Born, in Boston, Mass., 25 May 1803. Educated at Boston Grammar School, 1811–15; Latin School, 1815–17. To Harvard University, 1817; graduated, 1821. Engaged in tuition. Kept school at Boston, 1822–25. Studied Theology in Cambridge Divinity School, 1825–28. Approbated to preach, 1826. Ordained, 11 March 1829 as joint pastor, with Rev. H. Ware, of Second Church, Boston; succeeded to Ware’s position, 1830. Married Ellen Louisa Tucker, Sept. 1829. Resigned pastorate, 1832. Wife died, Feb. 1832. Tour in Europe, 1833; friendship with Carlyle begun. Returned to U.S.A., 1834; preached in New Bedford; and settled in Concord. Lectured on various subjects, 1835, 1836, 1837. Married Lidian Jackson, Sept. 1835. Finally adopted literary life. Frequently lectured. Symposium, or Transcendental Club, formed, 1836. Edited “The Dial,” 1842 to April 1844. Lecturing tour in England, 1847–49. Edited “Massachusetts Quarterly Review” (3 vols.), 1847–50. Contrib. to “Atlantic Monthly,” from its beginning in Nov. 1857. LL.D., Harvard, 1866; elected on Board of Overseers, 1867. Mental shock owing to partial destruction of house by fire, July 1872. To England and Egypt with daughter. Returned to Concord, 1873. Suffered from aphasia in later years. Died, at Concord, 27 April 1882. Works: “Right Hand of Fellowship to Rev. H. B. Goodwin,” 1830; “Historical Discourse,” 1835; “Nature” (anon.), 1836; (another edn., with “Lectures on the Times,” 1844); “An Oration” (Dartmouth Coll.), 1838; “An Oration” (Phi Beta Kappa Soc.), 1838; (new edn. called “Man Thinking,” 1844); “An Address” (Divinity Coll.), 1838; “The Method of Nature,” 1841; “Essays, first series,” 1841; “The Young American,” 1844; “Essays, second series,” 1844; “Man the Reformer,” 1844; “Orations, Lectures, and Addresses,” 1844; “An Address” (on Negro Emancipation), 1844; “Poems,” 1847; “Essays, Lectures and Orations,” 1848; “Miscellanies,” 1849; “Representative Men,” 1850; “Essays and Orations,” 1853; “English Traits,” 1856; “The Conduct of Life,” 1860; “Orations, Lectures and Essays,” 1866; “May-Day,” 1867; “Society and Solitude,” 1870; “Poetry and Criticism,” 1874; “Power, Wealth, Illusions” (from “The Conduct of Life”), 1876; “Letters and Social Aims,” 1876; “Culture, Behavior Beauty” (from “The Conduct of Life”), 1876; “Books, Art, Eloquence” (from “Society and Solitude”), 1877; “Success, Greatness, Immortality” (from “Society and Solitude” and “Letters and Social Aims”), 1877; “Love, Friendship, Domestic Life” (from “Essays” and “Society and Solitude”), 1877; “Fortune of the Republic,” 1878; “The Preacher” (from “Unitarian Review”), 1880. Collected Works: “Complete Works” (2 vols.), 1866; “Prose Works” (2 vols.), 1870; “Correspondence with Carlyle” (2 vols.), 1883; “Complete Works” (Riverside edn., 11 vols.), 1883–84. He edited: Marchioness Ossoli’s “Memoirs,” 1852; Gladwin’s translation of Sadi’s “Gulistan,” 1865; Plutarch’s “Morals,” 1870; Channing’s “The Wanderer,” 1871; “Parnassus,” 1875; “The Hundred Greatest Men,” 1879. Life: by Searle, 1855; by O. W. Holmes (“American Men of Letters” series), 1885; by Dr. Garnett (“Great Writers” series), 1887.

Personal

  Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d’Eichtal’s nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course we could do no other than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart’s content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane says it is the first journey since Noah’s Deluge undertaken to Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful.

  Proceeded to Cambridge, to hear the valedictory sermon by Mr. Emerson. In this he surpassed himself as much as he surpasses others in the general way. I shall give no abstract. So beautiful, so just, so true, and terribly sublime was his picture of the faults of the Church in its present position. My soul is roused, and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the state of the Church and the duties of these times.

  I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God’s earth; on one which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home, I am rich,—rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,—I call her Asia,—and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;—these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result; paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellant particle.

  As a speaker in delivering his lectures, sermons, or discourses he is remarkable. His voice is good, his enunciation clear and distinct; his manner his own, but very striking. He is always self-possessed, and his strange fancies fall upon the ear in the most musical cadences. His voice is now low and then again high, like an Æolian harp; but this is natural, not affected, and I think anywhere before an educated audience he would be deemed a remarkable speaker. In person he is tall and graceful. Some people think him slightly mad (one of his brothers died insane, and the other brother had been insane before his death), others think him almost inspired. Old men are not prepared to receive or listen to or read his thoughts. The young of both classes think highly of him. He has a great influence over many of the young minds of my acquaintance, who always couple him with Carlyle. I think him neither mad nor inspired, but original, thoughtful, and peculiar, with his mind tinged with some habits of speculation that are less practical than beautiful, and with a fearless honesty that makes him speak what he thinks, counting little any worldly considerations. In other times he might have been a philosopher, or a reformer, but he would always have been tolerant and gentle, and he would have gone into uncomplaining exile if the powers that were bade him.

  It is the doom of the Christian Church to be always distracted with controversy, and where religion is most in honor, there the perversity of the human heart breeds the sharpest conflicts of the brain. The sentiment of religion is at this time, perhaps, more potent and prevailing in New England than in any other portion of the Christian world. For many years since the establishment of the theological school at Andover, the Calvinists and Unitarians have been battling with each other upon the Atonement, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and the Trinity. This has now very much subsided; but other wandering of mind takes the place of that, and equally lets the wolf into the fold. A young man, named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my once loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented son George, after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher and school-master, starts a new doctrine of transcendentalism, declares all the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach of new revelations and prophecies.

  A spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen,… whose image more than any other’s is still deeply stamped upon my mind as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him so angelic and remarkable.

  Waldo Emerson called, and sat with me a short time, expressing his wish to make me acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Ward, whom he extolled greatly. I liked him very, very much—the simplicity and kindness of his manner charmed me.

  It was with a feeling of predetermined dislike that I had the curiosity to look at Emerson at Lord Northampton’s, a fortnight ago; when, in an instant, all my dislike vanished. He has one of the most interesting countenances I ever beheld,—a combination of intelligence and sweetness that quite disarmed me.

  He came to Oxford just at the end of Lent term, and stayed three days. Everybody liked him, and as the orthodox had mostly never heard of him, they did not suspect him. He is the quietest, plainest, unobtrusivest man possible; will talk, but will rarely discourse to more than a single person, and wholly declines “roaring.” He is very Yankee to look at, lank and sallow, and not quite without the twang; but his looks and voice are pleasing nevertheless, and give you the impression of perfect intellectual cultivation, as completely as would any great scientific man in England—Faraday or Owen, for instance, more in their ways perhaps than in that of Wordsworth or Carlyle. I have been with him a great deal; for he came over to Paris and was there a month, during which time we dined together daily: and since that I have seen him often in London, and finally here. One thing that struck everybody is that he is so much less Emersonian than his Essays. There is no dogmatism or arbitrariness or positiveness about him.

  The first man I have ever seen.

  The impregnator of a whole cycle of Boston mind, and the father of thousands lesser Emersons, he is the most unapproachably original and distinct monotype of our day…. Emerson’s voice is up to his reputation. It has a curious contradiction, which we tried in vain to analyze satisfactorily—an outwardly repellant and inwardly reverential mingling of qualities, which a musical composer would despair of blending into one. It bespeaks a life that is half contempt, half adoring recognition, and very little between. But it is noble, altogether. And what seems strange is to hear such a voice proceeding from such a body. It is a voice with shoulders in it which he has not—with lungs in it far larger than his—with a walk in it which the public never see—with a fist in it which his own hand never gave him the model for—and with a gentleman in it which his parochial and “bare-necessities-of-life” sort of exterior gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine nothing in nature—which seems, too, to have a type for everything like the want of correspondence between the Emerson that goes in at the eye and the Emerson that goes in at the ear…. The first twenty sentences, which we heard, betrayed one of the smaller levers of Emerson’s power of style which we had not detected in reading him. He works with surprises. A man who should make a visit of charity, and, after expressing all proper sympathy, should bid adieu to the poor woman, leaving her very grateful for his kind feelings, but should suddenly return after shutting the door, and give her a guinea, would produce just the effect of his most electric sentences. You do not observe it in reading, because you withhold the emphasis till you come to the key-word. But, in delivery, his cadences tell you that the meaning is given, and the interest of the sentence all over, when—flash!—comes a single word or phrase, like lightning after listened-out thunder, and illuminates with astonishing vividness, the cloud you have striven to see into.

