cottage doors, 
 
 And all unmeet our carpet floors ; 
 
 Nor spacious court, nor monarch's hall, 
 
 Suffice to hold the festival. 
 
 Up and away ! where haughty woods 
 
 Front the liberated floods: 
 
 We will climb the broad-backed hills, 
 
 Hear the uproar of their joy ; 
 
 We will mark the leaps and gleams 
 
 Of the new-delivered streams, 
 
 And the murmuring rivers of sap 
 
 Mount in the pipes of the trees, 
 
 Giddy with day to the topmost spire, 
 
 Which for a spike of tender green 
 
 Bartered its powdery cap ; 
 
 And the colours of joy in the bird, 
 
 And the love in its carol heard, 
 
 Frog and lizard in holiday coats, 
 
 And turtle brave in his golden spots ; 
 
 While cheerful cries of crag and plain 
 
 Reply to the thunder of river and main. 
 
 What could better give the sense of wild, sensuous 
 Nature making holiday than these '' cheerful cries of 
 
214 IRalpb Mal&o lEmereom 
 
 crag and plain " ? Emerson's care to preserve the 
 key-note of joy in being led him frequently to choose 
 epithets with the special aim of suggesting mirth and 
 glee, riotous rejoicing on the part of tree, hill, or 
 planet. The ''sportive sun," the World-Soul with 
 cheeks that * ' mantle with mirth, " and Nature ' ' game- 
 some and good," ''merry and manifold," laugh 
 through his poems; "The throbbing sea, the quak- 
 ing earth, Yield sympathy and signs of mirth," the 
 river is cheerful, the rills are gay, the mystic seasons 
 dance. Love " laughs and on a lion rides," the Spring 
 is merry, the rainbow smiles in showers, and the 
 poet is " Blameless master of the games. King of 
 sport that never shames." Seldom has any such 
 body of verse been so gaily grave, so full at once of 
 dignity and spontaneous joyousness, so eloquent of 
 the spirit which he finds in his forests — 
 
 . . . sober on a fund of joy 
 The woods at heart are glad. 
 
 It is, no doubt, as the outcome of this rich delight 
 in the healthy aspects of nature, that he so often 
 personifies natural objects and brings them into his 
 poetry as living, warm companions, speaking his 
 familiar language, but, instead of sharing his mood, 
 imposing their own mood, a quite different matter 
 from the "pathetic fallacy." Nature herself fre- 
 quently appears as a beautiful caressing goddess, 
 shedding smiles and friendliness as she walks the 
 earth amonsr her children. What a free charm is in 
 
Ipoema^ 215 
 
 this careless couplet of that chapter in the Poems 
 headed by her name: 
 
 But Nature whistled with all her winds, 
 Did as she pleased and went her way ! 
 
 And in this extraordinary little picture of man sur- 
 veying the phenomena of experience and comforted 
 by the lovely mother: 
 
 Little man, least of all. 
 Among the legs of his guardians tall. 
 Walked about with puzzled look. 
 Him by the hand dear Nature took, 
 Dearest Nature strong and kind, 
 Whispered, ** Darling, never mind! 
 To-morrow they will wear another face, 
 The founder thou, these are thy race! " 
 
 Emerson's lighter poems not seldom reveal a 
 childlike eagerness to learn the pleasant minor lessons 
 of the outdoor world, and he is not his least poetic 
 self when he is apostrophising the *' burly dozing 
 humble bee " or the blackberries of his pasture, 
 ''Ethiops sweet," but it is when he is making 
 pictures or thinking in music that he rises to heights 
 of poetic style. Nothing that he wrote combines 
 excellent form with high feeling and beautiful im- 
 agery more satisfyingly than the austere and vivid 
 lines on Days beginning: 
 
 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. 
 
2i6 IRalpb IHIlalbo lEmereom 
 
 This stanza of eleven lines is of an exquisite and 
 noble loveliness v^hich has hardly been surpassed 
 in English verse, never in the verse of Emerson's im- 
 mediate contemporaries and successors. Its mate 
 in pictorial words, delicate reserve, and imaginative 
 power is The Rhodora in which the simplicity of 
 Emerson's deepest thought smiles frankly in our 
 faces from his blossoming New England solitudes. 
 These two poems are types of his truest inspiration, 
 embodying as they do his fervent sense of moral 
 responsibility and his bright freedom from didactic 
 moralising. It was while he strolled musing near 
 the haunts of his fair Rhodora that he attained the 
 curious spiritual passion or ecstasy to which at cer- 
 tain moments Nature inspired him; the upspringing 
 of these central fires of feeling which he thanks the 
 God Pan for keeping in control: 
 
 Haply else we could not live, 
 Life would be too wild an ode. 
 
 At these moments his pure-minded Bacchus pours 
 *'the remembering wine" and fulfils his prayer 
 that he 
 
 Refresh the faded tints, 
 
 Recut the aged prints, 
 
 And write my old adventures with the pen 
 
 Which on the first day drew 
 
 Upon the tablets blue, 
 
 The dancing Pleiads and eternal men. 
 
 At these moments he is more the poet of energy, 
 to adopt Matthew Arnold's phraseology, than Words- 
 
poeme* 217 
 
 worth in his most soaring flight, than Arnold him- 
 self at any instant. Mr. Brownell, Arnold's most 
 discerning critic, has said of the latter that he is the 
 poet par excellence of feeling that is legitimated by 
 the tribunal of reason, and he finds his poetry ''ad- 
 mirably representative of the combined thought and 
 feeling of the era." '' But," he adds of his genius, 
 '' it is a reflective and philosophic genius, and accord- 
 ingly its sincerest poetical expression savours a little 
 of statement rather than of song." It is the opposite 
 of this quality in Emerson's most rapturous poems 
 that presses home the conviction of his essentially 
 poetic genius despite flaw and limitation. Rea- 
 son is not to him a faculty by which imagination 
 is restrained or crippled; it is the ether in which float 
 all consoling and radiant thoughts, flowing into the 
 human mind from the region of perfect bliss, ador- 
 able as religion is adorable to such a worshipper as 
 Vaughan. 
 
 Mr. Brownell finds in Arnold's treatment of the 
 theme of immortality that ''imaginative reason" 
 which operates with an eloquence in which we can 
 acquiesce because it makes no claim in the region 
 of the unverifiable " which reason would not, in re- 
 cognising its own limits, acquiesce in as properly 
 within the jurisdiction of the imagination," and in 
 reading his poetry, therefore, we have not to say to 
 ourselves "But it is not true!" Emerson's treat- 
 ment of the same theme is less cautious, but not, I 
 think, less poetic. In this passage from the Threnody, 
 
2i8 IRalpb Mal5o JEmcxeon. 
 
 although in some of its lines the rush of feeling 
 is interrupted by complicated and infelicitous ex- 
 pression, as nearly artificial as Emerson's always 
 significant expression can become, its substance has 
 pure poetic value and the emotion evoked by unal- 
 terable law is of the highest intensity. If it is faith it 
 is not blind faith. If it is reason it is not passionless. 
 If it is not poetry it is nothing: 
 
 Fair the soul's recess and shrine, 
 
 Magic-built to last a season ; 
 
 Masterpiece of love benign, 
 
 Fairer that expansive reason 
 
 Whose omen 't is, and sign. 
 
 Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know 
 
 What rainbows teach, and sunsets show ? 
 
 Verdict which accumulates 
 
 From lengthening scroll of human fates, 
 
 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 ; 
 
 Heart's love will meet thee again. 
 
 Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye 
 
 Up to his style and manners of the sky. 
 
 Not of adamant and gold 
 
 Built he heaven stark and cold; 
 
 No, but a nest of bending reeds. 
 
 Flowering grass and scented weeds; 
 
 Or like a traveller's fleeing tent, 
 
 Or bow above the tempest bent; 
 
 Built of tears and sacred flames. 
 
 And virtue reaching to its aims; 
 
 Built of furtherance and pursuing, 
 
 Not of spent deeds, but of doing. 
 
 Silent rushes the swift Lord 
 
 1 
 
poem0. 219 
 
 Through ruined systems still restored, 
 Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless, 
 Plants with worlds the wilderness; 
 Waters with tears of ancient sorrow 
 Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow. 
 House and tenant go to ground, 
 Lost in God, in Godhead found. 
 
 Arnold found Wordsworth's superiority in the 
 fact that he dealt with more of life than Burns or 
 Keats or Heine, and dealt with life as a whole more 
 powerfully. If this is true of Wordsworth, as indis- 
 putably it is, it is true of Emerson who equally with 
 Wordsworth pursued one object, to ''attain inward 
 freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment." Those 
 who have found his poetry fragmentary can hardly 
 have felt in it this moral unity. Already he has his 
 expositors, from whom we learn that his Brahma for 
 example, sums up the burden of the Bhagavad's 
 philosophy, and that his reference to the wheel ''on 
 which all beings ride " has its origin in the Rig Veda 
 of the Hindoos, and that "the starred eternal worm " 
 may be identified with the stupendous serpent-god 
 of the Hindoos, and we are told how much of his 
 philosophy he has drawn from the East and how 
 much his poetry is steeped in Eastern feeling, but all 
 this seems very far aside from his real poetic achieve- 
 ment. His real poetic achievement lies outside of 
 his borrowings from Eastern religions although this 
 borrowing was characteristically the outcome of his 
 truly poetic desire to unite the deep thought of the 
 world. His real poetic achievement has its source 
 
220 IRalpb Malbo lEmcreon* 
 
 in his power to penetrate the shows of things and 
 reveal their essence. We cannot ignore his poetry 
 because like that of Wordsworth it deals with reality, 
 with the most real of all realities, the indestructible 
 soul of man. If " how to live" is indeed, as Arnold 
 has said, the important teaching of the greatest poets, 
 and if no more than this is needed, we may class 
 Emerson among them without fear, for if we do not 
 learn from his poetry so far as may be learned from 
 any exterior teaching, how to maintain within our- 
 selves the strength of hope and serene intelligent 
 trust and indomitable moral purpose, we are inca- 
 pable of feeling the ''balm of thoughtful words." 
 
 1 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 THE CLOSING YEARS. 
 
 ALTHOUGH Emerson lived to be nearly 
 seventy-nine years old, the greater part of 
 the significant work of his life was accom- 
 plished before he had completed his sixth decade. 
 The rising tide of anti-slavery sentiment and the 
 pressure of political and national questions some- 
 what changed the current of his thought between 
 1850 and 1865. Detached as he kept himself from 
 partisan issues, he was not one who could study his 
 Greek without allowing the news of the firing on Fort 
 Sumter to disturb him. After the war had begun 
 he found that powder '' smelt good " to him, but he 
 kept constantly on the side of moderation in judg- 
 ment, and realised, as few Northerners at that time 
 seem to have done, the deplorable condition of the 
 South. In one of his lectures on slavery in 1855 he 
 urges the ending of the dangerous dispute on '' some 
 ground of fair compensation on one side and of 
 satisfaction on the other to the conscience of the 
 
 Free States." 'Mt is really the great task fit for this 
 
 221 
 
222 IRalpb Malbo jemereom 
 
 country to accomplish," he says, ''to buy that pro- 
 perty of the planters, as the British nation bought 
 the West Indian slaves. I say buy, — never conced- 
 ing the right of the planter to ow^n, but that we may 
 acknowledge the calamity of his position, and bear a 
 countryman's share in relieving him; and because it is 
 the only practicable course and is innocent. Here is a 
 right social or public function, which one man cannot 
 do, which all men must do. T is said it will cost two 
 thousand millions of dollars. Was there ever any 
 contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this 
 will be ? We will have a chimney-tax. We will 
 give up our coaches, and wine, and watches. The 
 churches will melt their plate. The Father of his 
 Country shall wait, well pleased, a little longer for 
 his monument; Franklin for his; the Pilgrim Fathers 
 for theirs; and the patient Columbus for his. The 
 mechanics will give; the needle-women will give; 
 the children will have cent-societies. Every man in 
 the land will give a week's work to dig away this ac- 
 cursed mountain of sorrow once and for ever out of 
 the world." Could this plan have been followed it is 
 now obvious how economical it would have been, not 
 merely in lives but in dollars, for a country left by 
 the Civil War with a bonded debt of nearly three 
 billions, to say nothing of the blighting legal-tender 
 notes. Most of his suggestions, founded as they 
 were upon permanent principles of wisdom, carried 
 a certain practical weight with which the '' mystic " 
 is seldom accredited, but which not infrequently is 
 
Zbc Cloeing l^eare. 223 
 
 justly his due. In January, 1862, eight months 
 before the Emancipation Proclamation, Emerson was 
 clear that emancipation was the demand of civilisa- 
 tion, and with much acuteness he compared the 
 issue of slavery with other issues, some of which are 
 still in dispute. 
 
 ''It is like free trade," he said, — ''certainly the 
 interest of nations, but by no means the interest of 
 certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds fat, and 
 the eager interest of the few overpowers the apathe- 
 tic general conviction of the many. Bank-notes rob 
 the public, but are such a daily convenience that we 
 silence our scruples and make believe they are gold. 
 So imposts are the cheap and right taxation, but by 
 the dislike of the people to pay out a direct tax, 
 governments are forced to render life costly by mak- 
 ing them pay twice as much, hidden in the price of 
 tea and sugar." In the course of the same lecture, 
 after defining the Emancipation policy in the form 
 which he considered most desirable, he thus defines 
 also his idea of government, in which his optimism 
 shows its substantial quality: " I hope it is not a fatal 
 objection to this policy that it is simple and beneficent 
 thoroughly, which is the attribute of a moral action. 
 An unprecedented material prosperity has not tended 
 to make us stoics or Christians. But the laws by 
 which the universe is organised reappear at every 
 point, and will rule it. The end of all political 
 struggle is to establish morality as the basis of 
 all legislation. It is not free institutions, it is not a 
 
224 IRalpb XKHalbo lemereom 
 
 republic, it is not a democracy that is the end, — no, 
 but only the means. Morality is the object of govern- 
 ment. We want a state of things in which crime 
 shall not pay. This is the consolation on which we 
 rest in the darkness of the future and the afflictions 
 of to-day, that the government of the world is moral, 
 and does for ever destroy what is not." Upon a 
 Sunday shortly following the Emancipation Proclam- 
 ation, he read an address, to the eloquence of which 
 one of its auditors has borne ardent testimony: 
 
 '' I have heard Sumner and Phillips and Lincoln 
 and Gladstone," he says, '' and other famous orators, 
 but never from other lips words so impressively 
 spoken as concluding that address: '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!' "^ 
 
 Not only in the stress of great national emergencies 
 was Emerson a good citizen. He was scrupulous in 
 his observance of a citizen's duties, and although he 
 did not like workmg in associations, he was very 
 willing to do what he judged his fair part of such 
 public service. In 1863 he was appointed one of the 
 visitors to the Military Academy at West Point, and 
 Mr. Cabot quotes from a letter written by Mr. John 
 Burroughs a delightful description of him, all eager- 
 ness and attention where the rest of the Board 
 looked dull or fatigued or peremptory, and wearing 
 much the appearance of '' an eager, alert, inquisitive 
 
 'J. W. Chadwick. 
 