  I went for a moment into Emerson’s study,—a large room, in which every thing was simple, orderly, unstudied, comfortable. No refined feeling of beauty has converted the room into a temple, in which stand the forms of heroes of science and literature. Ornament is banished from the sanctuary of the stoic philosopher; the furniture is comfortable, but of a grave character, merely as the implements of usefulness; one large picture only is in the room, but this hangs there with a commanding power; it is a large oil-painting, a copy of Michael Angelo’s glorious Parcæ, the goddess of fate.

  Mr. Emerson’s library is the room at the right of the door upon entering the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in architectural book-cases, and the room is hung with a few choice engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael Angelo’s “Fates,” which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author’s published writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much as they date from any place or moment.

  Last night I heard Emerson give a lecture. I pity the reporter who attempts to give it to the world. I began to listen with a determination to remember it in order, but it was without method, or order, or system. It was like a beam of light moving in the undulatory waves, meeting with occasional meteors in its path; it was exceedingly captivating. It surprised me that there was not only no commonplace thought, but there was no commonplace expression. If he quoted, he quoted from what we had not read; if he told an anecdote, it was one that had not reached us.

  I have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-studied artist in these things) does the deliberative utterance, that seems waiting for the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the labor of thought and make us feel as if the glance of humor were a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to us!

  Emerson seems an extraordinary mixture of genius and rusticity. Everybody seems amazed at his nomination for the Rectorship at Glasgow, and I have had to explain the position of affairs over and over again.

  One day [1834] there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after Emerson’s voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard. I could understand them, if not the fresh philosophical novelty of the discourse.

  Emerson entered—pale, thin, almost ethereal in countenance,—followed by his daughter, who sat beside him and watched every word that he uttered. On the whole, it was the same Emerson—he stumbled at a quotation as he always did; but his thoughts were such as only Emerson could have thought, and the sentences had the Emersonian pithiness. He made his frequent sentences very emphatic. It was impossible to see any thread of connection; but it always was so—the oracular sentences made the charm.

  Though tall, Mr. Emerson is still erect, and has the bright eye and calm grace of manner we knew when he was in England long years ago. In European eyes, his position among men of letters in America is as that of Carlyle among English writers; with the added quality, as I think, of greater braveness of thought and clearness of sympathy. The impression among many to whom I spoke in America, I found to be, that, while Carlyle inspires you to do something not clearly defined, when you have read Emerson you know what you have to do. However, Mr. Emerson would admit nothing that would challenge the completer merits of his illustrious friend at Chelsea. He showed me the later and earlier portraits of Carlyle, which he most cherished; made affectionate inquiries concerning him personally, and as to whether I knew of any thing that had proceeded from his pen which he had not in his library. Friends had told me that age seemed now a little to impair Mr. Emerson’s memory, but I found his recollection of England accurate and full of detail.

  The translator of the “Upanishads,” Moksha Mulara, sends greetings and best wishes to his American Guru, Amarasunu, on his seventy-seventh birthday.

	RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
	BORN IN BOSTON, MAY 25, 1803.
	DIED IN CONCORD, APRIL 27, 1882.
	The passive master lent his hand
	To the vast soul that o’er him planned.

  Emerson seemed to be on the lookout for whatever indicated genius and the best aspects of the inner life. In all his conversation his voice softened and played with a lingering charm over traits, and promises that make youth lovely. One felt the grace of his large, rich, amiable, childlike nature, utterly free from dogmatism and conceit. He carried this sympathy with youth to his grave.

  Although Emerson’s garb was not rustic, it was plain, never smart, and, with his homely speech, and simple manners, he did not find the country-folk shy. The phenomena of the universe were going on in and around Concord, and Emerson kept up a good relation with the humblest purveyors of fact and experience. They were richly rewarded when the day came for Emerson to lecture in the town-hall, when many a farming villager saw his prosaic face risen to a star and shining in its constellation. What a day was that when Emerson’s lecture came on! Remembering what Longfellow had told me about those sophisticated Bostonians whose faces were as extinguished lamps when listening to Emerson’s early lectures, I have remarked the contrast when, with illumined countenances, his villagers were gathered before him at Concord. They knew his voice and followed him. All the sermons in the village churches for a year were not so well remembered as his sentences. It has seemed to me that Emerson never spoke so well elsewhere as to his Concord audience. When I first heard him there, he appeared, as he rose, to be the very type of the New England farmer, so plain in dress and so thoroughly standing on his own feet. Ere long he was unsheathed, and we were in the hall of Pericles. It was then that I first heard Emerson, and, while it is the most vivid experience of my life, I find it nearly impossible to transcribe it. I recall no gesture, only an occasional swaying forward of the body by the impulse of earnestness. Though nearly every word had been written, the manuscript did not hold his eye, which kept its magnetic play upon the audience.

  The tall, spare figure, crowned by the small head carrying out, with its bird-like delicacy and poise, the aquiline effect of the beaked nose and piercing eyes. But no art can reproduce the luminous transparence, as it were the sun-accustomed gaze, of those unforgettable eagle eyes, nor the benign expression of smiling wisdom which in his old age transfigured his naturally rugged features. This expression revealed something brighter than resignation or even cheerfulness: it was the external sign of a spirit that had faced without shrinking the problem of existence, had suffered with the poet’s two-fold suffering, as keenly through sympathy as through experience—and that none the less found only a pledge of joy in the beauty of life and the promise of death…. His coloring was Saxon; the effect of the inward light which tempered the austerity of his vigorously molded countenance was not a little enhanced by the freshness of complexion which he retained almost to the end, by the clear gray-blue of his eyes, and the dry, twinkling humor of his smile. His manner towards strangers, while extremely simple, was marked by an exquisite suavity and dignity which peremptorily, albeit tacitly, prohibited undue familiarity or conventional compliment.

  The funeral ceremonies of Emerson were touching and eloquent, but nothing that was said or done on that occasion was nearly so impressive as was the face of the man himself as he lay in his coffin…. Few men can have had more noticeable peculiarities of face, figure, and demeanor than Emerson. Who that had once seen him could forget his appearance? Who ever spoke in his melodious measured tones? or whose smile so well expressed the self-command that does not deal in laughter?… His ordinary gait in walking was that of a man whose attention is so earnestly fixed upon something on the horizon that his body is conveyed forward rather by attraction than volition. It was progression in its simplest form, steady and uniform, but without the least embellishment of grace or elegance; and yet there was in it something indicative of the nature of the man, that made mere grace and elegance seem semi-civilized. In his lectures he stood before his audience in the unstudied pose of a New England farmer. He had no gestures; sufficient for him were the modulations of the voice, and the occasional lifting of the head and brightening of the visage. Nevertheless, few speakers comprehended the art and even the artifices of oratory better than he. Every word that passed his lips was so uttered and presented as to acquire its fullest force and meaning; and no one else could have delivered his lectures so effectively and captivatingly as he. The hand that he gave you in greeting was large and firm; it held yours for a few moments in a warm and steady clasp. There was no vigorous and impulsive handshaking, but the light of composed cordiality that emanated from his features made the more demonstrative forms of greeting seem vulgar, and inexpressive.

  It was a treat to attend the lectures of Mr. Emerson. He gave, in successive winter seasons, in Boston and other cities, beginning in 1834, for many years, some forty or fifty different lectures, and often whole courses. It was a special pleasure to listen to him year by year. At first, by his quaint, terse, and richly laden sentences, he seemed to perplex some of our wisest men. I sat, one evening, quite near the Hon. Jeremiah Mason—a man who could penetrate into the deepest depths of the law so long as the speaker or writer kept to the “dry light.” But Emerson, I saw, sorely tried him. Two ladies by his side evidently enjoyed every word they heard. The next day Mr. Mason, it is said, being asked how he liked Emerson, replied: “Oh, I couldn’t understand him at all. You must ask my daughters about him; they took it all in.”… Sometimes, while listening to his lectures, they seemed almost extemporaneous. They struck one as full of thoughts entirely fresh and original, and in some passages as if the inspiration of the hour. There was sometimes, in the beginning of a sentence, a little hesitancy, as if he was waiting for a word or words to be given him for utterance at the moment. Still they must have been, we know, the result of long premeditation as well as extensive reading.

  Though I could never find in Emerson’s effusions as a “Vates” so rich a vein of thought or so awakening a power as his most devoted readers were able to recognize, yet in his own personality he appeared to me almost all that is noble, lovely, and venerable.

  Emerson is a genuine specimen of the true Yankee, that strange latest product of mankind. New England was colonized by the Puritans, and therefore the most typical New Englander would be a minister. Emerson’s ancestors were ministers for eight successive generations, and he “smacks of the soil.” In his tall, gaunt figure and long, sharp face he had the unmistakable characteristics of his race, a race which has become a synonym for sharp bargains, wit, and sound sense, and intellectually Emerson was as true a Yankee as ever lived. His mind was always on the alert—paradoxical as this may seem after what has been previously said—and he was abundantly blessed with what he calls “the saving grace of common sense.” The majority of his illustrations are drawn from his own observation, and others from the details of many arts and sciences. His mind, in the aspect we are now considering, appreciated the supreme worth of experience. “I love facts,” he says; and again, “an actually existent fly, is more important than a possibly existent angel.” The second aspect of his mind may be thus briefly stated, as almost every page of his writings and every incident of his life furnishes an illustration of it. As one half of his intellectual constitution was Platonic, the other half was thus pre-eminently Yankee.

  Was all his days an arch traitor to our existing civilized regiment, inasmuch as he unconsciously managed to set aside its fundamental principle in doing without conscience, which was the entire secret of his very exceptional interest to men’s speculation. He betrayed it to be sure without being at all aware of what he was doing; but this was really all that he distinctively did to my observation…: He was lineally descended to begin with, from a half-score of comatose New England clergymen, in whose behalf probably the religious instinct had been used up. Or, what to their experience had been religion, became in that of their descendant life. The actual truth, at any rate, was that he never felt a movement of the life of conscience from the day of his birth till that of his death. I could never see any signs of such a life in him. I remember, to be sure, that he had a great gift of friendship, and that he was very plucky in behalf of his friends whenever they felt themselves assailed—as plucky as a woman…. Now Emerson was seriously incapable of a subjective judgment upon himself; he did not know the inward difference between good and evil, so far as he was himself concerned. No doubt he perfectly comprehended the outward or moral difference between these things; but I insist upon it that he never so much as dreamed of any inward or spiritual difference between them…. On the whole I may say that at first I was greatly disappointed in him, because his intellect never kept the promise which his lovely face and manners held out to me. He was to my senses a literal divine presence in the house with me; and we cannot recognize literal divine presences in our houses without feeling sure that they will be able to say something of critical importance to one’s intellect. It turned out that any average old dame in a horse-car would have satisfied my intellectual rapacity just as well as Emerson.

  Emerson’s personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very light for a man of his stature…. Emerson’s head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven-eighths on the cephalometer used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most heads. His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like “Ammon’s great son,” he carried one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide, well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement, centering about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three cultivated generations the battlefield and the play-ground of varied thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious…. Emerson’s mode of living was very simple; coffee in the morning, tea in the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with others using it, but always pie at breakfast…. He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while his eye-brows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the “ground swell,” as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.

  A born idealist, carrying or carried by his idealism sometimes to excess, offended by the deacons’ creaking boots as they bore around the consecrated elements in their hands, he forswore his clerical part in that particular ceremony as unsuited to the Occidental mind, and proposed a change in the administration of the Lord’s Supper; which his parish not accepting, he resigned his place, parting with grief from his flock…. All the sects may well waive claim of property in a man so human and humane … Emerson, supposed irreligious, was pre-eminently religious, because, not bewildered or diverted like a butterfly by the multitude of gay phenomena, he clung to the noumena, the real and invisible, and his conduct corresponded to his belief. Dogma is thought to be the parent of creed; but behavior returns the compliment, and fashions the faith. Through all the spectacle and panorama of sensible impressions, coat of many colors, protean forms, he, as Plato bids, exercised his intellect. His mind and heart sought the object of worship. The atheist leaps like a grasshopper from appearance to appearance; the pantheist fails to distinguish appearance from reality. He fixed on the unity in the universe.

  The portrait by David Scott recalls his expression and action in the lecture-room during that early period. The rapt expression of intense thought was emphasized by the peculiar action of the hand, which Scott has given. His voice was modulated by every shade of feeling, but had always a peculiar resonance which gave spirit and life to its tones; and it answered to that glance of the eyes which recalled Mrs. Child’s comparison of light shining out from a temple. But the charm of manner was intimately connected with the thought, and was not that superficial readiness which pleases everybody. Newspaper writers and School-ship boys thought it awkward and embarrassed. He never wearied his audience; he was a perfect artist in the correspondence between the value of the thought and the beauty of the expression, and his sentences were like jewels whose brilliancy drew your attention before you knew their worth. He was very scrupulous in regard to time, never keeping his audience more than an hour, but often tantalizing them by suddenly closing his lecture when seemingly much of his manuscript remained unread.

  When the book-mania fell upon me at fifteen, I used to venture into Mr. Emerson’s library, and ask what I should read, never conscious of the audacity of my demand, so genial was my welcome. His kind hand opened to me the richness of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, and Carlyle; and I gratefully recall the sweet patience with which he led me round the book-lined room, till the “new and very interesting book” was found, or the indulgent smile he wore when I proposed something far above my comprehension…. Living what he wrote, his influence purified and brightened like sunshine. Many a thoughtful young man and woman owe to Emerson the spark that kindled their highest aspirations, and showed them how to make the conduct of a life a helpful lesson, not a blind struggle.

  Emerson came into the world with an enduring constitution, so that he lived to be within one year of fourscore. He had excellent organs of digestion, and in mature life could “eat pie” like a school-boy; he slept well at night, and during sleep kept a window open, even in midwinter; but he complains more than twice of his want of power of voice and “a commanding presence;” so that the reader of his life is led to indulge in a surmise what he would have become if he had had “a commanding presence” like Webster; or if to the question, “Whose voice is music now?” he could have claimed a right to place himself by the side of Henry Clay. Whenever he exercised his mind on public affairs, he did so with judgment and courage.

  As a character Emerson appears to me greater than when regarded as an author only…. I saw him in Florence. A tall, slender figure, with the radiant smile which is peculiar to children and men of the highest order. His daughter Ellen was his companion, and devoted to him. The noblest culture raises men above national peculiarities and makes them perfectly unaffected. Emerson had an unpretentious dignity of demeanor, and I felt as if I had always known him. At that time he was still fresh and could work. Soon after an infirmity came upon him. He wholly lost his memory. One of my former hearers wrote me an account of his last visit to him. Emerson sat there, says the letter, like an old eagle in his eyrie. He greeted me in the most kind and friendly manner, but could no longer remember men or things.

  We were babies and boys together, but I can recall but one image of him as playing, and that was on the floor of my mother’s chamber. I don’t think he ever engaged in boys’ play; not because of any physical inability, but simply because, from his earliest years, he dwelt in a higher sphere. My one deep impression is that, from his earliest childhood, our friend loved and moved and had his being in an atmosphere of letters, quite apart by himself. I can as little remember when he was not literary in his pursuits as when I first made his acquaintance.

  Emerson never grew old; at heart he was to the last as young as ever, his feelings as unworn, his faith as assured as in the days of his youth. Many visions he had seen pass away, but the import of them remained, only confirmed and enlarged in scope. Nor were bodily infirmities swift to come upon him. His hair remained thick, and its brown color unchanged up to rather a late period, when suddenly it began to come off in large patches. His eyesight, which sometimes failed him in his youth, and early manhood, was remarkably strong in the latter part of his life. He used no glasses in reading his lectures until he was sixty-four, when he found the need of them in a Phi Beta Kappa speech in 1867, and was thrown into some confusion, attributed by the audience to the usual disarray of his manuscript. Dr. Hedge, in his recollections of Emerson in 1828, notes the slowness of his movements; but I think most persons who saw him first in more advanced years will have been struck with the rapid step with which he moved through the Boston streets, his eye fixed on the distance. I count myself a good walker, but I used to find myself kept at a stretch when I walked with him in the Concord woods, when he was past seventy. Miss Elizabeth Hoar and one or two other persons who remembered him from his youth have told me that he seemed to them more erect in carriage, better “set up,” in later years. A life so much in the open air no doubt had gradually strengthened an originally feeble habit of body. Emerson was never quite willing to acknowledge the fact of sickness or debility.

  I am not aware of any material change in my estimate of Mr. Emerson’s character from the time of my earliest acquaintance with him. It is possible, however, that my judgment of him may be, in some degree, unconsciously tinged by my recollections of the lovely qualities of his mother, from whom, it always seemed to me, he inherited many of his most striking traits. If I were asked to express in the fewest words what it was in Mr. Emerson that most impressed me, I should answer without hesitation, his reverent faith in God; his pure and blameless life.

  The great Emerson, whose discourses, as a rule, were far above the comprehension of the common multitude, was not a good speaker, and certainly made no attempts to amuse, but, on the contrary, aimed to instruct his audiences, told me himself that he once lectured to seven people at Montreal. This he did to console me for the fact that I had mentioned to him, that I had lectured to about thirty in Philadelphia…. Eloquent as he was with his pen, he was abnormally shy and retiring, and did not shine in conversation, or greatly care to indulge in it. Like Wordsworth, whom he visited at Rydal Mount, and of whom he spoke to me,

	He did not much or oft delight,
	To season his fireside with personal talk,

though he could break through his natural undemonstrativeness upon occasion, when conversing with a companion after his own heart, with whom he could exchange ideas rather than re-echo commonplaces.

  Emerson’s elocution has been frequently described, and most hearers attest its magical effect. It was, or seemed, the purest natural endowment; if it owed anything to art, it was the ars celare. It gave the impression of utter absorption in the theme, and indifference to all rhetoric and all oratorical stratagem. Composed and undemonstrative as any listener, almost motionless, except for a slight vibration of the body, seldom even adapting his voice to his matter, he seemed to confide entirely in the justness of his thought, the felicity of his language, and the singular music of his voice.