Zhc ClOBirxQ lOeare. 225 
 
 farmer." He could hardly be described as a ''club 
 man " in the modern sense of the word, yet, accord- 
 ing to Dr. Holmes, he was the nucleus of the Satur- 
 day Club in Boston and was very regular in his 
 attendance at its meetings, continuing to dine at its 
 table until within a year or two of his death. In 
 one chapter of the volume entitled Society and Soli- 
 tude, which he published in 1870, he gives an admir- 
 able picture of the uses and pleasures of a club from 
 a point of view far from ''transcendental" in the 
 familiar acceptance of that long-suffering word. The 
 club is to bring people together who wish to ex- 
 change thoughts and experiences, but it must be 
 self-protecting, and obstacles arise at the outset. 
 ''There are people who cannot well be cultivated, 
 whom you must keep down and quiet if you can. 
 There are those who have the instinct of a bat to fly 
 against any lighted candle and put it out, — marplots 
 and contradictors. There are those who go only to 
 talk, and those who go only to hear: both are bad. 
 A right rule for a club would be, — Admit no man 
 whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires 
 people who are not surprised and shocked, who do 
 and let do and let be, who sink trifles and know solid 
 values, and who take a great deal for granted." 
 There must not be too strong a tendency toward the 
 superfine. There must be room for a large range of 
 experience. " I knew a scholar, of some experience 
 in camps, who said that he liked, in a barroom, to tell 
 a few coon stories and put himself on a good footing 
 
 IS 
 
226 IRalpb IKHalbo jBmcveon. 
 
 with the company; then he could be as silent as he 
 chose. A scholar does not wish always to be pump- 
 ing his brains; he wants gossips. The blackcoats 
 are good company only for blackcoats; but when the 
 manufacturers, merchants, and shipmasters meet, see 
 how much they have to say, and how long the con- 
 versation lasts! They have come from many zones; 
 they have traversed wide countries; they know each 
 his own arts and the cunning artisans of his craft; 
 they have seen the best and the worst of men. 
 Their knowledge contradicts the popular opinion 
 and your own on many points. Things which you 
 fancy wrong they know to be right and profitable; 
 things which you reckon superstitious they know to 
 be true. They have found virtue in the strangest 
 homes; and in the rich store of their adventures are 
 instances which you have been seeking in vain for 
 years and which they suddenly and unwittingly offer 
 you." Here, again, is the instinctive repulsion to the 
 '' scholar " and '' literary " man; and also the recep- 
 tive attitude characteristic of Emerson in his inter- 
 course with the active world as it was reproduced in 
 the little society around him. '' My father delighted 
 in town-meetings," his son records, ''and sat there 
 humbly as an admiring learner, while the farmer, the 
 shoemaker, and the squire made all that he delighted 
 to read of Demosthenes, of Cato, of Burke, as true in 
 Concord as in ancient cities." As an admiring learner 
 he was prone to sit humbly among all his fellow-men 
 and absorb lessons which he gave out again in- 
 
Zbc ClOBlrxQ ^cnvB. 227 
 
 vested with the magic of his significant phrase. He 
 became, however, increasingly indisposed to '' pump 
 his brains " for new combinations of thought, and 
 between i860 and 1870 produced little that was equal 
 to his best, or that was altogether the fresh product 
 of his mind, although he went on making up lectures 
 from material already collected, and diligently deliv- 
 ering them to meet the common necessities of his 
 life, the war having sapped his resources. To this 
 period, nevertheless, belong the beautiful May-Day, 
 and Terminus, which he read, smiling, to his son, 
 apparently in full vigour of health, but conscious of 
 the inner monition of flagging faculties: 
 
 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!" 
 
 Strange and sad it is to trace in the work of these 
 later days the immitigable resolution of time that the 
 gentle scholar should now '' contract his firmament." 
 In 1870 he was asked, to his delight, to give a course 
 of University lectures at Cambridge for the benefit 
 of advanced students. He saw here the fitting time 
 and place for a course of lectures on The Natural 
 History of the Intellect, a subject that continually had 
 called to him since his young-manhood. He would 
 now, he thought, gather up the fragments of observa- 
 tion which he had been for many years preserving 
 
2 28 IRalpb Malbo lemereom 
 
 in notes, give them a consecutive form, and expand 
 them to cover the range of his long meditation, but 
 he was no longer mentally equal to the effort. After 
 the first lecture he came home quoting, "1 have 
 joined the dim choir of the bards who have been," 
 and though he finished the course in good heart, it is 
 impossible not to surmise that he was well aware of 
 its failure to express his early purpose. His prophetic 
 lines were promptly realised. He was now obliged 
 to ''economise the failing river," and touchingly to 
 follow out his counsel — 
 
 A little while 
 
 Still plan and smile, 
 
 And, fault of novel germs, 
 
 Mature the fallen fruit. 
 
 Before he was sixty he had written, in a spirit of 
 gay philosophy, upon Old Age, bent upon discover- 
 ing its compensations, but nothing that he said then 
 portrayed the extreme beauty of his quiet obedience 
 to the natural law for which no personal deprivation 
 could lessen his reverence. 
 
 In 1 87 1 he took, with a party of friends, a trip to 
 California, and out of the account of it, published 
 by one of his companions, his sturdy unreadiness to 
 benefit by the consideration of others shines con- 
 spicuously. The year after his return a serious mis- 
 fortune made it impossible for him not to accept the 
 kindness that surrounded him, prepared, according to 
 his own doctrine, to flow into any one of a hundred 
 forms of manifestation. Early on a damp and windy 
 
Zbc CIoeinQ IPeare. 229 
 
 summer morning his house caught fire, and he was 
 obliged to work beyond his strength in the attempt 
 to save his papers and other effects. The following 
 day he was kept long in the blazing sun, and an ill- 
 ness ensued which, though not severe, marked the 
 beginning of the decline in memory and the faculty 
 of continued attention described by Dr. Holmes in a 
 letter to Lowell: '' Emerson is gently fading out like 
 a photograph," he wrote; '* the outlines are all there, 
 but the details are getting fainter." 
 
 His friends in Concord had rallied to his assistance 
 at the time of the fire, and, after it, had decided 
 among themselves that the opportunity to be of fur- 
 ther aid to him was not one to be passed by. A 
 subscription was taken, and, first and last, more than 
 fifteen thousand dollars were conveyed to him to be 
 used in another European trip and for the rebuilding 
 of his house. There could hardly have been a more 
 severe test of his proud philosophy and loving tem- 
 per than the acceptance of this spontaneous tribute 
 provided. No reader of his chapter on Gifts, with 
 his indomitable sincerity in mind, can fail to perceive 
 the intense pathos of the occasion, or to realise in 
 what courtesy of soul he finally bent to take the 
 affectionate offering. *M am a lover of men," he 
 wrote, ''but this recent and wonderful experience of 
 their tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts 
 day by day." 
 
 His third and last transatlantic voyage, taken 
 under these auspices, brought him, by way of Eng- 
 
230 IRalpb TKDialbo Emerson* 
 
 land, France, and Italy, to Egypt, a land where there 
 were no men to stimulate him, only colossal temples 
 and strange trees to awaken his interest. In Eng- 
 land Carlyle opened his arms to him in a brotherly 
 embrace, and wondered at the ''striking and curious " 
 spectacle of a man so confidently cheerful in these 
 dark days of the modern world. In England also he 
 saw, now for the first time, Gladstone, Browning, 
 and Ruskin, the last notable to him as expressing a 
 gloom deeper than Carlyle's, and without the sub- 
 sequent laugh that cleared the air for the Scotch 
 misanthropist. 
 
 Upon his return to Concord he was met by crowds 
 of his fellow-citizens, and passed through a flowery 
 arch of triumph and between rows of school-chil- 
 dren singing and cheering. By this joyous guard he 
 was escorted to his new house, the counterpart of 
 the old, in which every book, paper, and picture had 
 been restored to its original position. Among all the 
 eulogies, some of them sufficiently dithyrambic of a 
 certainty, that marked Emerson's honour in his own 
 country after his death, none were so eloquent as 
 this labour of heart and hand spent freely for his 
 happiness during his lifetime, and after his own day 
 of industry was over. His comment, recorded by 
 his son, is wholly characteristic, not only of himself 
 but of the relation between him and his benefactors: 
 '' My friends! " he said, pausing on his threshold and 
 turning to those who had accompanied him thither, 
 '' 1 know that this is not a tribute to an old man and 
 
 t 
 
^be CIosirtQ ^cave. 231 
 
 his daughter returned to their house, but to the 
 common blood of us all — one family — in Concord! " 
 
 During the remaining years of his life he got out 
 his last volume of essays, Letters and Social Aims, 
 with the assistance of his friend, James Elliot Cabot, 
 and spent much time looking over and indexing his 
 journals. He lectured little, finding increasing diffi- 
 culty in remembering words, although his mind was 
 entirely clear. He continued to attend the Lyceum 
 and heard the speakers who filled his place there 
 with unfailing pleasure. 
 
 The failure of his mental machinery to respond to 
 his will left his personal charm singularly undimmed. 
 An artist, who came to his house to paint his portrait 
 afterhismemory was nearly gone, said of him: ''I see 
 Mr. Emerson every day, and every day he asks me 
 afresh my name, — and I never saw a greater man." 
 This dominating virtue of personality was long held 
 to account for his pre-eminence among his contem- 
 poraries, but time has proved it, so far as it existed 
 apart from his thought and vision, merely the lovely 
 light in which the enduring features of his genius 
 were at once made beautiful and to a degree ob- 
 scured. 
 
 In the spring of 1882 he caught cold on one of his 
 walks in the Concord neighbourhood, and after a few 
 days of illness, the last one only spent in bed, he 
 passed from earth, leaving the world different and 
 better for his having been. 
 
 To make clear to ourselves why his effect thus 
 
232 IRalpb Mal5o lemereom 
 
 lives in us and helps us to diviner ends is an attempt 
 as stimulating as it is difficult. Mr. Henry James 
 has perhaps come as near as anyone to producing a 
 phrase that epitomises his pervasive and evading 
 genius: It is the genius ''for seeing character as 
 a real and supreme thing," and again: ''With 
 Emerson it is ever the special capacity for moral 
 experience— always that and only that." Always 
 that, but not only that. Combined with it is the 
 capacity for esthetic experience. Mr. James, when 
 he walked with him in his old age through the gal- 
 leries of the Louvre and of the Vatican, was struck 
 with the anomaly of a man so refined and intelligent 
 being so little spoken to by works of art. But what 
 is still more striking is that a man so conscious of 
 practical ethics and the problems of moral experience 
 should so insistently be spoken to by the interior 
 vision of beauty, and should so completely decline to 
 consider morality apart from it. He was conscious 
 of beauty, not as vaguer moralists have felt it, a mere 
 quality of the spiritual attitude, but as artists feel it, 
 with all its exacting claims and immutable laws, 
 the result in the final analysis toward which creation 
 moves. *' Art has not yet come to its maturity," he 
 says in an early essay, 'Mf it do not put itself abreast 
 with the most potent influences of the world, if it 
 is not practical and moral, if it do not stand in con- 
 nection with the conscience, if it do not make the 
 poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them 
 with a voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work 
 
for Art than the arts. They are abortive births of 
 an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to 
 create ; but in its essence, immense and universal, it 
 is impatient of working with lame or tied hands and 
 of making cripples and monsters such as all pictures 
 and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of 
 man and nature is its end." 
 
 Possibly this genius for seeing character as the 
 real and supreme thing, and for seeing beauty as 
 the inevitable result of right character, the soul at 
 work with line and light, together with the faculty, 
 supremely his, of applying general principles to the 
 needs of the '' deep to-day " constitute the secret of 
 his power over us. Had he been less firmly moral, 
 had he loved beauty less passionately, had he spoken 
 in language less pertinent to the present hour, he 
 could hardly have touched so many of us. His voice 
 is still heard in all our latest and most searching in- 
 terrogation of the mysteries of being. We have not, 
 after a hundred years, outlived him ; it is probable 
 that we shall never outlive him, and for this reason, 
 that he was a moral artist. His was the frame of 
 mind in which an artist creates forms that endure, 
 and his subject was the moral world. What more 
 secure promise of permanence could be given ? 
 
o 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE FRENCH ESTIMATE. 
 
 NE reflection occurs immediately," says 
 Dr. Garnett, in 1888, discussing the per- 
 petuity of Emerson's fame, '' he can never 
 get beyond the English language. He has been 
 excellently translated into German, and even into 
 Italian: it is, perhaps, within the resources of French 
 prose to provide a better translation still. But no 
 merely French, or German, or Italian reader will 
 have the least notion of the magic of his diction: 
 hardly even will the foreigner well versed in English 
 enjoy him to the full." 
 
 Certainly no translation fully can render the 
 peculiar charm of his highly individualised phrase, 
 but it is an interesting fact that in France at least 
 the appreciation of Emerson's work was prompt and 
 enthusiastic. Fifteen years before Hermann Grimm 
 wrote of him, '' He is as good as unknown among 
 us in Germany," his thought, his style, and his 
 temper were being analysed with considerable skill 
 
 and with genuine sympathy for the French public. 
 
 234 
 
.H 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 THE FRESICH estimate. 
 