  He established certain iron rules for the management of the pilgrims. No railing or wilful rudeness or uncleanness would he permit. In the autumn of 1871, some years after the arrival of the more wild and uncouth Reformers had ceased, a man short, thick, hairy, dirty, and wild-eyed came to our door and asked to see Mr. Emerson. I showed him into the parlor and went to call my father, and returned with him, the guest had so wild a look. It appeared that he came from Russia, and very possibly the distance he had had to travel may have accounted for his very late arrival. He stood with his hat on. I knew that that hat would have to come off before spiritual communication could be opened, but wondered how it could be got off, as the man looked determined. My father saluted him, asked him to be seated and offered to take his hat. He declined and began to explain his mission. My father again asked him to take his hat off, which proposition he ignored and began again to explain his advanced views. Again the host said, “Yes, but let me take your hat, sir.” The Russian snorted some impatient remark about attending to such trifles, and began again, but my father firmly, yet with perfect sweetness, said, “Very well, then, we will talk in the yard,” showed the guest out, and walked to and fro with him under the apple-trees, patiently hearing him for a few minutes; but the man who was a fanatic, if not insane, and specially desired that a hall be secured for him, free of charge, to address the people, soon departed, shaking off the dust of his feet against a man so bound up in slavish customs of society as Mr. Emerson.

  It now becomes my duty to unveil and present to the British public, and to the strangers within our gates who can appreciate greatness, the statute of a great man [Carlyle]. Might I append to these brief remarks the expression of a wish, personal perhaps in its warmth, but more than personal in its aim, that somewhere upon this Thames Embankment could be raised a companion memorial to a man who loved our hero, and was by him beloved to the end? I refer to the loftiest, purest, and most penetrating spirit that was ever shown in American literature—to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the life-long friend of Thomas Carlyle.

  Well do I remember his tender, shrewd, wise face as I first saw it. Almost before we were alone he made me forget in whose presence I stood. He was merely an old, quiet, modest gentleman, pressing me to a seat near him, and all at once talking about college matters, the new gymnasium, the Quarterly, and from these about books and reading and writing; and all as if he continually expected as much as he gave. And so it was ever after; no circumstances so varying but, whether I saw him alone or in the presence of others, there was the ever-ready welcome shining in his eyes, the same manifest gentleness and persistent preference of others.

  He had a penetrating, eager, questioning look. His head was thrust out as if in quest of knowledge. His gaze was steady and intense. His speech was laconic and to the purpose. His direct manner suggested a wish for closer acquaintance with the mind. His very courtesy, which was invariable and exquisite in its way, had an air of inquiry about it. There was no varnish, no studied grace of motion or demeanor, no manifest desire to please, but a kind of wistfulness as of one who took you at your best and wanted to draw it out. He accosted the soul, and with the winning persuasiveness which befits friendliness on human terms. There was a certain shyness which indicated the modesty which is born of the spirit.

  We, who knew him, talked with him and loved him, know that he found the kingdom of heaven on earth. He found God reigning in his babe’s nursery; at the post-office; when he pruned his apple-trees, and when he took the train for Boston. We want you, who have not seen him, to believe that the man of ideas was thus a human man, a man with men. He was not a dreamer. He was an actor. He taught us how to live; and he did so because he lived himself.

  Emerson’s manner in the lecture-room, like that which distinguished him in private was one of perfect serenity. For any emotion that he displayed, there might have been no audience before him. He always read his lectures, and in a grave monotone, for the most part, with rarely any emphasis. Much in them must have been “caviare to the general,” but ever and anon some striking thought, strikingly expressed, produced a ripple of response from the audience, and the close of his finely discriminating lecture on Napoleon was followed by several rounds of applause, all this confirming what he once said to me, that such lecturing triumphs as fell to him were achieved by “hits.” To the public success or failure of his lectures he appeared to be profoundly indifferent, a mood to which his experience in American lecture-rooms had habituated him. He told me, with perfect equanimity, that at home he was accustomed to see hearers, after listening to him a little, walk out of the room, as much as to say that they had had enough of him. At his Manchester lectures the audiences were numerous and attentive. Whatever they might fail to understand, they evidently felt that this was a man of genius and of high and pure mind.

  In his later days Emerson’s voice failed him for lecturing, and still later and more entirely his memory of words. His hesitation for the right word had to be met by guesses. At Longfellow’s grave, having to speak of him, very touching was the failure—“Our dear friend, whose name at this moment I cannot recall.”

  His works have a quality like light, and a purity as of snows caught in the high Alps, but the man was still clearer and rarer,—a nature not to be reflected in print, however skilfully ordered.

  If Emerson laughed at all, it was very quietly. Carlyle’s loud roaring laugh must have been intolerable to him. But Emerson’s smile was something to remember. It was the wisest smile. His lips and eyes were implicated in it about equally. It could do many things: for one, express his “cherub scorn” of what he didn’t like; also his gladness in a thought which came to him he knew not whence; again his pleasure in some palpable absurdity.

  Emerson might be seen on his way to the post-office at precisely half-past five every afternoon, after the crowd there had dispersed. His step was deliberate and dignified, and though his tall lean figure was not a symmetrical one, nor were his movements graceful, yet there was something very pleasant in the aspect of him even at a distance. The same has also been said of good statuary, even before we know what is its subject. He knew all the people old and young in the village, and had a kindly word or a smile for every one of them. His smile was better than anything he said. There is no word in the language that describes it. It was neither sweet nor saintly, but more like what a German poet called the mild radiance of a hidden sun. No picture, photograph or bust of Emerson has ever done him justice for this reason; only such a master as Giorgione could have painted his portrait. Every morning after reading the “Boston Advertiser” he would go to his study, to take up the work of the day previous and cross out every word in it that could possibly be spared. This procedure and his taste for unusual words is what gives the peculiar style to his writing. It was characteristic of him physically and mentally. He had a spare figure; was sparing of speech, sparing of praise, and sparing of time; in all things temperate and stoical. He had an aquiline face, made up of powerful features without an inch of spare territory.

	“With beams December planets dart
	His keen eye truth and conduct scanned.”

His eyes were sometimes exceedingly brilliant; his nose was strong and aquiline; and the lower part of his face, especially the mouth, was notably like the bust of Julius Cæsar. His voice was a baritone of rapid inflections, and when he was very much in earnest it changed to a deep bass.

  He was a poet, a genius, and had the face of an angel.

  The impression of Emerson as dwelling in cloud-land, the central figure in a company of ethereal shapes, is removed when he is seen before other backgrounds than those of Transcendentalism. The good people of Concord began by giving him the office of hogreeve, usually bestowed upon newly married men, and always found him eager for the well-being of the place, not only in wishes, but in service. If he had given the town nothing but the lines which live with “the embattled farmer” of French’s noble statue, it would have been much, but there were many local “occasions” made richer by the voice and wisdom of Emerson. There was no little significance in the words of a simple woman who brought her work to an early end one day to go to a lecture of Emerson’s before the Concord Lyceum. When she was asked if she could understand him, she replied: “Not a word, but I like to go and see him stand up there and look as if he thought everyone was as good as he was.” Through his friendships in Boston, especially after the foundation of the “Atlantic Monthly” and the Saturday Club in 1857, he was brought often into contact with men of the world, in the best sense of that elastic phrase. The names of the men associated with the beginnings of these two organizations are too well known to need repetition. Emerson had great pleasure in their society; and of his effect upon them, perhaps Lowell spoke for all when he wrote to Thomas Hughes: “He is as sweetly high-minded as ever, and when one meets him the fall of Adam seems a false report. Afterwards we feel our throats, and are startled by the tell-tale lump there.”

  He was a man of angelic nature, pure, exquisite, yet refined, and human. All concede him the highest place in our literary heaven. First class in genius and in character, he was able to discern the face of the times. To him was entrusted not only the silver trump of prophecy, but also that sharp and two-edged sword of the Spirit with which the legendary archangel Michael overcomes the brute Satan. In the great victory of his day, the triumph of freedom over slavery, he has a record not to be outdone and never to be forgotten.

  He lectured in forty successive seasons before a single “lyceum”—that of Salem, Mass. His fine delivery unquestionably did a great deal for the dissemination of his thought. After once hearing him, that sonorous oratory seemed to roll through every sentence that the student read; and his very peculiarities,—the occasional pause accompanied with a deep gaze of the eyes, or the apparent hesitation in the selection of a word, always preparing the way, like Charles Lamb’s stammer, for some stroke of mother-wit,—these identified themselves with his personality, and secured his hold. He always shrank from extemporaneous speech, though sometimes most effective in its use; he wrote of himself once as “the worst known public speaker, and growing continually worse;” but his most studied remarks had the effect of off-hand conviction from the weight and beauty of his elocution.

  It was my fortune to be sent to Concord, at Mr. Redpath’s suggestion, to see if Mr. Emerson would come in and give us a lecture. I went out and met the dear old man at the Manse House. He greeted me very cordially and gladly accepted the invitation to come in and lecture. The date was fixed; it was advertised in the newspapers; tickets were put out at from one to three dollars, and many of the Boston ladies sold them. The afternoon for the lecture came. The Old South was filled with as choice an audience of the blue blood of Boston as has ever assembled in that old chapel. Mr. Emerson came in and was introduced by Father Neil. As he began reading his lecture the audience was very attentive. After a few moments he lost his place, and his grand-daughter, sitting in the front row of seats, gently stepped toward him and reminded him that he was lecturing. He saw at once that he was wandering, and with the most charming, characteristic, apologetic bow he resumed his place—an incident that seemed to affect the audience more than anything that could possibly have occurred. A few moments later he took a piece of manuscript in his hand, and turning around with it, laid it on a side table. Just then one of the audience said to me (I think it was Mrs. Livermore or Mrs. Howe), “Please have the audience pass right out,” and rushing up to Mr. Emerson, said, “Thank you so much for that delightful lecture,” then turning around, waved the audience to go out. He probably had been speaking about fifteen minutes. The audience passed out, many of them in tears. It was one of the most pathetic sights that I ever witnessed. It did not attract very much attention just then, and I never read any account of it in the newspapers. I suppose it was out of love and veneration for the dear man that the incident did not receive public mention, but there must be a great many still alive who were witnesses of that memorable scene. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s last public appearance.

  There was more congruity in the presence and conversation of Emerson with the ideal one naturally formed of him than we usually find in our personal intercourse with famous writers. I think this is partly the cause of the powerful impression he made upon his contemporaries. His manner of life, the man himself, was at one with his thought; his thought at one with his expression. There were no paradoxes, none of the supposed eccentricities of genius, to furnish the intolerable ana for future literary scavengers. He spoke of Nature not to add an elegant ornament to his pages; he lived near to her. In meeting him the disappointments, if any there were, one found in himself. For he measured men so they became aware of their own stature, not oppressively, but by a flashing, inward self-illumination, because he placed something to their credit that could not stand the test of their own audit.

  The pure, simple-minded, high-feeling man, made of the finest clay of human nature; the one man who, to Carlyle, uttered a genuine human voice, and soothed the profound glooms of dyspeptic misanthropy; a little too apt, no doubt, to fall into the illusion of taking the world to be as comfortably constituted as himself; and apt also to withdraw from the ugly drama in which the graver passions are inextricably mixed up with the heroic and the rational, to the remote mountain-tops of mystical reflection. Yet nobody could be more fitted to communicate the “electric shock” to his disciples, because of his keen perception of the noble elements of life in superiority to all the vulgar motives and models of thought, which were not the less attractive because he could not see his way to any harmonious or consistent system of thought.

  That evening Mr. Sanborn took me over to Emerson’s house. We awaited the poet in the large drawing room, which, in fact, was rather a sitting-room. It was not yet dark, and the lamps were not lighted. We came forward as he entered. It was, indeed, the real, the living Emerson. Where another man would hardly have been recognized in the dim light, with him everything was accented. His tall, slightly stooped figure, his long neck and sloping shoulders, his strong features and well-formed head, came out with prominence in the quiet light. But it was not this so much as it was his large but simple manner that impressed me. I felt myself in the presence of a truly great man.

  Emerson was then [1853] in the vigor of middle age, just turned of fifty, in good health and fine color, with abundant dark brown hair, no beard, but a slight whisker on each cheek, and plainly dressed. His form was never other than slender, after I knew him, and his shoulders, like Thoreau’s, had that peculiar slope which had attracted notice in England, where the New England type of Anglo-Norman was not so well known as it has since become. His striking features were the noble brow, from which the hair was carelessly thrown back, though not long, and the mild and penetrating blue eye, smiling, in its social mood, in the most friendly manner, but capable, on rare occasions, of much severity.

Poetry

  Emerson himself is a northern hyperborean genius—a winter-bird with a clear, saucy, cheery call, and not a passionate summer songster. His lines have little melody to the ear, but they have the vigor and distinctness of all pure and compact things. They are like the needles of the pine—“the snow-loving pine”—more than the emotional foliage of the deciduous trees, and the titmouse becomes them well.

  Here was more religious inspiration than had entered into more than a very few modern volumes of poetry, with the fervor and power of the old prophets. There was, also, that rich fulness of the best of the mystics, when they most truly rise into the height of spiritual attainment. These two tendencies were wonderfully combined in some of the poems, making them unique in modern poetry. Such a volume, however, could not soon grow into popular favor, and perhaps can never have more than a limited circle of admirers. It is a book for poets and thinkers more than for the people; yet some of these poems will ever remain the admiration of all lovers of nature and of moral inspiration.

  I can’t imagine any better luck befalling these States for a poetical beginning and initiation than has come from Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier. Emerson, to me, stands unmistakably at the head, but for the others I am at a loss where to give any precedence. Each illustrious, each rounded, each distinctive. Emerson for his sweet, vital-tasting melody, rhym’d philosophy, and poems as amber-clear as the honey of the wild bee he loves to sing.

  Here we conclude what we had to say by way of setting forth and elucidating Emerson’s right to be ranked among the true poets of this country and of all countries, of this age and of many ages to come. We think it indisputable. Most likely his audience at any one time will be comparatively small. In a single half-generation the platitudes of a Tupper found more admirers than Emerson will have found for ages. But be his auditors many or few, they will surely be “fit.” If voters were to be weighed, not counted, his would be a heavy vote. And, in the long result, it will be weight, not numbers, which will decide the final issue.

	In this book you’ll find
	Music of a prophet’s mind.
	Even when harsh the numbers be,
	There’s an inward melody;
	And when sound is one with sense,
	’Tis a bird’s song—sweet, intense.

  It is remarkable enough that Carlyle and Emerson both had in them that imaginative gift which made them aim at poetry, and both that incapacity for rhythm or music which rendered their verses too rugged, and too much possessed with the sense of effort, to sink as verse should sink into the hearts of men. Carlyle’s verse is like the heavy rumble of a van without springs; Emerson’s, which now and then reaches something of the sweetness of poetry, much more often reminds one of the attempts of a seeress to induce in herself the ecstasy which will not spontaneously visit her. Yet the prose, both of Carlyle and of Emerson, falls at times into that poetic rhythm which indicates the highest glow of a powerful imaginative nature, though of such passages I could produce many more from Carlyle than from Emerson. I should say that a little of Emerson’s verse is genuine poetry, though not of the highest order, and that none of Carlyle’s is poetry at all; but that some of Carlyle’s prose is as touching as any but the noblest poetry, while Emerson never reaches the same profound pathos.

  It is impossible not to be refreshed and gratified by Emerson’s prose; but perhaps his poetry more completely carries the reader with it, as being a higher and purer production of genius. The best passages of it are indeed as unmitigated poetry as was ever written; they are poetry down to the last syllable; they are verses which, as he himself expresses it, seem to be found, not made. Their meaning is as intimately connected with their form as sound is with speech. The mystic obscurity of some of the poems, however, and the unfamiliar subjects treated by others, have discouraged or repelled many from the study of any of them…. Emerson’s point of view is so far from being conventional or obvious, and is, besides, so lofty and abstract, that the careless and hasty glance of the general reader can not be expected to apprehend it.

  I would not know where to go for a more adequate statement of the poet’s means and ends in nature than Emerson’s “Wood Notes.”

  As for Emerson’s verse (though he has written some as exquisite as any in the language) I suppose we must give it up. That he had a sense of the higher harmonies of language no one that ever heard him lecture can doubt. The structure of his prose, as one listened to it, was as nobly metrical as the King James version of the Old Testament, and this made it all the more puzzling that he should have been absolutely insensitive to the harmony of verse. For it was there he failed—single verses are musical enough. I never shall forget the good-humoredly puzzled smile with which he once confessed to me his inability to apprehend the value of accent in verse.

	Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song,
	Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong?
	He seems a wingèd Franklin, sweetly wise,
	Born to unlock the secrets of the skies;
	And which the nobler calling,—if ’t is fair
	Terrestrial with celestial to compare,—
	To guide the storm-cloud’s elemental flame,
	Or walk the chambers whence the lightning came,
	Amidst the sources of its subtile fire,
	And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre?
	If lost at times in vague aërial flights,
	None treads with firmer footstep when he lights;
	A soaring nature, ballasted with sense,
	Wisdom without her wrinkles or pretence,
	In every Bible he has faith to read,
	And every altar helps to shape his creed.
	Ask you what name this prisoned spirit bears
	While with ourselves this fleeting breath it shares?
	Till angels greet him with a sweeter one
	In heaven, on earth we call him EMERSON.

  Taken as a whole, Emerson’s poetry is of that kind which springs, not from excitement of passion or feeling, but from an intellectual demand for intense and sublimated expression. We see the step that lifts him straight from prose to verse, and that step is the shortest possible. The flight is awkward and even uncouth, as if nature had intended feet rather than wings. It is hard to feel of Emerson, any more than Wordsworth could feel of Goethe, that his poetry is inevitable. The measure, the colour, the imaginative figures, are the product of search, not of spontaneous movements of sensation and reflection combining in a harmony that is delightful to the ear. They are the outcome of a discontent with prose, not of that high-strung sensibility which compels the true poet into verse. This must not be said without exception. “The Threnody,” written after the death of a deeply loved child, is a beautiful and impressive lament. Pieces like “Musquetaquid,” the “Adirondacs,” the “Snow-storm,” “The Humble-Bee,” are pretty and pleasant bits of pastoral. In all we feel the pure breath of nature, and

	The primal mind,
	That flows in streams, that breathes in wind.