 ONE reflection occurs immediately," says 
 Dr. Garnett, in 1888, discussing the per- 
 petuity of Emerson's fame, '' he can never 
 
 get beyond the ^ft^^fe ^ms^' ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ 
 excellently transla^dalBte^^tep^n- ^"d even mto 
 iialia^^' '^ '*^ T^prhips, withir, ^'. ' :es of French 
 
 pros ' ^""*' still. But n* 
 
 ^•> reader will 
 ;\c ui his diction 
 ed in Em.' 
 
 an render th 
 iidividualised ph: 
 bu. that in France at ' 
 
 the api. V erson's work was prompt 
 
 ..r.4^. . ; > f: Fifteen years before Hermann Gr 
 '* He is as good as unknown an 
 us in " his thou^ "-* his style, and 
 
 temper were bemg an: ' - wiin considerable 
 and w ine sympathy for the French 
 
 834 
 
Zbc fvcncb leetimate* 235 
 
 In 1847, within a few years after the publication of 
 the Essays and while the Poems were still damp 
 from the press, a writer in the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes, M. Emile Montegut, devoted thirty pages 
 of that journal to the discussion of his quality, the 
 distinction of which he proclaimed with no uncer- 
 tainty of tone. His article opens with a designation 
 now grown somewhat trite and wearying: '' Emer- 
 son, like Montaigne, like Charron, like Shakespeare, 
 is a sage." Following out his comparison, which 
 doubtless seemed to his readers a bold one, M. 
 Montegut describes the modern sage as lacking the 
 systematic mind and rigorous logic of the ancients, 
 declaring that in the sensuous life of the antique 
 world it was true wisdom to concentrate the mind, 
 as did Socrates and Seneca, upon a single point and 
 to regulate the life by a single thought; but that 
 amid the multiplied points of view and the innumer- 
 able mental snares of modernity even the sage has 
 become adroit rather than audacious, walking with 
 hesitation, and constantly observing his environment. 
 Such is the role played by Montaigne, Charron, and 
 Shakespeare, — the role of great observer. Such is 
 the role also that Emerson fills, continually observ- 
 ing and continually seeking, but at one point sur- 
 passing these richly endowed companions — at the 
 point of character. By his character and by the 
 audacity and concentration of his thought he is 
 allied to the ancients, and thus misses no virtue of 
 his class: '' All the qualities of the sage are in him," 
 
236 l?alpb IKHal&o jEmeraon* 
 
 his critic finds, — ''originality, spontaneity, sagacious 
 observation, delicate analysis, the critical faculty, the 
 absence of dogmatism." The critical faculty, ''the 
 principal attribute of the true sage," is eminent in 
 him, and his writings contain a remarkable picture 
 of the infirmities of the age, and a manly protest 
 against them in the name of that individuality which 
 is "stifled by the democratic system." Nor is his 
 style found to be less notable than his penetration 
 of mind. The charming art of the Essays, eflectually 
 concealed from most of their contemporaneous com- 
 mentators, is fully discussed. In using the essay 
 form as a medium for his thought, Emerson, M. 
 Montegut notes, has singularly modified it. To 
 speak of the English essay from Addison to Hazlitt 
 and Lamb is to suggest humour constantly upleap- 
 ing, endless turns of phrase, unexpected thoughts, 
 and, also, a certain lack of unity redeemed by rich- 
 ness and infinite variety of detail. But in Emerson 
 there is "an art of composition distinguishing him 
 from other moralists. Each of his essays abounds 
 in detail and observation, but, once arrived at the 
 end of the chapter, it is easy to discover the har- 
 mony under this apparent disorder." Truly a wise 
 young judge, writing at the time when Carlyle 
 was comparing Emerson's style with bags of duck- 
 shot, and when critics less endowed were finding 
 it obscure and confused and fitful. M. Montegut 
 continues: "Chance thoughts attract him as they 
 do Carlyle and Heine, but in his case the attrac- 
 
 I 
 
Zbc ifrencb leetimate^ 237 
 
 tion has in it no element of danger. The Amer- 
 ican moralist can trust himself to the current of 
 his reveries with the certainty of never losing sight 
 either of the end to be attained or of the road by 
 which to reach it. The tide of his imagination rises 
 slowly, but it never deviates or drops. Ordinarily 
 when 1 read the product of a poet, an orator, or a 
 philosopher I can distinguish the moment when he is 
 about to take his leap to become eloquent. There is 
 an unexpected movement as if a stimulus were given 
 to the imagination to enable it to spring, an effort 
 often factitious, a beating of the wing. With 
 Emerson there is nothing of the sort. His thought 
 rises without exertion and without stir ; not precipi- 
 tately but gradually; he arrives at eloquence without 
 its having been perceived that he was approaching it. 
 When he has reached a certain height he pauses in 
 an intermediary region between earth and heaven, 
 and his philosophy thus avoids both the vagaries of 
 mysticism and the commonplaces of ordinary mor- 
 alising. An enthusiasm which is not exaltation, a 
 sort of rapture not that of desire, a contemplation 
 not that of ecstasy, an imagination of the soul tinted 
 with the purest reflections from nature, sustain him 
 in his middle sphere between the visible world and 
 the infinite." 
 
 Here, also, is an appreciative passage upon the 
 mingled sobriety and light-heartedness of Emerson's 
 attitude toward nature, in which our own language 
 is levied upon for the one right word: 
 
238 IRalpb Malbo fimeraom 
 
 ''There is light and colour in his verse, but it is 
 the light only found in shadowy solitudes and thick 
 woods, the light perfectly expressed in English by 
 the phrases, sunny woods, sunny groves. This word, 
 which is wanting in our language, seems to me 
 admirably to render the sense of light penetrating 
 foliage and shadow, appearing in its golden concen- 
 tration a palpable and material substance, and quite 
 lacking the pallor of the higher light. 'Sunny soli- 
 tudes,' Emerson calls his beloved woods, and we 
 fitly might call his poetic reveries and philosophic 
 inspirations 'sunny soliloquies.' " 
 
 The article is filled with similar delicate tributes 
 to Emerson's gracious qualities as an artist, but the 
 serious business of the criticism is to disclose his 
 unique value as a writer upon questions of moral- 
 ity. This made a peculiar and definite appeal to 
 the thoughtful French mind of the late forties. His 
 attitude toward the individual, M. Mont^gut main- 
 tains, furnishes a salutary example to the student 
 of European ideas at that moment. "From the 
 moral point of view a society which should destroy 
 genius and character would be an intolerable, im- 
 pious, and iconoclastic society, for it would destroy 
 the most beautiful work of art that exists, the 
 individual character, the human soul, such as each 
 of us may fashion by doing his duty. Of this 
 Emerson is well aware, and therefore makes 
 his protest on behalf of the individual. From the 
 individual he exacts character and genius, from 
 
^be 3frencb leetimate. 239 
 
 society he exacts that it shall walk not in one 
 uniform path, but take its way through many; that 
 it shall not close itself against all issues in order 
 that no person shall pass beyond certain limits, but 
 that it give each person freedom to choose his way." 
 It was long after this that Emerson's lecture on 
 Aristocracy was published for the first time, with 
 its more complete definition of this point of view. 
 Had M. Montegut been writing with it before 
 him this passage would have presented itself for 
 quotation: 
 
 ''The young adventurer finds that the relations 
 of society, the position of classes, irk and sting him, 
 and he lends himself to each malignant party that 
 assails what is eminent. He will one day know that 
 this is not removable, but a distinction in the nature 
 of things; that neither the caucus, nor the news- 
 paper, nor the Congress, nor the mob, nor the 
 guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail to 
 outlaw, cut out, burn, or destroy the offence of 
 superiority in persons. The manners, the preten- 
 sions, which annoy me so much are not superficial, 
 but built on a real distinction in the nature of my com- 
 panion. The superiority in him is inferiority in me, 
 and if this particular companion were wiped by a 
 sponge out of nature, my inferiority would still be 
 made evident to me by other persons everywhere 
 and every day." 
 
 But higher even than his teachings to the frantic 
 apostles of democracy, higher than any immediate 
 
240 IRalpb TKHal&o lemereon* 
 
 influence that he could exert upon the turbulent 
 social and political tendencies of the time, M. 
 Montegut esteems Emerson's independence of all 
 temporal questions and mutual considerations. With 
 a fine exercise of his clear Gallic intelligence he 
 grasps the dominating virtue of Emerson's mind and 
 its importance in an age distinguished by shortness 
 of sight and superficiality of interests. The ability 
 to fix the attention upon eternal truth, undistracted 
 by accidents of time and place, is the supreme 
 achievement of either the ancient or the modern 
 sage. This ability in Emerson is truly described as 
 crowning all the evidences of his genius. '' Poster- 
 ity," his courageous critic concludes, '' will not forget 
 that he has given to our century what Montaigne 
 gave to his, a new ideal of wisdom." He was quite 
 right: posterity has not forgotten; nor has this still 
 bolder prophecy failed of fulfilment: 
 
 ''When the day comes that in the United States 
 the superiority of Emerson is recognised without 
 opposition, when his doctrines have fervent follow- 
 ers, when the majority of minds pronounce in his 
 favour, there will have been a great change in the 
 manners, the habits, the tendencies of America." 
 
 This preoccupation with Emerson on the part of 
 a critic typically French in the disinterestedness of 
 his mental processes and the orderliness and definite- 
 ness of his method, is interesting both as showing 
 Emerson's appeal to the French intelligence through 
 his freedom from exuberance, his impartial vision, 
 
 J 
 
Zbc 3frencb leetimatc. 241 
 
 and his instinctive mental and moral balance; and as 
 showing the positive value of criticism based on the 
 application of a definite aesthetic and moral standard 
 to literary phenomena. M. Montegut emphasised 
 in his analysis of Emerson's newly discovered genius 
 precisely the qualities that attract the critical atten- 
 tion toward him to-day, and whether or not his 
 estimate of them is sound it is both responsible and 
 discriminating. 
 
 When in 1850 he contributed to the Revue an- 
 other article on Emerson, inspired by the publication 
 of Representative Men, his mind was occupied with 
 the part played by great men in bringing about the 
 Revolution; and in comparing Emerson's book with 
 Carlyle's Hero IVorship he gave the preference to 
 the latter because it places the greatness of energetic 
 men, living and struggling among realities, higher 
 than the greatness of the passive thinkers. It was 
 more difficult for him sympathetically to appreciate 
 the spirit which could, as he said, express ideas in 
 1848 precisely as they would have been expressed in 
 1846; and while he could admire the imperturbable 
 confidence that was neither intimidated nor shaken 
 by revolutions and reactions; that sacrificed nothing 
 to the spirit of the moment; that discussed Plato and 
 Swedenborg when the whole world had ears only 
 for M. Prudhon and M. Louis Blanc; that praised the 
 scepticism of Montaigne as if the century were not 
 one that boasted of its absolute philosophies, he 
 
 could not entirely acquiesce in what he calls 
 16 
 
242 IRalpb Malbo lemeraon* 
 
 Emerson's theory of '' easy greatness." He does not 
 recognise in it what Carlyle calls the hero, but sees 
 in it the great man only in an antique sense, in the 
 modern sense the man of genius. ''The great man 
 as Emerson depicts him is the pagan, par excel- 
 lence, the man whose grace comes by nature." But 
 Christianity has changed the ideal of heroism. " In 
 modern times man is no longer great by condition 
 and by nature, but by task achieved, by incessant 
 labour, by duty performed. How will it serve him 
 to display his great soul? It is no longer any- 
 thing but a symbol; as Emerson says, it is only the 
 shadow of the ideal; but in ancient times it was a 
 reality. To-day, thanks to Christianity, the humblest 
 and poorest of men has an ideal more elevated than 
 the soul of Epaminondas, Plato, or Homer." If this 
 attitude is not so much at variance with that of Emer- 
 son as the writer narrowing his attention to the 
 one book supposes, the next point of disagreement 
 is more serious in its conventional acceptance of 
 Emerson's indifference to the problem of evil. M. 
 Montegut's tone, like that of Mr. Morley many years 
 later, is one not of antagonism but of pained sincer- 
 ity. Neither critic can recognise his modern inter- 
 rogation of the universe in travail and suffering in 
 Emerson's vision of a universe from which pain and 
 evil are excluded by the reason that every man has 
 lived scrupulously according to the inner law. 
 
 ''This theory of easy greatness," M. Montegut 
 argues, " is almost inadmissible, since Christianity 
 
^be fvcncl) lEetimate* 243 
 
 has recognised the existence of suffering and of sacri- 
 fice. Greatness is no longer the goal of man; it is 
 no longer the end, it is but a means; the end lies 
 beyond greatness itself. In ancient times individual 
 greatness was the end, man attained nothing beyond 
 supreme beauty; but in modern times beauty also is 
 no more than the instrument of truth. Calm, that 
 supreme attribute of truth, is no more; Christianity 
 has stirred the soul to trouble by the example of the 
 Saviour; he has given himself in trial and suffering, 
 and has won for us an ideal of perfection which 
 allows no repose. If calm and greatness sufficed, 
 Christianity would have no excuse for being, — Sto- 
 icism would be enough. Thus the great enemy of 
 Christianity, Spinoza, has attempted to revive and 
 exalt all the calm and serene attributes of antique 
 virtue. He who has replaced in virtue the hero and 
 great man of ancient times is not the modern hero 
 but the saint. . . . It is only the saint who pos- 
 sesses the gift of power to live with the divine and 
 the intellectual without the temptation to dominate 
 these celestial forces, who can let himself be inspired 
 by them with the simplicity of the child." 
 
 In spite, however, of the fact that Emerson does 
 not lay sufficient stress on the beauty of overcoming 
 to please his critic to whom the fine passage on Fate 
 and Free-will in the Conduct of Life has not yet 
 spoken, it is granted that his theory of great men 
 is infinitely to be preferred to the then popular theory 
 of the power of circumstances to create greatness; 
 
244 IRalpb Mal&o j£mcvBon. 
 
 and the doctrine so pungently expressed in the poem 
 on The Celestial Love 
 
 He that feeds men serveth few; 
 He serves all who dares be true, 
 
 is analysed and reapplied with lively appreciation of 
 its worth. 
 