There is a certain charm of naïveté, that recalls the unvarnished simplicity of the Italian painters before Raphael. But who shall say that he discovers that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” which a great poet has made the fundamental element of poetry?

  In truth, one of the legitimate poets, Emerson, in my opinion, is not. His poetry is interesting, it makes one think; but it is not the poetry of one of the born poets. I say it of him with reluctance, although I am sure that he would have said it himself…. Emerson’s poetry is seldom either simple, or sensuous, or impassioned. In general it lacks directness; it lacks completeness; it lacks energy. His grammar is often embarrassed; in particular, the want of clearly marked distinction between the subject and the object of his sentence is a frequent cause of obscurity in him. A poem which shall be a plain, forcible, inevitable whole he hardly ever produces. Such good work as the noble lines graven on the Concord Monument is the exception with him; such ineffective work as the “Fourth of July Ode” or the “Boston Hymn” is the rule. Even passages and single lines of thorough plainness and commanding force are rare in his poetry. They exist, of course; but when we meet with them they give us a sense of surprise, so little has Emerson accustomed us to them.

  For to me he was a poet and much more…. It was among his gifts that he could feel the poetic impulse not only in himself but in others; that he knew and tested high poesy, not so much by a critical faculty and by study, as by native inspiration and appreciation…. His vocabulary is rich and novel, and he has brought it well into acceptance. But in marshalling these words he felt his inadequacy, and in this was the “discontented poet” of whom he wrote. He lamented his imperfect use of the metrical faculty, which he felt all the more keenly in contrast with the melodious thoughts he had to utter, and the fitting words in which he could clothe these thoughts. He would have written much more in verse if he had been content with his own metrical expression as constantly as he was delighted with it sometimes. But it is also true that he purposely roughened his verse, and threw in superflous lines and ill-matched rhymes, as a kind of protest against the smoothness and jingle of what he called “poetry to put round frosted cake.”

  Emerson’s prose is full of poetry, and his poems are light as air. But this statement like so many of his own, gives only one side of a truth. His prose is just as full of everyday sense and wisdom; and something different from prose, however sublunary and imaginative, is needed to constitute a poem. His verse, often diamond-like in contrast with the feldspar of others, at times is ill-cut and beclouded. His prose, then, is that of a wise man, plus a poet; and his verse, by turns, light and twilight, air and vapor. Yet we never feel, as in reading Wordsworth, that certain of his measures are wholly prosaic. He was so careless of ordinary standards, that few of his own craft have held his verse at its worth…. He knew the human world, none better, and generalized the sum of its attainments,—was gracious, shrewd, and calm,—but could not hold up the mirror and show us to ourselves. He was that unique songster, a poet of fire and vision, quite above moralist, yet neither to be classed as objective; he perceived the source of all passion and wisdom, yet rendered neither the hearts of others nor his own. His love poetry is eulogized, but it wants the vital grip, wherewith his “Concord Fight” and “Boston Hymn” fastens on our sense of manhood and patriotism. It chants of Love, not of the beloved; its flame is pure and general as moonlight and as high-removed…. He ranks with the foremost of the second class, poets eminent for special graces, values, sudden meteors of thought. In that gift for “saying things,” so notable in Pope and Tennyson, he is the chief of American poets. From what other bard have so many original lines and phrases passed into literature,—inscriptions that do not wear out, graven in bright and standard gold?

  Emerson’s poetry will be interpreted differently according to the estimation held of the value of form in poetical composition. If it be held, as it surely must, that no artist can be regardless of form without forfeiting many chaplets from his poetic crown, then Emerson’s laurels will present a peculiarly bare and disordered appearance. He redeems his reputation, it is true, by many happy touches and graceful thoughts, but the instructural instinct…. seems entirely wanting. There are many poets who run so easily in their self-imposed harness, that only criticism can detect the strict rules in accordance with which the work has been constructed. There are other poets on a lower scale, of whom we have abundant examples in contemporary literature, who obey the laws of their composition with such surprising dexterity that, though the artifice is relieved, they almost succeed in concealing their want of inspiration. Emerson is certainly not artificial, but then he is not naturally artistic in his poems. They are formless, without end, beginning, or middle; inchoate, unhewn, unpolished; only just emerging from the quarry of nature.

  The verses of Emerson are sometimes difficult to be understood. He finds the subjects of poetry only in nature, whereas the highest poetry leads us into the secret of the passions, relations, and actions of living men and women. Homer treats of men and women, of love and war, of heroes and demigods, and of the gods themselves, is always melodious, and is always clear even to a child. And yet Emerson, though so different from Homer, was a poet; that which he has done best, and which will live longest, is in verse.

  We must confess that the strength of his verse sometimes becomes rudeness. There is sometimes a lack of finish that jars upon the sensitive ear. No reader of Emerson can fail to regret that his lines are so often marred by imperfections. It seems a pity that some one could not have done for him what he is said to have done for Jones Very, even to the reminding him that the Holy Ghost surely writes good grammar…. Some of Emerson’s work, however, is not appreciably affected by such faults. The Threnody, for instance, is not without imperfections, but it overpowers these by its great beauty. The Problem utters lofty thought and sublime imagery in a music that is worthy of them. Had Emerson written nothing else, his fame as a poet should rest securely on this. Like all great poets he should be judged by his best work. Upon how few of his poems does the fame of Wordsworth rest! We read the others largely in the light of these.

  If Emerson had been frequently sustained at the heights he was capable of reaching, he would unquestionably have been one of the sovereign poets of the world. At its very best his phrase is so new and so magical, includes in its easy felicity such a wealth of fresh suggestion and flashes with such a multitude of side lights, that we cannot suppose that it will ever be superseded or will lose its charm. He seems to me like a very daring but purblind diver, who flings himself headlong into the ocean, and comes up bearing as a rule, nothing but sand and common shells, yet who every now and then rises grasping some wonderful and unique treasure. In his prose, of course, Emerson was far more a master of the medium than in poetry…. Emerson, as a verse-writer, is so fragmentary and uncertain that we cannot place him among the great poets; and yet his best lines and stanzas seem as good as theirs. Perhaps we ought to consider him, in relation to Wordsworth and Shelley, as an asteroid among the planets.

  The genius of his verse is best characterized by a happy phrase of Dr. Holmes’s—it is elemental. It stands in a closer relation to Nature than that of almost any other poet. He has an unique power of making us participate in the life of Nature as it is in Nature herself, not as Wordsworth gives it, blended with the feelings or at least coloured by the contemplations of humanity. Such intimacy with Nature has sometimes all the effect of magic; there are moments and moods in which Emerson seems to have as far outflown Wordsworth as he outflew Thomson and Collins. But the inspiration is in the highest degree fitful and fragmentary, and is but seldom found allied with beautiful and dignified Art. The poems offend continually by lame unscannable lines, and clumsiness and obscurities of expression.

  The poetry of Emerson occupies a peculiar position. It is obedient, as a rule, to the canons of poetic art; much of it is highly lyrical and of exquisite finish; but on the whole it is simply to be considered as a medium for the expression of thought which could not so concisely be uttered in prose. When Emerson wished to speak with peculiar terseness, with unusual exaltation, with special depth of meaning, with the utmost intensity of conviction, he spoke in poetic form. He who misses this fact cannot rightly interpret Emerson the poet…. It was no wonder that Emerson anticipated, in half-a-dozen poems, the later conclusions of the evolutionists. He was the singer of the upward march of nature and the onward march of man. His poetic field was too broad to be tilled thoroughly in many parts. He was too proverbial to be a great constructive artist. He gives us saws, sayings, admonitions, flashes, glimpses, few broad constructed pictures. With these we are content, and do not ask him for epics, tragedies, or “Excursions.”

  Potentially the greatest of American poets.

  Though perhaps never guilty of writing invita Minerva, he is naturally more grammatic than lyric. It is only in the fusion of an emotion or an ideal that he flows. And even then his stream is roughened and impeded by serious technical limitations. For such long elemental wave-sweeps as Milton or Byron or Shelley or Keats delighted in, he was unfit. He lacked one essential element, the sensuous—and this includes the rhythmical sense. The form is slighted—the thought or the picture only prized. But every complete poet should be an artist too, and know how to wed beautiful thoughts to beautiful forms, and in the most harmonious union. Here, I think, was Emerson’s deficiency. I am sure that in all times of literature, those poems will live longest that best fulfill the demand for a perfect soul in a perfect body…. Whatever the technical imperfections of Emerson’s verse, it is beyond question that we are lifted by his rare though broken music into chambers of thought and mystical sentiment, to which few poets of our day have the key. If he is not a great poetic artist, he is a great seer and inspirer—and of prose-poets our first.