 From the time of this article to the end of the 
 century Emerson was the subject of but two more 
 critical papers in the Revue, one of them by M. 
 Montegut on English Traits, the other a superficial 
 and unenlightening discussion of the Poems by Th. 
 Bentzon. In 1902 came another long and thor- 
 ough investigation of the substance and form of 
 Emerson's work, — this time by M. Roz, a much less 
 sympathetic interpreter than M. Montegut, but no 
 less earnest or intelligent. Finding that Emerson's 
 thought belongs essentially to his country and time, 
 and that it loses much of its prestige in crossing 
 the Atlantic, he freely accords him the distinction 
 of writing from a point of view in astonishing con- 
 formity with the needs and aspirations of that time 
 and country. *' Other countries and other epochs 
 have given greater thinkers; none, to use his own 
 phrase, a more representative one." 
 
 In order to comprehend the usefulness of such 
 idealism as Emerson taught, one must understand, 
 M. Roz assures his countrymen, the crying need 
 of the young democracy which, to his mind, was 
 fast crumbling into a dust of independent units, and 
 
^be ifrencb leetimate. 245 
 
 if the quietism at which Emerson's individualism 
 strangely arrives is at first sight disconcerting, it 
 must be borne in mind that ''the American world in 
 which the practical sense is always awake, has only 
 too marked a tendency to attach itself to works. 
 There is no need to teach it the value of action, of 
 effort, of enterprise. What is important, on the con- 
 trary, is to lead it to recognise the worth of love, of 
 the interior sentiments." What is most difficult for 
 M. Roz to justify is Emerson's optimism. This he 
 accepts as the ineluctable consequence of his system 
 and the fundamental tendency of his mind, but he 
 feels that his hope is akin to indifference; his insist- 
 ence upon the obligation of each individual to col- 
 laborate with the good intentions of the universe is 
 offset by his dislike of admitting the difficulties, 
 struggles, and disabilities of human nature in its 
 weakness. This, in essence, is the complaint of M. 
 Montegut, and of Mr. Morley as well, and arises, cer- 
 tainly, through no impatient or ineffectual examina- 
 tion of Emerson's writings. But is it a reasonable 
 complaint ? If it is, we have to admit that Emerson, 
 despite his extraordinary endowment, is not a writer 
 to move hearts; that he is the mere illustrator of 
 ideas and not a student and teacher of life. Un- 
 questionably it is true that in his writings Emerson 
 declined to dwell upon the presence of evil in the 
 world, and it is true that, as M. Roz with some dis- 
 approval points out, he did counsel the suppression 
 of all reference to personal ailments either of body or 
 
246 IRalpb TKHalbo jemereon* 
 
 soul. There seems to be but one explanation at 
 once consistent with these facts and with our con- 
 ception of Emerson as the friend of man, the lover 
 of his kind. His French critics and some of his 
 English critics have commented upon his singular 
 blending of individuality with universal aims and in- 
 terests. But it is upon the union of these apparently 
 opposing elements in humanity that he bases his 
 hope for a regenerated world. Before all of us he 
 holds the ideal life, the rounded perfection of beauty 
 in thought, conduct, and aspiration. To each of us 
 he leaves the solution of our individual problems, our 
 grapple with the special evil that threatens or defect 
 that limits. That is our part, quite sacredly our own, 
 and not to be pried into or meddled with by even 
 the moralist. His part is to display the goal, to lure 
 with visions of the exquisite outcome of duty per- 
 formed, never more radiantly shown as the rainbow 
 of the soul, to stimulate with accounts of the worth 
 of goodness and truth, the ravishing charm of virtue. 
 Both the evil of intention and the evil of accident are 
 indeed left out of his scheme, not, perhaps, because 
 he is indifferent to the suffering they cause, but be- 
 cause his way of inspiring man's soul with the hope 
 that quickens is to show the kingdom of righteousness 
 as though it were the pearl of great price, to obtain 
 which a man might well give all that he had of other 
 treasure. This is the ''indirect service" which is 
 all, he says, that any man has it in his power to ren- 
 der another; this is the life-giving light of influence 
 
Zbc fvcncb leetimate* 247 
 
 that pours down upon the heart and causes it to 
 blossom in good deeds. If self-sacrifice is not 
 preached it is included in self-development such as 
 he urges upon the individual. As M. Montegut in 
 one of his papers has explained, Emerson does not 
 set up great men, as Carlyle does, in the position 
 of natural guides of the people, antique demi-gods, 
 or apostles, but as terrestrial types of the divine and 
 holy, at once mirrors of nature and temples of God. 
 Toward common men he held the same attitude. 
 In fact, '' There are no common men," he says. " All 
 men are at last of a size, and true art is only possible 
 on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis 
 somewhere." Each man has in him the divinity 
 according to which he must live and by which he 
 must learn his method, whether it turn out to be 
 self-sacrifice or the enjoyment of different oppor- 
 tunity. To the deeply religious mind there is no 
 shock in this assumption. Is it not from the highest 
 Christian source that we have learned to call our- 
 selves '' gods " without blaspheming ? 
 
 Possibly the inclination to regard Emerson's op- 
 timism as of the heartless type is due to a perfectly 
 simple and, on the whole, natural error in defining 
 his attitude toward life, an error avoidable only by 
 attempting to discern as far as possible the mood in 
 which he advocated receptivity and serenity. He 
 is taxed with the defects of an exclusive doctrine, 
 when, apparently, his controlling intention was to 
 teach a morality the most inclusive to be conceived. 
 
248 IRalpb TKIlal&o lemereon* 
 
 M. Roz, for example, finds his serenity more or less 
 disdainful and distant, and affirms that in his counsel 
 to us to be as a shadow crossed by a ray of divine 
 light he takes too little cognisance of the human 
 obstacles retarding and interrupting the ray's transit; 
 of our need for all strength and all help in over- 
 coming them. To begin with, the passage from 
 which this specific illustration of Emerson's theory 
 is taken is marked by one of his rare modifications: 
 " Great genial power, one would almost say, consists 
 in not being original at all; in being altogether recep- 
 tive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the 
 spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the 
 mind." But, of course, there are passages in plenty 
 to convey the general idea as M. Roz has grasped it. 
 Other passages, however, to be read in connection 
 with these theories, in which Emerson speaks of con- 
 duct, show his belief in self-discipline and moral 
 action with entire recognition of all the demons that 
 fight against morality and faith. Man contends with 
 the strength of his moral nature against the acci- 
 dents and foes that would destroy his belief in ulti- 
 mate good. '' When his mind is illuminated, when 
 his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the 
 sublime order, and does with knowledge what the 
 stones do by structure." In other words, he clears 
 away the obstacles blocking his heart against the 
 divine ray. His acquiescence in the order of the uni- 
 verse at the moment when it is most cruel and crush- 
 ing presupposes the elevation of his mind and soul 
 
Zhc frencb iBetimate* 249 
 
 to the perception of love and goodness. '' One way 
 is right to go: the hero sees it and moves on that aim, 
 and has the world under him for root and support/' 
 This surely is not only the clear-seeing but the right- 
 acting hero. ''I know not whether there be, as 
 is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere a 
 permanent westerly current, which carries with it all 
 atoms which rise to that height, but 1 see that when 
 souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they 
 accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. 
 A breath of will blows eternally through the universe 
 of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary. 
 It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, 
 and it is the wind which blows the worlds into 
 order and orbit." The entire chapter on Fate in 
 which Emerson once for all sums up the horrors 
 of our existence, breathes the spirit of Christianity, 
 the spirit that inspires the saint and the sage to suf- 
 fer for the universal benefit. '' 1 come," said Christ, 
 '' not to destroy the law but to fulfil it. " From centu- 
 ries before his day what Emerson calls ''the Beautiful 
 Necessity " has been regarded by the sceptical as the 
 tyrant of our life. Emerson's scepticism is of a 
 different order. Sceptical of essential evil, he can 
 write in a spirit as purely religious as that of the 
 devout martyrs: *Mf we thought men were free in 
 the sense that in a single exception one fantastical 
 will could prevail over the law of things, it were all 
 one as if a child's hand could pull down the sun. 
 If in the least particular, one could derange the order 
 
250 IRalpb Malbo JBmcxeon. 
 
 of natjre, — who would accept the gift of life?" 
 Obviously this is neither disdain nor egoism. If it is 
 a doctrine too passive for the modern world it awaits 
 the growth of the modern world to its altitude of 
 reasonable faith. 
 
 For Emerson's appreciation of the scientific spirit 
 and joyous acceptance of scientific discovery M. Roz 
 has naturally the most cordial admiration, and his 
 estimate of Emerson's art, particularly as shown in 
 his prose, echoes M. Montegut's favourable verdict. 
 ** He is a poet by virtue of his tone; a creative power 
 dwells in his words. . . . Like Socrates, whom 
 he loved, he deems that truth belongs to all, is at the 
 doorway of all; that the task of the philosopher is to 
 make it admired and beloved. Thus, perchance, his 
 surest originality lies in the fact that he warms all 
 truth at the fires of moral and poetic imagination. 
 For all truth interests him. This is plainly to be 
 seen in the variety of his work. He borrows from 
 theology and science, aesthetics and morals, history 
 and legend. He looks in every direction, and all the 
 objects beheld by him illuminate one another in his 
 eyes, reveal to him their hidden relations, their 
 secret harmonies. Hence the charm, slightly whim- 
 sical at times but nearly always compelling, of his 
 style." 
 
 In these criticisms Emerson is at least made real 
 to the French public. Through them he is seen to 
 be a dignified and unique figure in literature, and his 
 message is coherently rendered. Curiously, also, it 
 
 1 
 
t^ 
 
 "^UCill > 
 
 <rift of life?" 
 
 ^ ism. If it is 
 
 ^ world it awaits 
 
 its altitude of 
 
 s ap[ ;ie scientific spirit 
 
 acceptance ot scientific discovery M. Roz 
 
 the most cordial admiration, and his 
 
 ^ Emerson's art, particularly as shown in 
 
 echoes M. Mont^gut's favourable verdict. 
 
 '* He is a poet by virtue of his tone; a creative power 
 
 dwells in his word:,. . . . Like Socrates, whom 
 
 hf. loved, he deems that truth belongs to all, is at the 
 
 uuui way of all; ^^j^^^^^J^^gl^the philosopher is to 
 
 ma^ it admired^and beloved.. thiiJi, Derdiance, his 
 
 By Daniel Chester French. By permission of Trie Xlenlury Co. ' 
 
 su in the fact that he warms all 
 
 at the 
 
 to br 
 
 of h 
 
 >, hist 
 .1, and all 
 another in 
 elations. ' 
 cnarm, slightly \ 
 ompelling, 
 
 1 is at least mac^ 
 public. Through them he i^ 
 d unique fissure in literature 
 ^f^ntly renc Curiousb 
 
Zl)c ]frencb leetimate* 251 
 
 is a French writer — a Belgian writing in French — 
 who has most adequately commented upon the ele- 
 ment in his work most valuable to the common 
 mind, and least often dwelt upon by judicial critics, 
 —his power, that is, of casting glory over the 
 common day, of seeing grandeur in our dust. 
 M. Maurice Maeterlinck has chosen, characteristi- 
 cally, to embody his criticism of Emerson in the 
 indirect manner of the impressionist; and as no 
 synopsis or report of his essay could in the least 
 represent its spirit it is translated in its complete 
 form as it appeared in Le Tresor des Humbles : 
 
 *' ' One sole thing matters,' says Novalis, — 'the 
 quest, that is, of our transcendental self.' This self 
 we perceive at times in God's word, in that of poets 
 and sages, in the deeps of certain joys and certain 
 sorrows, in slumber, love, and illness, at sudden mo- 
 ments when from afar it signals to us and points to 
 our relation with the universe. 
 
 ''Certain wise men have pursued no other quest 
 than this and have written those books in which 
 only the extraordinary reigns. 'What is there of 
 value in books,' our author says, 'save the trans- 
 scendental and the rare ? ' These men are like 
 painters striving in the dark to gain a likeness. 
 Some have traced abstract images of great size but 
 nearly indistinguishable. Others have succeeded in 
 fixing an attitude or habitual gesture of the higher 
 life. Many have imagined strange beings. These 
 pictures are not numerous. They are never alike. 
 
252 IRalpb TlWalbo lEmevBon. 
 
 Some are very beautiful, and those who have not 
 looked upon them are, during their whole lifetime, 
 like men who have never been out of doors at noon- 
 day. There are those drawn in line purer than that 
 of heaven ; and these figures appear to us so far dis- 
 tant that we are ignorant whether they live or were 
 copied from ourselves. These are the work of the 
 pure mystics, and in them man does not yet recog- 
 nise himself. Others, called poets, have told us in- 
 directly of these things. A third class of thinkers, 
 raising by one degree the old myth of the Centaurs, 
 has given a more accessible image of this occult 
 identity by mingling the outlines of our apparent self 
 with those of our higher self. The countenance of 
 our soul divine smiles now and again over the shoul- 
 der of the human soul, her sister, bending to lowly 
 tasks of thought ; and that smile, revealing glimpses 
 of all that exists beyond the limits of thought, is all 
 that matters in the works of man. 
 
 '' They are not many who have shown us that man 
 is greater and more profound than man, and who 
 have succeeded in fixing thus some of the eternal 
 suggestions encountered by us at every moment of 
 life, in a gesture, a sign, a look, a word, in silence, 
 and in the events that hedge us about. The science 
 of human grandeur is the strangest of sciences. 
 None among men is ignorant of it; but hardly one 
 knows that he possesses it. The child who meets 
 me will not be able to tell its mother that which it 
 has seen; and yet from the moment its eye has rested 
 
JLhc ifrencb lEetimate* 253 
 
 on me it knows all that I am, all that I have been 
 and shall be, as well as my brother, and three times 
 better than myself. It knows me instantly in the 
 past and future, in the present world and in other 
 worlds ; and its eyes in turn reveal to me the part 1 
 play in the universe and in eternity. Infallible souls 
 are judged by one another; and from the first in- 
 stant its eyes have taken in mine, my face, my atti- 
 tude, and the infinite by which these are surrounded 
 and of which they are interpreters, the child knows 
 upon what to rely; and even though he does not yet 
 distinguish the crown of an emperor from the wallet 
 of a beggar, he has for one moment known me as 
 accurately as God. 
 
 '' In truth we already behave as the gods, and our 
 entire life passes amid infinite certainties and infalli- 
 bilities. But we are blind men playing with precious 
 stones along the road ; and this man knocking at my 
 door dispenses, at the moment of greeting, spiritual 
 treasures as marvellous as any gifts a prince whom I 
 might have snatched from death could bestow upon 
 me. I open to him, and in an instant he sees at his 
 feet, as from the summit of a tower, all that takes 
 place between two souls. The peasant woman of 
 whom 1 ask my way I judge as deeply as though 1 
 asked my mother's life of her ; and my own soul has 
 spoken to me as intimately as that of my betrothed. 
 She rises swiftly to the highest mysteries before re- 
 plying, then tells me tranquilly, knowing what I am 
 at a glance, that I must take the path to the left for 
 
254 TRalpb IKHalbo JEmcvBon. 
 
 the village. If I pass an hour in the midst of a 
 crowd, 1 have judged the living and the dead a thou- 
 sand times silently, and v/ith but a moment's thought, 
 and which of these judgments shall be changed at the 
 last day ? There are in this room five or six beings 
 who speak of rain and of fine weather ; but above 
 this paltry conversation their souls hold intercourse 
 which no human wisdom could approach without 
 danger ; and though they speak through look and 
 gesture, and face, and presence, what they have said 
 they will never know. They must await, however, 
 the end of their indiscernible dialogue, and that is 
 why they have I know not what of mysterious joy 
 in their languor without comprehending that which 
 in them hearkens to all the laws of life, and death, 
 and love which flow like never-failing rivers around 
 their abode. 
 
 ' * Thus is it everywhere and always. We live only 
 by our transcendental being whose acts and thoughts 
 each moment pierce the envelope surrounding us. 
 
 'M go to-day to see a friend whom 1 have never 
 seen ; but 1 know his work and I know that his soul 
 is extraordinary and that he has spent his life in 
 manifesting it as exactly as possible in accord with 
 the duty of the higher minds. 1 am anxious and the 
 hour is solemn. He enters ; and all the explanations 
 he has given us in the course of many years fall in 
 dust at the opening of the door to admit him. He is 
 not that which he believes himself to be. He is other 
 than his thought. Once again we prove that the 
 
Zbc fvcncb leetimate. 255 
 
 emissaries of the mind are ever faithless. He has 
 spoken deep things about his soul ; but in that little 
 instant between the glance that pauses and the glance 
 withdrawn, I have learned all that he will never be 
 able to say and all that he will never be able to make 
 alive in his mind. He belongs to me henceforth ir- 
 revocably. Formerly we were united by a thought. 
 To-day something many thousand times more mys- 
 terious than thought delivers us into one another's 
 hands. For years we have looked forward to this 
 moment ; and now we feel that all is useless, and in 
 fear of silence we who were prepared to show each 
 other vast and secret treasures talk together of the 
 striking hour or the setting sun, that our souls may 
 have time to wonder at each other, and drop away 
 into another silence, not to be troubled by the mur- 
 mur of lips and thoughts. 
 
 ''At bottom, we live only from soul to soul and are 
 gods without knowing it. If to-night, unable to en- 
 dure my solitude, 1 go down among men, they will 
 tell me that the storm has beaten their pears to the 
 ground, or that the last frosts have closed the harbour, 
 is it for this that I have come ? And yet I shall soon 
 depart, my soul as satisfied and strengthened and 
 filled with new treasure as though 1 had passed these 
 hours with Plato, Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius. 
 What their lips speak is unheard beside what their 
 presence proclaims, and it is impossible for man not 
 to be great and admirable. What thought thinks is of 
 no importance by the side of the truth that we are, 
 
256 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 
 
 affirmed in silence ; and if, after fifty years of soli- 
 tude, Epictetus, Goethe, and St. Paul were to touch 
 upon my island they could tell me only what the 
 light spray of their bark must tell me at the same 
 time and perhaps more directly. In truth, that 
 which in man is strangest is his gravity and hidden 
 sagacity. The most frivolous among us never really 
 laughs and in spite of his efforts never succeeds in 
 losing a moment, for the human soul is watchful and 
 does nothing uselessly. Ernst ist das Leben (life is 
 earnest), and in the depths of our being our soul has 
 not yet smiled. On the other side of our involun- 
 tary agitations we lead a wonderful existence, mo- 
 tionless and very pure and very sure, at which our 
 out-stretched hands, our opening eyes, our meeting 
 glances, continually hint. 
 
 ''All our organs are mystical accomplices of a 
 higher being, and it is never a man but a soul that 
 we have known. I have never seen the poor man 
 begging alms on my doorstep without perceiving one 
 thing else, the identical destinies in our eyes greeting 
 one another, and at the moment he stretches forth 
 his hand the little house-door opens for an instant 
 upon the sea. ' In my dealing with my child,' says 
 Emerson, ' my Latin and Greek, my accomplish- 
 ments and my money stead me nothing ; but as much 
 soul as 1 have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will 
 against mine, and leaves me, if 1 please, the degrada- 
 tion of beating him by my superiority of strength. 
 
 *' ' But if I renounce my will and act for the soul, 
 
 % 
 
Zbc 3ftencb lEBtimate* 257 
 
 setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his 
 young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves 
 with me.' 
 
 *' But if it is true that the last among us cannot 
 make the smallest gesture without taking account 
 of the soul and the spiritual kingdoms over which 
 it reigns, it is also true that the wisest hardly ever 
 thinks of the infinite which acts through the eyelid 
 opening, the head inclining, the hand closing. We 
 live so far from ourselves that we are ignorant of 
 nearly all that takes place on the horizon of our being. 
 We wander at random in the valley, unsuspecting 
 that all our movements appear again with their true 
 significance upon the summit of the mountain; and 
 we need that some one come to us from time to time 
 to say: ' Lift up your eyes, behold what you are, be- 
 hold what you are doing; it is not here that we live; 
 it is yonder on high.' This glance exchanged in the 
 shadow; these words, meaningless in the valley, — 
 behold the meaning they take on beyond those 
 snowy peaks, and how our hands, that we believe 
 so weak and small, touch God at every moment, 
 without knowing it. 
 
 'There are those who have come to lay hand upon 
 our shoulder and point out to us what is taking place 
 ' upon the glaciers of mystery. They are not many: 
 there are three or four of them in this century. 
 There have been five or six in others; and all that 
 they are able to tell us is as nothing beside what ex- 
 ists and is known by our soul. But what matter ? 
 
 >7 
 
258 IRalpb THIlalbo JEmereon. 
 
 Are we not like one who in early childhood has lost 
 his sight? He has seen the measureless spectacle 
 of creation. He has seen the sun, the sea, and the 
 forest. Now these marvels for ever belong to him; 
 and should you speak of them what could you say 
 to him, and what would your poor words be beside 
 the forest-glade, the tempest, and the daybreak which 
 still live in the depths of mind and flesh ? He will, 
 however, listen to you with ardent and amazed de- 
 light, and though he knows all, and though your 
 words represent that which he knows more imper- 
 fectly than a glass of water represents a great river, 
 the little feeble phrases falling from the lips of man 
 will for an instant illuminate the ocean, the day, and 
 the sombre foliage sleeping amid shadows under his 
 lifeless lids. 
 
 ' ' The facets of this ' transcendental self, ' of which 
 Novalis speaks, are no doubt innumerable, and no 
 two of the mystic moralists have succeeded in study- 
 ing the same one. Swedenborg, Pascal, Novalis, 
 Hello, and others examine our relations endlessly, 
 abstrusely, subtly, and from afar off. 
 
 '' They lead us over mountains where not all the 
 summits seem either habitable or natural, and where 
 we often breathe with pain. Goethe accompanies 
 our soul upon the shores of the sea of serenity. 
 Marcus Aurelius establishes it upon the hillside of a 
 humanity weary in its perfection, and under the too 
 heavy foliage of hopeless resignation. Carlyle, the 
 spiritual brother of Emerson, who in this century has 
 
^be ifrencb lEetimate* 259 
 
 told us of the opposite end of the valley, shows sin- 
 gle heroic moments of our being in lightning flashes 
 against a background of cloud and storm, of an Un- 
 known never other than monstrous. He leads us like 
 a flock dispersed by tempest toward strange sulphur- 
 ous pastures. He thrusts us into the deepest of the 
 shadows which he has joyously discovered, lighted 
 only by the intermittent fierce star of heroes, and 
 there abandons us with wicked laughter to the vast 
 reprisals of mystery. 
 
 '' But here at the same moment is Emerson, the 
 good shepherd of the morning, in the pale verdant 
 meadows of a new optimism, natural and credible. 
 He does not insist that we skirt the abyss. He does 
 not take us out of the humble familiar inclosure, for 
 the glacier, the sea, the eternal snows, the palace, 
 the stable, the funeral pall of the pauper, the bed of 
 sickness, are all under the same heavens, purified by 
 the same ^tars, and subject to the same infinite forces. 
 
 ''To many he has come at the moment of need, at 
 the instant when they were in mortal want of new 
 interpretations. The periods of heroism have faded 
 out of sight, those of abnegation have not yet come; 
 nothing is left us but the daily life, still we cannot 
 live without greatness. He has given to this life, 
 divested of its traditional horizon, an almost satisfac- 
 tory meaning, and possibly he has shown us that 
 it is strange and deep and broad enough to be its 
 own excuse. He knows no more of it than others, 
 but he affirms with greater courage, and he has 
 
26o IRalpb HClalbo lemeraon* 
 
 confidence in the mystery. You must live, all you 
 who pass through the days and years without ac- 
 tivity, without thought, without light, because your 
 life, in spite of everything, is incomprehensible and 
 divine. You must live, because no one has the right 
 to subtract from the spiritual events of common- 
 place weeks. You must live, because there are no 
 hours without their intimate miracles and ineffable 
 meanings. You must live, because there is not an 
 act, not a word, not a movement which escapes the 
 inexplicable claims of a world ' where there are many 
 things to do, and few things to know.' 
 
 '' Life is neither great nor small, and the deed of 
 Regulus or Leonidas has no importance when 1 com- 
 pare it with one moment of my soul's secret being. 
 That soul might or might not be able to do what 
 they have done; these things do not touch it; and the 
 soul of Regulus, when he was returning from Car- 
 thage, was probably as distraught and as indifferent 
 as that of the workman on his way to his factory. 
 It is too removed from all our deeds; it is too re- 
 moved from all our thoughts. It lives alone within 
 us a life of which it does not speak; and from the 
 heights where it reigns the variety in our life is not 
 distinguishable. We walk weighed down by our 
 soul, and there is no proportion between it and our- 
 selves. Possibly it never considers what we are 
 doing, and this fact may be read in our faces. If one 
 would interrogate a mind from another world as to 
 the typical expression of the human countenance, it 
 

 ir^- 
 
 ^1 
 
 
200 
 
 .aii^u v^^iUk) Ctiicr0cn* 
 
 must live, all you 
 
 -rnr<: without ac- 
 
 , oecause your 
 
 rehensible and 
 
 one has the right 
 
 the spiritual events of common- 
 
 i must live, because there are no 
 
 it their intimate miracles and ineffable 
 
 You must live, because there is not an 
 
 ...., not a word, not a movement which escapes the 
 
 inexplicable claims of a world ' where there are mnny 
 
 things to do, and few things to know/ 
 
 '' Life is neither great nor small, and the deed of 
 Regulus or lRQJl^0^3m^mmSi^^^^ when I com- 
 pare it with omfnmmm}%pkpWi»PuVs secret being, 
 soul mifi^ht or do what 
 
 I the 
 
 •rent 
 
 ay . 
 
 ,o, .L io too re- 
 es alone within 
 ; and from th^" 
 ariety in our life is 
 >K weighed down by oi 
 is no proportion between it and 
 ly it never considers what wt 
 .5 fact may be read in our faces. 1: 
 ^ ^^^ate a mind from another world . 
 
 ^jjression of the human counten^^' 
 
^be Jrencb lEatimate* 261 
 
 would no doubt reply, after having seen mankind in 
 joy, in grief, and in anxiety: ' They have the air of 
 thinking of something else/ Be great, be wise and 
 eloquent; the soul of the poor man stretching out his 
 hand for alms at the corner of the bridge will not be 
 envious, but yours perhaps will envy him his silence. 
 Heroes have need of the common man's appro- 
 bation, but the common man does not ask the ap- 
 probation of heroes, and follows his way without 
 anxiety, as one who has all his treasures secure. 
 'When Socrates speaks,' says Emerson, 'Lysis 
 and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they 
 do not speak. They also are good. He likewise 
 defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Be- 
 cause a true and natural man contains and is the 
 same truth which an eloquent man articulates; but 
 in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, 
 it seems something the less to reside, and he turns 
 to these, silent, beautiful, with the more inclination 
 and respect.' 
 
 '' Man is avid for explanations. He demands that 
 his life be shown him. He rejoices to find some- 
 where the exact interpretation of a little gesture he 
 has been using for the past twenty-five years. Here 
 there is no little gesture, but the universal attitude 
 of the common soul. You will not find here the 
 eternal quality of a Marcus Aurelius. But Marcus 
 Aurelius is thought incarnate. Moreover, which 
 of us leads the life of a Marcus Aurelius ? One is 
 man here and nothing more. He is not arbitrarily 
 
262 IRalpb Wnlbo lEmereom 
 
 magnified; only he is brought nearer to us than usual. 
 It is John who cuts down the trees; it is Peter building 
 his house; it is you speaking to me of the harvest; it 
 is I giving you my hand; but we are taken at our 
 point of contact with the gods, and are astonished 
 at what we do. We did not know that all the pow- 
 ers of the soul are present, we did not know that 
 all the laws of the universe attend upon us; and we 
 turn round and stare at each other speechless, like 
 people who have beheld a miracle. 
 