  Of our New England poets, I find myself taking down Emerson oftener than any other; then Bryant; occasionally Longfellow for a few poems; then Whittier for “The Playmate” or “Snow-Bound;” and least of all, Lowell. I am not so vain as to think that the measure of my appreciation of these poets is a measure of their merit; but as this writing is so largely autobiographical, I must keep to the facts. As the pathos and solemnity of life deepens with time, I think one finds only stray poems, or parts of poems, in the New England anthology that adequately voice it; and these he finds in Emerson more plentifully than anywhere else, though in certain of Longfellow’s sonnets is adequacy also.

  These are never the impulsive record of a passing mood or incident. Herein they differ as widely as possible from the verses of his friend Holmes, which are nearly all “occasional.” Each Emersonian poem is, rather, the deliberate, labored, final expression of a calm philosophical thought.

  Emerson’s passion for nature was not like the passion of Keats or of Burns, of Coleridge or of Robert Browning; compared with these men he is cold. His temperature is below blood-heat, and his volume of poems stands on the shelf of English poets like the icy fish which in Caliban upon Setebos is described as finding himself thrust into the warm ooze of an ocean not his own. But Emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very extraordinary and rare man of genius, whose verses carry a world of their own within them…. He is the chief poet of that school of which Emily Dickinson is a minor poet…. His worship of the New England landscape amounts to a religion. His poems do that most wonderful thing, make us feel that we are alone in the fields and with the trees,—not English fields nor French lanes, but New England meadows and uplands. There is no human creature in sight, not even Emerson is there, but the wind and the flowers, the wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmosphere, the breath of nature.

  There is something of the vates in Mr. Emerson. The deep intuitions, the original and startling combinations, the sometimes whimsical beauty of his illustrations,—all these belong rather to the domain of poetry than to that of philosophy. The high level of thought upon which he lived and moved and the wonderful harmony of his sympathies are his great lesson to the world at large. Despite his rather defective sense of rhythm, his poems are divine snatches of melody. I think that, in the popular affection, they may outlast his prose.

  Emerson’s poems, for all their erratic oddity of form, prove on consideration to possess many qualities of temper for which an orthodox mind would have sought expression in hymns. They are designed not so much to set forth human emotion or to give æsthetic delight as to stimulate moral or spiritual ardour. For all his individualism, Emerson could not help being a good old inbred Yankee preacher.

  There are many cultivated Americans to whom Emerson’s poems seem truly great, if not the greatest produced by any of their countrymen. Others equally cultivated maintain, however, that many of his poems are only versified versions of his essays, and declare that save in rare passages he is deficient in passion, in sensuousness, in simplicity, and cramped in his use of the metrical and other technical resources of the true poet. The fact that save for a few perfect pieces, such as the clear-cut “Rhodora” and the impressive “Days,” and a slightly larger number of passages, stanzas, and lines, Emerson as a poet has not made his way with English-speaking people outside the Northern and Western States, lends great support to the arguments of his unenthusiastic critics. It can scarcely be denied, furthermore, that poems like “The Daemon in Love” deal with subjects unfitted for concrete treatment, that true poetic glow and flow are almost entirely absent from Emerson’s verses, and that his ever-recurring and often faulty octosyllabic couplets soon become wearisome. That he is at times irritatingly obscure or else uncomfortably profound, that he is given to diffuseness, that he is rarely capable of sustaining himself at a high level of execution, can almost be demonstrated. Worse still, he is prone to jargon, to bathos, to lapses of taste.

  Although the range of Emerson’s poetry is narrow, it is deep, and suffused with pure light of imagination, and dominated by the supreme ideality of a philosophic mind. Its keynote is Beauty. What it lacks in mere technical excellence, what occasional flaws there may be, showing the absence of the subtle touches of the master verse-builder, in rhythm, and meter, are compensated for by the depth of insight, by the soul and heart uplifting power of inspiration, which characterize his best poems, and by the profound truths which shine like virgin gold in his virile lines … are felt by the student and the cultured reader of Emerson’s poems—by everyone who allows himself to be touched and purified by the Ithuriel spear of this rare poet.

General

  We find beautiful writing and sound philosophy in this little work, but the effect is injured by occasional vagueness of expression, and by a vein of mysticism that pervades the writer’s whole course of thought. The highest praise that can be accorded to it is, that it is a suggestive book; for no one can read it without tasking his faculties to the utmost, and relapsing into fits of severe meditation. But the effort of perusal is often painful, the thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us uncertain and obscure. The reader feels as in a distracted dream, in which shows of surpassing beauty are around him, and he is conversant with disembodied spirits; yet all the time he is harassed by an uneasy sort of consciousness that the whole combination of phenomena is fantastic and unreal.

  J. Sterling showed me Emerson’s book, and drew a parallel between him and Carlyle; he was the Plato, and Carlyle the Tacitus. Emerson is the systematic thinker; Carlyle has the clearer insight, and has many deeper things than Emerson.

  Emerson’s writings and speakings amount to something:—and yet hitherto, as seems to me, this Emerson is perhaps far less notable for what he has spoken or done, than for the many things he has not spoken, and has forborne to do. With uncommon interest, I have learned that this, and in such a never-resting locomotive country too, is one of those rare men who have withal the invaluable talent of sitting still!… What Emerson’s talent is, we will not altogether estimate by this book. The utterance is abrupt, fitful; the great idea not yet embodied struggles towards an embodiment. Yet everywhere there is the true heart of a man; which is the parent of all talent; which without much talent cannot exist. A breath as of the green country,—all the welcomer that it is New England country, not second-hand but first-hand country,—meets us wholesomely everywhere in these “essays:” the authentic green Earth is there, with her mountains, rivers, with her mills and farms. Sharp gleams of insight arrest us by their pure intellectuality; here and there, in heroic rusticism, a tone of modest manfulness, of mild invincibility, low-voiced but lion-strong, makes us too, thrill with a noble pride.

  Belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever—the mystics for mysticism’s sake. Quintilian mentions a pedant who taught obscurity, and who once said to a pupil: “This is excellent, for I do not understand it myself.” How the good man would have chuckled over Mr. Emerson. His present rôle seems to be the out-Carlyling Carlyle. Lycophron Tenebrosus is a fool to him. The best answer to his twaddle is cui bono?—a very little Latin phrase very generally mistranslated and misunderstood—cui bono?—to whom is it a benefit? If not to Mr. Emerson individually, then surely to no man living.

  He has all the qualities of the sage,—originality, spontaneity, sagacious observation, delicate analysis, criticism, absence of dogmatism. He collects all the materials of a philosophy, without reducing it to a system; he thinks a little at random, and often meditates without finding definite limits at which this meditation ceases. His books are very remarkable, not only for the philosophy which they contain, but also for the criticism of our times. He is full of justice towards the doctrines and the society he criticises; he finds that the conservatives have legitimate principles; he thinks that the transcendentalists are probably right; he does not look with scorn upon our socialistic doctrines. He searches for his authorities through the entire history of philosophy; and thus, after having listened to all the modern doctrines with complaisance and patience, he breaks silence to give us maxims that might have issued now from the school of the Portico, and now from the gardens of the Academy.

  He has not written a line which is not conceived in the interest of mankind. He never writes in the interest of a section, of a party, of a church, or a man, always in the interest of mankind. Hence comes the ennobling literature of the times; and, while his culture joins him to the history of man, his ideas and his whole life enable him to represent also the nature of man, and so to write for the future. He is one of the rare exceptions amongst our educated men, and helps redeem American literature from the charge of imitation, conformity, meanness of aim, and hostility to the powers of mankind. No faithful man is too low for his approval and encouragement; no faithless man too high and popular for his rebuke.

  Emerson’s “Essays” I read with much interest, and often with admiration, but they are of mixed gold and clay—deep and invigorating truth, dreary and depressing fallacy seem to me combined therein.

  Some things he has published will live as long as the language itself; but much of his verse, constructed upon whims rather than under the influence of the spirit of poetry, will die out among the short-lived oddities of the day. Much of his prose, too, the product of imitation, unconscious perhaps of vicious foreign models, can scarcely be expected to survive the charm which hangs about his person and lingers in the magic tones of his voice. Mr. Emerson is a great writer, and an honest and independent thinker, on the whole. He is not, however, what one of the idolaters has lately called him, a Phœbus Apollo, descended from Olympus with hurtling arrows and the silver twanging bow…. His style is often musical, clear, and brilliant; words are selected with so rare a felicity that they have the shine of diamonds, and they cut their meaning on the reader’s mind as the diamond’s edge leaves its trace deep and sharp on the surface of glass. But by and by, we fall upon a passage which either conveys no distinct sense, or in which some very commonplace thought is made to sound with the clangor of a braying trumpet. Quaintness of thought and expression is his easily besetting sin; and here lies the secret of his sympathy with Carlyle, that highly gifted master of oddity and affectation. As a writer, Mr. Emerson is every way Carlyle’s superior, would he but let the Carlylese dialect alone. He had more imagination, more refinement and subtlety of thought, more taste in style, more exquisite sense of rhythm. Perhaps his range of intellectual vision is not so broad. He has not the learning of Carlyle, nor the abundant humour, which sometimes reconciles us even to absurdity. But Mr. Emerson has a more delicate wit, a wit often quite irresistible by its unexpected turns, and the sudden introduction of effective contrasts. Carlyle has an extraordinary abundance of words, a store of epithets, good, bad, and indifferent, by which the reader is often flooded; Emerson is more temperate and artistic.