 ''Emerson came to affirm simply this equal and 
 secret grandeur of our life. He has enveloped us 
 with silence and wonder. He has placed a ray of 
 light under the foot of the artisan coming out of his 
 shop. He has shown us all the forces of heaven and 
 earth, busy holding up the threshold on which two 
 neighbours speak of the falling rain and the rising 
 wind. And above the two wayfarers, pausing for 
 their chat, he shows us the face of one god smiling 
 upon another. He is nearer than any one else to our 
 habitual life. He is the most watchful to warn, the 
 most assiduous, the most honest, the most scrupu- 
 lous, perhaps the most human. He is the sage of 
 the common day, and common days make up the 
 sum of our existence. More than one year rolls by 
 without passions, without virtues, without miracles. 
 Let us learn to revere the petty hours of life. If 1 
 have acted this morning in the spirit of Marcus 
 Aurelius, do not emphasise my deeds, for I myself 
 am aware that something has been achieved. But 
 
JSflSK!^h'^ im^Si i - - C W>? SSiAi: ^-■'^>3r-'^ar.^v■^»«- -. 
 
Emerson's Grave at Concord. 
 
 From a photograph bj> A. Hosmer. 
 
Zbe ftcncb JBetimatc. 263 
 
 if I think I have lost my day in poor enterprises, and 
 if you can prove that nevertheless I have lived as 
 deeply as a hero, and that my soul has not lost its 
 rights, you will have done more than if you had 
 persuaded me to save my enemy upon this day, for 
 you have augmented in me the sum, the grandeur, 
 and the desire of life, and to-morrow, perchance, 
 I shall be able to live with self-respect." 
 
 Certainly the French critics cannot be said to 
 have neglected Emerson's claim to detailed con- 
 sideration; and that they so early perceived and so 
 long discussed his service to humanity may reasona- 
 bly be considered to prove not only their perspicac- 
 ity but the far-reaching character of that service. 
 It has been said, by a Frenchman, that we know 
 French literature through the blusterers. We can- 
 not retaliate. The French have taken pains to know 
 us by the best we have produced. In their estimates 
 of Emerson they have stood as a generous illustra- 
 tion of his words: ''The genius of life is friendly 
 to the noble, and in the dark brings them friends 
 from far." 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 THE following tables of contents for the sixteen 
 numbers of The Dial are based on those 
 given in Mr. George Willis Cooke's article 
 on the origin and character of the magazine in the 
 Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 1886. Those 
 articles attributed to Emerson by Mr. Cooke, and 
 omitted in Mr. Cabot's list of his contributions to The 
 Dial, are marked with a star. The ones considered 
 by Mr. Cabot doubtful are marked with a dagger; 
 and the ones ascribed to Emerson by Mr. Cabot and 
 omitted by Mr. Cooke are printed in italics. 
 
 THE DIAL. 
 
 A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. 
 
 Volume I. 
 
 Boston: 
 
 Weeks, Jordan and Company 
 
 121 Washington Street. 
 
 London: 
 Wiley and Putnam, 67 Paternoster Row. 
 
 MDCCCXLL 
 
 Volume L Number i. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 The Editors to the Reader . . i— R. W. Emerson. 
 A Short Essay on Critics . . 5— Margaret Fuller. 
 
 265 
 
266 
 
 appenbiy* 
 
 To the Aurora Borealis 
 
 Notes from the Journal of a Scholar 
 
 The Religion of Beauty 
 
 Brownson's Writing 
 
 The Last Farewell 
 
 Ernest the Seeker (Chapter First) 
 
 The Divine Presence in Nature 
 
 and in the Soul 
 Sympathy .... 
 Lines .... 
 
 Allston Exhibition 
 
 Song. S. G. Ward. — To 
 
 Orphic Sayings . 
 
 Stanzas .... 
 
 Channing's Translation of Jouffroy 
 
 Aulus Persius Flaccus . 
 
 The Shield .... 
 
 The Problem 
 
 Come Morir ? . . . 
 
 1 Slept and Dreamed that Life was 
 
 Beauty 
 The Concerts of the Past Winter 
 A Dialogue .... 
 Richter — In the Morning Breeze 
 
 Dante 
 
 Sketches .... 
 
 1 1 — C. P. Cranch. 
 13 — C. C. Emerson. 
 17 — Dwight. 
 22 — Geo. Ripley. 
 47 — E. B. Emerson. 
 48 — W. H. Channing. 
 
 58 — Theo. Parker. 
 
 71 — Thoreau. 
 
 72 — Ellen T. Emerson. 
 
 73 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 84 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 85— A. B. Alcott. 
 
 98 — C. P. Cranch. 
 
 99— W. D. Wilson. 
 117 — Thoreau. 
 121 — S. G. Ward. 
 122 — R. W. Emerson. 
 123 — S. G. Ward. 
 
 123 — Ellen Hooper. 
 
 124 — Dwight. 
 
 134 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 135 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 136 — Sarah Freeman Clarke. 
 
 136 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 Volume I. Number 2. 
 
 Thoughts on Modern Literature . 
 
 Silence . . . . . 
 
 First Crossing the Alleghanies 
 
 A Sign From the West 
 
 Angelica Sleeps .... 
 
 Nature and Art; or, The Three 
 Landscapes . . . . 
 
 The Art of Life : The Scholar's Call- 
 ing 
 
 Letters to a Theological Student . 
 
 "The Poor Rich Man" 
 
 137 — R. W. Emerson. 
 158 — R. W. Emerson, 
 159 — ^J. F. Clarke. 
 161 — C. P. Cranch. 
 172 
 
 173^. F. Clarke. 
 
 175 — F. H. Hedge. 
 183 — Geo. Ripley. 
 187 — Ellen Hooper. 
 
appenMy. 
 
 267 
 
 Musings of a Recluse . 
 
 The Wood Fire . 
 
 The Day Breaks . 
 
 The Poet 
 
 Life .... 
 
 Evening 
 
 A Lesson for the Day . 
 
 Wayfarers . 
 
 From Goethe 
 
 Psean . . . . 
 
 Lyric .... 
 
 Truth against the World 
 
 Waves 
 
 New Poetry 
 
 Art and Artist 
 
 Ernest the Seeker (Chapter Sec 
 ond) 
 
 Woodnotes: Number I. 
 
 Life and Death 
 
 Record of the Months . 
 
 The Works of William E. Chan 
 
 ning, D. D. Four Volumes 
 
 Third Edition. Glasgow 
 
 1840 
 
 Two Sermons on the Kind Treat- 
 ment and on the Emancipation 
 of Slaves. Preached at Mo- 
 bile. With a Prefatory State- 
 ment. By George F. Simmons 
 A Letter to those who Think. 
 
 By Edward Palmer 
 Professor Walker's Vindication 
 
 of Philosophy 
 The Athenaeum Exhibition of 
 Painting and Sculpture . 
 
 Select List of Recent Publications . 
 Dana's Two Years before the 
 
 Mast 
 
 Fourier's Social Destiny of Man . 
 Ranke's Popes .... 
 
 188— C. P. Cranch. 
 193 — Ellen Hooper. 
 193 — C. S. Tappan. 
 194 — Ellen Hooper. 
 195 — C. S. Tappan. 
 195 — C. S. Tappan. 
 196 — Th. Parker. 
 216 — Ellen Hooper. 
 216 
 
 217 — C. S. Tappan. 
 217 — C. S. Tappan. 
 218 — Th. Parker. 
 219 — C. S. Tappan. 
 220 — R. W. Emerson. 
 2-^2 — C. S. Tappan. 
 
 233 — W. H. Channing. 
 242 — R. W. Emerson. 
 245 — C. S. Tappan. 
 246 
 
 246 — R. W. Emerson.* 
 
 248 — R. W. Emerson.* 
 
 251 
 
 
 256 
 
 
 260- 
 264 
 
 -Margaret Fuller. 
 
 
 Emerson. ? 
 
 
 Emerson. • 
 Parker. 
 
268 
 
 appen&li. 
 
 Harwood's Materialism in Re- 
 ligion 
 
 Cousin's Plato . . . . 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 Volume I. Number 3. 
 
 Man in the Ages . 
 
 Afternoon .... 
 
 Questionings 
 
 Endymion .... 
 
 Hymn and Prayer 
 
 Klopstock and Meta 
 
 The True in Dreams 
 
 The Magnolia of Lake Pontchar 
 train .... 
 
 Love and Insight . 
 
 Sunset .... 
 
 Give us an Interpreter . 
 
 Ideals of Every-Day Life. No. I 
 
 To Nydia .... 
 
 The Violet .... 
 
 Stanzas .... 
 
 German Literature 
 
 The Snow-Storm 
 
 Menzel's View of Goethe 
 
 Suum Cuique 
 
 The Sphinx 
 
 Orphic Sayings 
 
 Woman 
 
 Sonnet 
 
 Thoughts on Art 
 
 Glimmerings 
 
 Letters from Italy on the Repre- 
 sentatives of Italy 
 
 To the Ideal 
 
 Record of the Months 
 Michael Angelo Considered as a 
 Philosophic Poet, with Trans- 
 lations. By John Edward 
 Taylor 
 
 273 — Th. T. Stone. 
 289 — C. S. Tappan. 
 290 — F. H. Hedge. 
 291 — C. P. Cranch. 
 292 — J. F. Clarke. 
 293 — Margaret Fuller. 
 298 — C. P. Cranch. 
 
 299 — xMargaret Fuller. 
 
 305 — C. S. Tappan. 
 
 30"^ — C. S. Tappan. 
 
 306 — C. S. Tappan. 
 
 307 — ^J. S. Dwight. 
 
 312 — J. F. Clarke. 
 
 314 — Ellen Tucker Emerson. 
 
 314 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 315 — Th. Parker. 
 
 339 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 340 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 347 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 348 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 351— A. B. Alcott. 
 
 362 — Sophia Ripley. 
 
 366— J. R- Lowell. 
 
 367 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 379 — C. P. Cranch. 
 
 386— S. G. Ward. 
 400 — Ellen Hooper. 
 401 
 
 401 — R. W. Emerson, f 
 
appenMy* 
 
 269 
 
 Select List of Recent Publications 402 
 Robbins's Worship of the Soul . 402- 
 
 ■R. W. Emerson, t 
 
 Volume I. Number 4. 
 
 The Unitarian Movement in New 
 
 England 
 Dream 
 Ideals of Every-Day Life. No. II 
 
 Home . 
 Listen to the Wind 
 The Wind Again 
 Leila .... 
 The Genuine Portrait . 
 The Real and the Ideal 
 Hermitage . 
 The Angel and the Artist 
 Shelley 
 A Dialogue . 
 Thoughts on Labour 
 The Out-Bid 
 
 Theme for a World Drama 
 Man, the Reformer 
 Music of the Winter 
 Farewell 
 
 409 — W. D. Wilson. 
 443— J. F. Clarke. 
 
 446 — J. S. Dwight. 
 461 — Ellen Hooper. 
 461 — Ellen Hooper. 
 462 — Margaret Fuller. 
 468— J- F- Clarke. 
 468— J. F. Clarke. 
 469 — W. E. Channing. 
 469— Caroline S. Tappan. 
 470 — John M. Mackie. 
 494 — Margaret Fuller. 
 497 — Theodore Parker. 
 519 — Ellen Hooper. 
 520 — W. E. Channing. 
 523 — R. W. Emerson. 
 539 — ^- F- Tuckerman. 
 544 — Ellen Hooper. 
 
 Volume II. Number i 
 
 Goethe .... 
 
 Two Hymns 
 
 Night and Day 
 
 The Blind Seer 
 
 Wheat Seed and Bolted Flour 
 
 Song 
 
 Need of a Diver . 
 
 Clouds .... 
 
 " The Future is better than the Past 
 
 August Shower . 
 
 The Pharisees 
 
 Protean Wishes . 
 
 I- 
 42- 
 
 45- 
 
 47- 
 
 48- 
 
 52 
 53- 
 
 55- 
 57- 
 58- 
 
 59- 
 
 77- 
 
 -Margaret Fuller. 
 -E. T. Clapp. 
 -W. H. Channing. 
 -C. P. Cranch. 
 -W. H. Channing. 
 
 -Margaret Fuller. 
 -E. T. Clapp. 
 -E. T. Clapp. 
 -E. T. Clapp. 
 -Theodore Parker. 
 -Theodore Parker. 
 
270 
 
 appenML 
 
 Painting and Sculpture 
 Sic Vita .... 
 Bettina .... 
 
 Prophecy — Transcendentalism — 
 Progress 
 
 Sonnet to . 
 
 Letter 
 
 Lines 
 
 Sonnet .... 
 
 Notices of Recent Publications 
 
 Jones Very's Essays and Poems 
 
 Carlyle's On Heroes 
 
 Lowell's A Year's Life 
 
 Translations of Goethe 
 
 H. Martineau's Hour and Man 
 
 Tennyson, Stirling, and Festus 
 
 The Plain Speaker . 
 
 Lines 
 
 To Contributors . 
 
 78 — Sophia Ripley. 
 81— H. D. Thoreau. 
 82 — Caroline S. Tappan. 
 
 83 — ^J. A. Saxton. 
 121 — W. E. Channing. 
 122 — Sophia Ripley. 
 129 — Caroline S. Tappan. 
 129 — ^J. R. Lowell. 
 130 
 
 130 — R. W. Emerson. 
 131 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 U3 
 
 J 34 
 
 134 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 135 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 135 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 136 — Sara A. Chase. 
 
 136 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 Volume II. Number 2. 
 
 Cupid's Conflict, 
 
 By Dr. Henry More, 1647 
 
 Lives of the Great Composers : 
 Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Bach, 
 Beethoven 
 
 Light and Shade . 
 
 Friendship . 
 
 Painting and Sculpture 
 
 Fate .... 
 
 Woodnotes : Number 11. 
 
 A Glimpse of Christ's Idea of 
 Society 
 
 Poems on Life 
 
 Windmill 
 
 Festus 
 
 Walter Savage Landor 
 
 Inworld 
 
 137 — Selected by 
 
 A.B. Alcott. 
 
 148 — Margaret Fuller. 
 203 — Caroline S. Tappan. 
 204 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 205 — R. W. Emerson. 
 20s — R. W. Emerson. 
 207 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 214 — Elizabeth P. Peabody. 
 
 228 
 
 230 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 231 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 262 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 271 — C. P. Cranch. 
 
appenbiy* 
 
 Volume II. Number 3. 
 
 271 
 
 First Principles 
 
 (Poetical Motto) . 
 
 Yuca Filamentosa 
 
 In world 
 
 Outworld 
 
 Primitive Christianity 
 
 Bettine Brentano and her friend 
 
 Gunderode . 
 Sonnet 
 Sonnet 
 
 Sonnet. To Irene on her Birthday 
 The Hour of Reckoning 
 Sonnet. To Mary on her Birthday 
 De Profundis Clamavi 
 Music. To Martha 
 Plan of the West Roxbury Com- 
 munity 
 The Park . . . 
 Forbearance 
 Grace .... 
 The Senses and the Soul 
 Epilogue to the Tragedy of Essex 
 From the German of Goethe 
 Editor's Table 
 
 Transcendentalism . 
 
 (Calvinist's Letter) . 
 
 (Friend's Letter) 
 Notices of Recent Publications 
 
 Plan of Salvation 
 
 Motherwell's Poems 
 
 Goethe's Egmont 
 
 Monaldi .... 
 
 Wilde's Conjectures and Re 
 searches 
 
 Boston Academy of Music 
 
 Theory of Teaching . 
 
 The Ideal Man . 
 
 273 — W. B. Greene. 
 286 — W. E. Channing. 
 286 — Margaret Fuller. 
 288— C. P. Cranch. 
 290 — C. P. Cranch. 
 292 — Th. Parker. 
 
 313 — Margaret Fuller. 
 357— J. R. Lowell. 
 351—}' R- Lowell. 
 358— J. R. Lowell. 
 358 — Ellen Hooper. 
 359 — B. F. Presbury. 
 
 359 
 
 360 — B. F. Presbury. 
 
 361 — E. P. Peabody. 
 373 — R. W. Emerson. 
 373 — R. W. Emerson. 
 373 — R. W. Emerson. 
 374 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 380— M. Fuller. 
 
 382 
 
 382 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 382 — Th. T. Stone. 
 
 3S3 
 
 38s— J. F. Clarke. 
 
 393 
 
 394 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 395 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 399 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 407 
 
 408 
 
 408 — R. W. Emerson, f 
 
2 72 appenMy* 
 
 Volume II. Number 4. 
 
 Note to the Editor 
 
 409 — A. B. Alcott. 
 
 Days from a Diary 
 
 409 — A. B. Alcott. 
 
 Marie van Oosterwich. Translated 
 
 
 from the French . 
 
 437 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 Silence and Speech 
 
 483 — C. P. Cranch. 
 
 Thoughts on Theology 
 
 485 — Theodore Parker. 
 
 Herzliebste 
 
 528 — Ch. A. Dana. 
 
 Record of the Months . 
 
 529 
 
 Whewell's Inductive Sciences . 
 
 529 — Th. Parker. 
 
 Whewell's Morals 
 
 530 — Th. Parker. 
 
 Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History 
 
 531 — Th. Parker. 
 
 Harwood's German Anti-Super- 
 
 
 naturalism .... 
 
 535 — Th. Parker. 
 
 Republications 
 
 539 — Th. Parker. 
 
 Milman's History of Christianity 
 
 540 — Th. Parker. 
 
 Gibbon's Rome, edited by Mil- 
 
 
 man ..... 
 
 542 — Th. Parker. 
 
 Volume III. Number i. 
 
 Lectures on the Times. Intro- 
 
 
 ductory .... 
 
 I — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Natural History of Massachusetts 
 
 19 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 Gifts 
 
 40 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 The Lover's Song 
 
 41 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 Sea-Song 
 
 42 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 The Earth-Spirit .... 
 
 42 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 Prayer 
 
 42 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 After- Life 
 
 43 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 Autumn Leaves .... 
 
 44 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 Entertainments of the Past Winter 
 
 46 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 Tact 
 
 72 — R. W .Emerson. 
 
 Holidays 
 
 73 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 The Amulet ..... 
 
 73 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 The Castle by the Sea. From 
 
 
 Uhland 
 
 74 — Tr. by F. H. Hedge 
 
 Eternity 
 
 7^ — Ch. A. Dana. 
 
 Vespers 
 
 76 
 
 I 
 
appenbix* 
 
 273 
 
 Prayers . . , . 
 
 (Metrical Prayer) 
 
 (Prayer) .... 
 To Shakespeare . 
 Veeshnoo Sarma . 
 (Lines) .... 
 
 Fourierism and the Socialists 
 The Evening Choir 
 The World .... 
 Chardon Street and Bible Conven- 
 tions .... 
 The Two Dolons . 
 Agriculture of Massachusetts 
 Outward Bound . 
 Record of the Months . 
 
 Borrow's Zincali 
 
 Lockhart's Spanish Ballads 
 
 Colton's Tecumseh . 
 
 Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales 
 
 Hawthorne's Stories for Child- 
 ren . . . 
 
 Cambridge Miscellany 
 
 Short Notices . 
 Intelligence .... 
 
 Wilkes's Exploring Expedition 
 
 Association of State Geologists 
 
 Harvard University . 
 
 (Wordsworth's New Poems) 
 
 (Tennyson and Henry Taylor) 
 
 Schelling in Berlin . 
 
 New Jerusalem Church 
 
 Romaic and Rhine Ballads . 
 
 The Black Knight 
 
 Lectures on the Times: The Con 
 
 servative 
 The Inward Morning . 
 Free Love .... 
 
 77 — R. W. Emerson. 
 79 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 80 — Junius Alcott. 
 81 — W. E. Channing. 
 82 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 86— R. W. Emerson. 
 97 — Jones Very. 
 99 — Jones Very. 
 
 100 — R. W. Emerson. 
 112 — Ch. N. Newcomb. 
 123 — R. W. Emerson. 
 126— B. P. Hunt. 
 127 
 
 127 — R. W. Emerson? 
 128 — R. W. Emerson? 
 129 — R. W. Emerson? 
 130 
 
 . 131 
 
 
 
 
 . 131 
 
 
 
 
 . 131 
 
 
 
 
 . 132 
 
 
 
 
 . 132- 
 
 -R. 
 
 W. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 . 133- 
 
 -R. 
 
 W. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 • 133- 
 
 -R. 
 
 W. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 • 135- 
 
 -R. 
 
 W. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 . 135- 
 
 -R. 
 
 W. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 . 136- 
 
 -R. 
 
 w. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 . 136 
 
 
 
 
 Number 2. 
 
 
 
 . 137- 
 
 -Margaret Fuller. 
 
 . 180— H. 
 
 D. 
 
 Thoreau. 
 
 181 — R. W. Emerson. 
 198 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 199 — H, D. Thoreau. 
 
 x8 
 
2 74 
 
 HppenMy* 
 
 The Poet's Delay . 
 
 Rumours from an ^olian Harp 
 
 Hollis Street Council . 
 
 The Moon .... 
 
 To the Maiden in the East . 
 
 The Summer Rain 
 
 The Artist .... 
 
 English Reformers 
 
 James Pierrepont Greaves . 
 
 Dirge . 
 
 Cromwell 
 
 The Poet 
 
 Lines . 
 
 Saadi . 
 
 The Gallery 
 
 Record of the Months . 
 
 Tennyson's Poems . 
 
 Brownson's Letter to Dr. Chan 
 ning .... 
 
 Smyth's Lectures on History 
 Editor's Table 
 
 Heraud's Lectures 
 
 French Journals 
 
 Schelling in Berlin . 
 
 200 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 200 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 201 — Theodore Parker. 
 222 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 222 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 224 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 22"^ — C. P. Cranch. 
 227 — R. W. Emerson. 
 247 — Charles Lane. 
 2^(i — W. E. Channing. 
 258 — Charles Lane. 
 264 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 2(^^ 
 
 265 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 269 — Samuel G. Ward. 
 
 273 
 
 273 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 276- 
 
 277 
 
 278 
 
 279 
 
 279 
 
 280 
 
 ■R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Volume III. Number 3. 
 
 James Pierrepont Greaves (con- 
 tinued) 
 
 Lectures on the Times: The Tran- 
 scendentalist .... 
 
 A Song of Spring 
 
 Discoveries in the Nubian Pyra- 
 mids (from the German of 
 Dr. Carus) 
 
 Anna . 
 
 To Eva at the South 
 
 The Brook . 
 
 The River . 
 
 Life 
 
 281 — Charles Lane. 
 
 297 — R. W. Emerson. 
 313 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 314 — Elizabeth Hoar. 
 326 — W. E. Channing. 
 327 — R. W. Emerson. 
 "^2^ — C. S. Tappan. 
 329 — W. E. Channing. 
 329 — W. E. Channmg. 
 
HppenbiL 
 
 275 
 
 To .... 
 
 The Laws of Menu 
 
 Death 
 
 The Life and Character of Dr 
 
 Follen .... 
 The Prometheus Bound (trans- 
 lated) .... 
 Literary Intelligence 
 
 {Death of Dr. Channing) . 
 
 (German Topics) 
 
 (German Letter) 
 
 Shelling's Introductory Lecture 
 in Berlin (translated) 
 Record of the Months . 
 
 Life of Richter . 
 
 An Essay on Transcendentalism 
 
 Letters of Schiller 
 
 Fables of La Fontaine 
 
 Confessions of St. Augustine 
 
 (Notices of Books) . 
 
 Goethe and Swedenborg . 
 
 330 — W. E. Channing. 
 331 — W. E. Channing. 
 340 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 343 — Theodore Parker. 
 
 363 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 387 
 
 387 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 387 
 387 
 
 398— F. H. Hedge. 
 
 404 
 
 404 
 
 406 — Ch. Lane. 
 
 411 
 
 413 
 414- 
 
 415 
 416 
 
 -R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Volume III. Number 4. 
 
 A. Bronson Alcott's Works . 
 
 Canova . . 
 
 Anacreon (Eleven Poems trans- 
 lated) 
 
 What is Beauty } . 
 
 Sayings of Confucius (selected) 
 
 George Keats 
 
 To a Stray Fowl . 
 
 Orphics: I. Smoke. II. Haze 
 
 Sonnets .... 
 
 To .... 
 
 To .... 
 
 The Friends .... 
 
 Europe and European Books 
 
 A Leaf from " A Voyage to Porto 
 Rico" 
 
 417 — Charles Lane. 
 454 — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 484 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 490 — L. M. Child. 
 493 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 495 — ^J. F. Clarke. 
 505 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 505 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 506 
 
 507 — W. E. Channing. 
 507 — W. E. Channing. 
 509 — W. E. Channing. 
 311 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 ^22 — C. C. Emerson ? 
 
276 
 
 Hppen&iL 
 
 Dark Ages . . . 
 Friendship. From Chaucer's " Ro 
 maunt of the Rose " 
 
 Record of the Months . 
 Bremer's Neighbours 
 Bulwer's Last of the Barons 
 Fetes' Music Explained 
 Sorrow's Bible in Spain . 
 Browning's Paracelsus 
 Zschokke's Sleep Walker . 
 Heraud's Life of Savonarola 
 
 Literary Intelligence 
 (German Letter) 
 Catalogue of Books (brought by 
 Alcott and Lane from Eng- 
 land) 
 
 527 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 529 — Selected by 
 
 H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 532 
 
 534 — R. W. Emerson. 
 535 — R. W.Emerson. \ 
 
 535 
 
 536 — Charles Lane. 
 
 541 
 
 541 — C. S. Wheeler. 
 
 543— A. B. Alcott. 
 
 Volume IV. Number i 
 
 The Great Lawsuit . . 
 
 The Youth of the Poet and the 
 
 Painter .... 
 Ethnical Scriptures. Desatir 
 
 Spring 
 
 Abou Ben Adhem 
 
 The Earth .... 
 
 Social Tendencies 
 
 A Song of Death . 
 
 Notes from the Journal of a Scholar 
 
 Manhood .... 
 
 Gifts 
 
 Past and Present . 
 
 An Old Man 
 
 To Rhea .... 
 
 The Journey 
 
 Notes on Art and Architecture 
 
 The Glade .... 
 
 Voyage to Jamaica 
 
 Record of the Months . 
 
 I — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 48 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 59 
 
 62 
 
 63 — Leigh Hunt. 
 
 64 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 6s — Charles Lane. 
 
 87 — George W. Curtis. 
 
 88 — C. C. Emerson. 
 
 92 — Charles A. Dana. 
 
 93 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 96 — R. W. Emerson. 
 103 — W. E. Channing. 
 104 — R. W. Emerson. 
 106 — W. E. Channing. 
 107 — Samuel G. Ward. 
 IIS — W. E. Channing. 
 116— B. P. Hunt. 
 J 34 
 
HppenML 
 
 277 
 
 Pierpont's Anti-Slavery Poems 
 Garrison's Poems 
 CofFm's America 
 Channing's Poems . 
 Bremer's Holy Family 
 Intelligence . 
 Fruitlands. 
 To Correspondents . 
 
 134 — R. W. Emerson. 
 134 — R. W. Emerson. 
 134 — R. W. Emerson. 
 135 — R. W. Emerson. 
 U5 
 
 135— A. B. Alcott. 
 136 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Volume IV. Number 2. 
 
 Hennell on the Origin of Christ- 
 ianity . 
 
 A Day with the Shakers 
 
 The Youth of the Poet and the 
 Painter (continued) 
 
 Autumn .... 
 
 Social Tendencies (continued) 
 
 Ethnical Scriptures: Chinese Four 
 Books .... 
 
 Via Sacra . . . 
 
 A Winter Walk . 
 
 The Three Dimensions 
 
 Voyage to Jamaica (continued) 
 
 The Mother's Grief 
 
 Sweep Ho! . 
 
 The Sail 
 
 The Comic . 
 
 Ode to Beauty 
 
 AUston's Funeral . 
 
 To the Muse 
 
 William Tell's Song 
 
 A Letter 
 
 New Books . 
 The Huguenots 
 Longfellow's Spanish Student 
 
 Percival's Poems . 
 
 (Notes of Books) . 
 
 137 — Th. Parker. 
 165 — Charles Lane. 
 
 174 — W. E. Channing. 
 186 — W. E. Channing. 
 188 — Charles Lane. 
 
 205 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 210 — Ch. A. Dana. 
 
 21 1— H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 226 — R. W. Emerson.* 
 
 227— B. P. Hunt. 
 
 244 
 
 245 — Ellen Hooper. 
 
 246 — William A. Tappan. 
 
 247 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 257 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 259 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 260— W. E. Channing. 
 
 261 — W. E. Channing. 
 
 262 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 270 
 
 270 
 
 270 — R. W. Emerson ? \ 
 
 ,271 — R. W. Emerson. \ 
 
 2'J2 
 
278 
 
 appenMy* 
 
 Volume IV. Number 3. 
 
 The Youth of the Poet and the 
 
 Painter (continued) 
 Translation of Dante . 
 Homer, Ossian, Chaucer 
 
 Lines 
 
 The Modern Drama 
 
 To R. B. (Robert Bartlett) . 
 
 Autumn Woods . 
 
 Brook Farm .... 
 
 Tantalus .... 
 
 The Fatal Passion: A Dramatic 
 
 Sketch .... 
 Interior or Hidden Life 
 Pindar (Note and Translations) 
 The Preaching of Buddha (selec- 
 tions) .... 
 
 Eros 
 
 Ethnical Scriptures. Hermes Tris 
 
 megistus 
 The Times: A Fragment 
 Critical Notices 
 
 Child's Letters from New York 
 
 Channing's Present . 
 
 Hopkins's Address . 
 
 Deutsche Schnellpost 
 
 273 — W. E. Channing. 
 285 — Samuel G. Ward. 
 290 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 306 — Ellen Hooper. 
 307 — Margaret Fuller. 
 349 — Charles A. Dana. 
 350 — W. E. Channing. 
 351 — Charles Lane. 
 357 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 364 — W. E. Channing. 
 373 — Charles Lane. 
 379 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 391 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 401 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 402 — H. D. Thoreau. 
 405 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Volume IV. Number 4. 
 
 Immanuel Kant . . . . 
 Life in the Woods 
 The Emigrants. From Freiligrath 
 The Youth of the Poet and the 
 
 Painter (continued) 
 The Twin Loves . 
 Dialogue 
 The Consolers 
 To Readers . 
 The Death of Shellev 
 
 409 — J. Elliot Cabot. 
 
 415 
 
 425 — Ch. T. Brooks. 
 
 427 — W. E. Channing. 
 45s — Samuel G. Ward. 
 4S8 — Margaret Fuller. 
 469 — Samuel G. Ward. 
 470 — W. E. Channing. 
 471 — W. E. Channing. 
 
Hppenbiy^ 
 
 279 
 
 A Song of the Sea 
 
 472- 
 
 -W. E. Channing 
 
 To the Poets .... 
 
 473- 
 
 -W. E. Channing. 
 
 Fourierism 
 
 473- 
 
 -E. P. Peabody. 
 
 The Young American . 
 
 484- 
 
 -R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Herald of Freedom 
 
 307- 
 
 -H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 Fragment of Pindar (translated) . 
 
 513- 
 
 -H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 The Tragic 
 
 315- 
 
 -R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Saturday and Sunday among the 
 
 
 
 Creoles 
 
 521 
 
 
 The Moorish Prince. From Freili- 
 
 
 
 grath 
 
 525- 
 
 -C. T. Brooks. 
 
 The Visit 
 
 528- 
 
 -R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Ethnical Scriptures. Chaldean 
 
 
 
 Oracles 
 
 529 
 
 
 Millennial Church 
 
 537- 
 
 -Charles Lane. 
 
 Notice of " Human Nature " 
 
 540 
 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Adirondacs, The, poem, 59, 64, 69 
 
 >Esop, 184 
 
 Agassiz, J. L. R., 64 
 
 Alcott, A. B., 104, 105, 112, 113, 119, 
 
 122, 128, 136, 137 
 American Scholar, The, essay on, 9 
 Anti-Slavery, 99-1 11, 221-224 
 Argyll, Duke of, 1 56 
 Aristocracy, lecture on, 239 
 Arnold, Matthew, 21, 96-98, 168, 182, 
 
 216, 219, 220 
 Art of Life, article by F. H. Hedge, 129 
 
 B 
 
 Bacchus, poem, 216 
 Bacon, 7 
 
 Bagehot, Walter, 161, 164 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 36 
 Birrell, Augustine, 22 
 Blackwood's Maga^^ine, 166 
 Brahma, poem, 67, 219 
 Brandes, Dr. George, 192 
 Brook Farm, 102-106 
 Brown University, 4 
 Brownell, W. C, 217 
 Burroughs, John, 224 
 
 Cabot, James Elliot, 34, 224, 231 
 
 California, trip to, 228 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 22, 52, 57, 76-93, IS7, 
 
 159, 164, 166, 201, 230, 236, 242, 
 
 247 
 
 Celestial Love, poem, 244 
 
 Cervantes, 184 
 
 Chadwick, Dr. J. W., 121 
 
 Channing, Wm. E., 20, 28, }6, 142 
 
 Character, poem, 59 
 
 Charron, 235 
 
 Chaucer, 5, 189 
 
 Cheney, Mrs., 1 1 
 
 Cicero, 18 
 
 Clough, A. H., 157, 158, 160 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 37, 113 
 
 Commonplace Book, Emerson's, 8, 9, 18 
 
 Conduct of Life, 8, 184, 243 
 
 Conservative, The, essay on, 144 
 
 Cornwall, Barry, 158 
 
 Cruikshank, George, 158 
 
 Culture, essay on, 10 
 
 Curtis, Burrell, 105 
 
 Curtis, George William, 127 
 
 Dcemonic Love, The, poem, 32, 6 1 
 
 Days, poem, 275 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 158-166 
 
 Dial, The, 40, 101, 11 2- 154 
 
 Diamond Necklace, The, Carlyle's, 88 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 158 
 
 Divinity School, 27 
 
 Divinity School Address, 43-49, 52 
 
 Edinburgh Review, The, 37 
 Education, essay on, 2 
 Eliot, George, 124, 125 
 
 281 
 
282 
 
 Inbey^ 
 
 Emancipation ol the Negroes in the 
 British West Indies, address on, 109 
 
 Emerson, Charles, 29, 93, 128 
 
 Emerson, Edward, 29, 153, 201, 226 
 
 Emerson, Mary Moody, 2, 4, 9, 10, 19, 26 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, birth, i ; child- 
 hood, 2-4; at college, 4-9; manner 
 in youth, 1 1 ; preparation for the min- 
 istry, 18-33; on health, 28, 29; re- 
 ligion, 34-56; on nature, 57-75; 
 relations with Carlyle, 76-91 ; loss of 
 his eldest son, 92; loss of his brother 
 Charles, 93; as preacher at East Lex- 
 ington, 94; on culture, 98; on Anti- 
 Slavery, 99-111, 221-224; on Brook 
 Farm, 102-106; contributor to The 
 Dial, 112-154; editor of The Dial, 
 138-154; visit to England, 155-182; 
 on Representative Men, 182-201; 
 poems, 201-220; as a citizen, 224; 
 closing years, 221-233; trip to Cali- 
 fornia, 228; house burned, 228; third 
 visit to Europe, 229; contribution from 
 friends, 229; return to Concord, 230; 
 failure of memory, 23 1 ; last illness, 
 231 ; his art, 232 
 
 Emerson, Ralph IValdo, Life of, by 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, 13 
 
 Emerson, Ralph IValdo, memoir of, by 
 James Elliot Cabot, 2, 10 
 
 Emerson, Ruth Haskins (Emerson's 
 mother), 2 
 
 Emerson, William, 25, 27 
 
 Emerson, Rev. William, 1 
 
 Emerson's IVorks, Centenary Edition 
 
 of <53 
 England, first visit to, 57, 109; second 
 
 visit to, 155-182 
 English Traits, 162, 164, 169, 244 
 Essays, 85, 87, 101, 118, 235 
 Everett, Edward, 20 
 Examiner, London, 156 
 Experience, essay on, 6 
 Experience, poem, 215 
 
 Fiske, John, 69 
 
 Frederick the Great, Carlyle's, 90, 91 
 
 French Revolution, Carlyle's, 82, 83, 
 
 9> 
 Froude, J. A., 160 
 Fuller, Margaret, 12, 113, 123, 125, 128, 
 
 135-138, 140-142, 146 
 Furness, Dr., 4 
 
 Garnett, Dr. Richard, 162, 200-234 
 Gifts, essay on, 229 
 Gladstone, Wm. E., 230 
 Goethe, 7, 1 13, 199, 201 
 Grimm, Hermann, 78, 234 
 
 H 
 
 Harvard University, 4 
 
 Hawthorne, Julian, 168 
 
 Helps, Arthur, 158, 164 
 
 Henry yilL, Shakespeare's rhythm of, 
 
 192 
 Hero-lVorship, Carlyle's, 241-243 
 Heroism, essay on, 98 
 Higginson, Thomas W., 122 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 13, 191, 193, 
 
 204, 225 
 Howitt, William and Mary, 156 
 Hunt, Leigh, 158 
 
 I 
 
 Ideals of Every-Day Life, Dwight's, 
 
 '3'> 
 Illinois, 183 
 Intellect, poem, 59 
 
 J 
 
 James, Henry, 22, 232 
 Jerrold, Douglas, 156 
 
 K 
 
 Keats, George, 146 
 
 Keats, John, 146 
 
 Kirkland, Dr. John Thornton, 8 
 
Unbei. 
 
 283 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 1 70 ; letter 
 
 from, 172-179 
 Letter to a Theological Student, George 
 
 Ripley, 130 
 Letters and Social Aims, 231 
 Literary Ethics, 67 
 Longfellow, Henry W., 4 
 Lovejoy, Elijah, 99 
 Lowell, Charles Russell, 153 
 Lowell, James Russell, 4, 35, 64, 95, 135 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., 158 
 
 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 251 
 
 Man, the Reformer, 95, 10 1 
 
 Manchester, Emerson's after-dinner 
 speech at, 181 
 
 May-Day, poem, 63, 212, 213, 227 
 
 Merlin, poem, 208, 2 1 1 
 
 Michigan, 183 
 
 Middlemarch, 125 
 
 Middlesex Association of Ministers, 27 
 
 Mind and Manners of the XlXth Cent- 
 ury, lectures on, 167 
 
 Miscellanies, Carlyle's, S} 
 
 Monadnoc, poem, 60 
 
 Monadnoc Afar, poem, 74 
 
 Montaigne, 5, 7, 9, 201-203, 235, 241 
 
 Montegut, Emile, 235-247 
 
 Morley, John, 21, 242, 245 
 
 Musketaquid, poem, 62 
 
 N 
 
 Napoleon, 190, 193, 196 
 
 Natural History of the Intellect, lectures 
 
 on, 227, 228 
 Natural History of Massachusetts, 
 
 Thoreau's, 1 38 
 Nature, 57, 58, 186 
 Nature, couplet on, 215 
 Nature, essay on, 17, 23, 68 
 Notes from the Journal of a Scholar, 
 
 Charles Emerson's, 128 
 
 O 
 
 Ode to Beauty, poem, 209 
 
 Old Age, essay on, 228 
 
 Orphic Sayings, Alcott's, 128, 131, 133 
 
 Oxford, 159 
 
 Paris, 167, 235 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 44, 112, 120, 125 
 
 Past and Present, Carlyle's, 84 
 
 Patmore, Coventry, 158 
 
 Peabody, Elizabeth, 1 1 2 
 
 Phi Beta Kappa speech, 95, 98 
 
 Philadelphia, 183 
 
 Pittsburgh, 183 
 
 Plato, 5, 15, 196, 199 
 
 Plutarch, 5, 7 
 
 Poems, 244 
 
 Potver, essay on, 28 
 
 R 
 
 Religion, 34, 40, 56 
 
 Religion of Beauty , Dwight's, 128 
 
 Representative Men, 156, 183, 201, 240 
 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, 235-250 
 
 Rhodora, The, poem, 216 
 
 Ripley, George, 105, 112, 122 
 
 Robinson, Crabb, 157 
 
 Rodni, 188 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 158 
 
 Rossetti, Wm., 157 
 
 Royce, Professor, 71 
 
 Roz, M., on Emerson, 244, 246 
 
 Saadi, poem, 142, 207 x? 
 Sanborn, F. B., no 
 Sartor Resartus, 77, 81, 82 
 Saturday Club, the, 22s 
 Second Church, the, 93 
 S elf-Reliance, essay on, 168 
 Seneca, 23s 
 
 Shakespeare, 7, 9, 184, 189, 193, 194, 
 235 
 
284 
 
 llnbCL 
 
 Shaler, Professor, 72 
 
 Silence, poem, 130 
 
 Society and Solitude, 3, 8, 225 
 
 Socrates, 184, 235, 250 
 
 Sphinx, The, poem, 53, 132, 134 
 
 Stafford House, 159 
 
 Stephenson, George, 158 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 202, 203 
 
 Stillman, W. J., 64, 65 
 
 Stonehenge, 164 
 
 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 200, 241 
 
 Sympathy, poem, by Thoreau, 128 
 
 Tact, poem on, 12 
 
 Talma, 189 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 158 
 
 Terminus, poem, 227 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 155, 157, 166 
 
 Thayer, Professor, 13 
 
 Theophrastus Such, 125 
 
 Thoreau, H. D., 58, 105, 126, 138, 
 
 140 
 Thoughts on Modern Literature, 127 
 Threnody, poem, 60, 93, 206, 210, 
 
 217, 218 
 
 Times, lecture on the, 106, 138 
 Transcendentalist, The, essay on, 145 
 Tresor des Humbles, Le, Maeterlinck's, 
 
 251-263 
 Tucker, Ellen, 34 
 Tyndall, Professor, 73 
 
 U 
 
 Unitarian Church, the, ^6 
 
 Vanity Fair, Thackeray, 157 
 Visit, The, poem, 153 
 
 W 
 
 Ware, Henry, 34 
 IVealth, essay on, 19 
 Wiley & Putnam, firm of, 85 
 Winchester, 159, 165 
 IVood-Notes, poem, 130 
 Woodbury, Professor, 21 
 Wordsworth, William, 113, 159, 182, 
 216, 219, 220 
 
BELLES^LE TTRES 
 
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 Tennyson, 
 
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