  How little the all-important art of making meaning pellucid is studied now! Hardly any popular writer, except myself, thinks of it. Many seem to aim at being obscure. Indeed, they may be right enough in one sense; for many readers give credit for profundity to whatever is obscure, and call all that is perspicuous shallow. But coraggio! and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your Emersons be then? But Herodotus will still be read with delight.

  Emerson is certainly one of the most original writers the New World has produced. He writes least like an American of any author we have read. We do not mean this disparagingly to his character as a good and true republican, but to show our opinion of his greater breadth and depth of appreciation than is generally met with in American authors…. Mr. Emerson’s power has not its foundation in the human heart: the roots of his being are in the intellect. Consequently he is deficient in one of the two great elements of genius. That this narrows his scope is too evident to need anything beyond the mere statement…. Mr. Emerson possesses so many characteristics of genius that his want of universality is the more to be regretted; the leading feature of his mind is intensity; he is deficient in heart sympathy. Full to overflowing with intellectual appreciation, he is incapable of that embracing reception of impulses which gives to Byron so large a measure of influence and fame. Emerson is elevated, but not expansive; his flight is high, but not extensive. He has a magnificent vein of the purest gold, but it is not a mine. To vary our illustration somewhat, he is not a world, but a district; a lofty and commanding eminence we admit, but only a very small portion of the true poet’s universe. What, however, he has done is permanent, and America will always in after time be proud of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and consider him one of her noblest sons.

  His poems are mostly philosophical, which is not the truest kind of poetry. They want the simple force of nature and passion, and, while they charm the ear and interest the mind, fail to wake far-off echoes in the heart. The imagery wears a symbolical air, and serves rather as illustration, than to delight us by fresh and glowing forms of life.

  Very good scattered thoughts in it [“Representative Men”]: but scarcely leaving any large impression with one, or establishing a theory.

  An exquisite observer and very subtle, often very profound, thinker.

  He is the most original man produced by the United States up to this day…. Some of Emerson’s poems are charming. A little piece “To the Bee,” delicious in its way, is almost worthy of Milton.

	Fine soul and brave!
	If quaint in rhyme, if no logician gave
	Laws to thy thinking, inly sweet and wise,
	Long in these woodlands may thine image live!
	And many a musing Briton’s heart
	Shall melt, as oft with moistening eyes
	He lets his noisy train depart
	To linger where,—O sacred art!
	In yonder grave thy Druid lies.

  His first slim, anonymous duodecimo, “Nature,” was as fair and fascinating to the royal young minds who met it in the course of their reading, as Egeria to Numa wandering in the grove. The essays, orations, and poems followed, developing and elaborating the same spiritual and heroic philosophy, applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigor and richness so supreme that not only do many account him our truest philosopher, but others acknowledge him as our most characteristic poet…. The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord, or floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its landscape upon Emerson’s pages…. His writings, however, have no imported air. If there be something Oriental in his philosophy and tropical in his imagination, they have yet the strong flavor of his mother earth—the underived sweetness of the open Concord sky, and the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon.

  If he cannot interpret, he can paint nature as few else can. He has watched and followed all her motions like a friendly spy. He has the deepest egotistic interest in her. He appropriates her to himself, and because he loves and clasps, imagines that he has made her. His better writings seem shaken, sifted, and cooled in the winds of the American autumn. The flush on his style is like the red hue of the Indian summer inscribed upon the leaf. One of the most inconsistent and hopelessly wrong of American thinkers, he is the greatest of American poets. We refer not to his verse—which is, in general, woven mist, involving little—but to the beautiful and abrupt utterances about nature in his prose. No finer things about the outward features, and the transient meanings of creation, have been said, since the Hebrews, than are to be found in some of his books. But he has never, like them, pierced to the grand doctrine of the Divine Personality and Fatherhood.

  The Emerson philosophy, for example, is grieved that one series of writing should arrogate inspiration to themselves alone. It is obvious that a ready credence given to professed inspiration in other quarters, and later times, must tend to lower the exclusive prestige of the Scriptures. Thus the mystics may be played off against the Apostles, and all that is granted to mysticism may be considered as so much taken from the Bible. A certain door has been marked with a cross. Emerson, like the sly Abagail of the Forty Thieves, proceeds to mark, in like manner, all the doors in the street…. Whether in prose or verse he is the chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism. He belongs more to the East than to the West—true brother of those Sufis with whose doctrine he has so much in common. Luxuriant in fancy, impulsive, dogmatic, darkly oracular, he does not reason. His majestic monologue may not be interrupted by a question. His inspiration disdains argument. He delights to lavish his varied and brilliant resources upon some defiant paradox—and never more than when that paradox is engaged in behalf of an optimism extreme enough to provoke another Voltaire to write another “Candide.” He displays in its perfection the fantastic incoherence of the “God-intoxicated” man.

  I have been reading this morning for my spiritual good Emerson’s “Man the Reformer,” which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning. My heart goes out with venerating gratitude to that mild face, which I dare say is smiling on some one as beneficently as it one day did on me years and years ago.

  Emerson’s writing has a cold cheerless glitter, like the new furniture in a warehouse, which will come of use by and by.

  Emerson stands closest of all in relation to Blake, his verse as well as his essays and lectures being little else than the expression of this mystical simplicity. Were he gifted with the singing voice we should not have to look to the future for its supreme bard. But whenever he has sung a few clear sweet notes, his voice breaks, and he has to recite and speak what he would fain chant. His studies, also, have somewhat injured his style with technicology, making him in his own despite look at Nature through the old church and school windows, often when he should be with her in the rustic air. In some of his shorter poems, however, and in the snatches of Orphic song prefixed to some of his essays (as “Compensation,” “Art,” “History,” “Heroism”), any one with ears to hear may catch pregnant hints of what poetry possessed by this inspiration can accomplish, and therefore will accomplish; for no pure inspiration having once come down among men ever withdraws its influence until it has attained (humanly) perfect embodiment.

  The majority of the sensible, practical community regarded him [1836] as mystical, as crazy or affected, as an imitator of Carlyle, as racked and revolutionary, as a fool, as one who did not himself know what he meant. A small but determined minority, chiefly composed of young men and women, admired him and believed in him, took him for their guide, teacher, and master. I, and most of my friends, belonged to this class. Without accepting all his opinions, or indeed knowing what they were, we felt that he did us more good than any other writer or speaker among us, and chiefly in two ways,—first, by encouraging self-reliance; and, secondly, by encouraging God-reliance.

  His genius is ethical, literary; he speaks to the moral sentiments through the imagination, insinuating the virtues so, as poets and moralists of his class are wont…. Of Emerson’s books I am not here designing to speak critically, but of his genius and personal influence rather. Yet, in passing, I may say, that his book of “Traits” deserves to be honored as one in which England, Old and New, may take honest pride, as being the liveliest portraiture of British genius and accomplishments,—a book, like Tacitus, to be quoted as a masterpiece of historical painting, and perpetuating the New Englander’s fame with that of his race. ’Tis victory of eyes over hands, a triumph of ideas…. The consistent idealist, yet the realist none the less, he has illustrated the learning and thought of former times on the noblest themes, and comes nearest of any to emancipating the mind of his own time from the errors and dreams of past ages.

  There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses…. We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne,—though he does use that abominable word reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as his I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold.

  Emerson is a great master in his way. His style has an incomparable charm. Its silvery rhythm captivates the ear. The affluence of his illustrations diffuses a flavor of oriental spicery over his pages…. In thus renewing my acquaintance with Emerson, I am struck with certain rare combinations which may serve to explain his position. His rejection of dogmas is cool and merciless; but he shows no sympathy with vulgar and destructive radicalism. He asserts an unlimited freedom of the individual, but maintains a moral tone, rigid almost to asceticism. With the wild havoc which he makes of popular opinion, he always respects the dignity of human nature…. The practical shrewdness interwoven with his poetical nature is one of the secrets of his power. You attempt to follow his lofty flight among the purple clouds, almost believing that he has “hitched his wagon to a star,” when he suddenly drops down to earth, and surprises you with an utterance of the homeliest wisdom. On this account, when they get over the novelty of his manner, plain men are apt to find themselves at home with him. His acquaintance with common things, all household ways and words, the processes of every-day life on the farm, in the kitchen and stable, as well as in the drawing-room and library, engages their attention, and produces a certain kindly warmth of fellowship, which would seem to be incompatible with the coldness of his nature. Emerson is not without a tincture of science. He often makes a happy use of its results, in the way of comparison and illustration. But I do not suppose that he could follow a demonstration of Euclid, or one of the fine analysis in Physics of Tyndall or Huxley. Of such a writer as Herbert Spencer he has probably no more than a faint comprehension.

  Is a zealous interpreter and proclaimer of German philosophy, and excels equally in his characteristic description of nationalities as of poets.

  In philosophy, the name of Emerson at once occurs to the mind; but with all his excellences—and in some respects he is the most remarkable man America has yet produced—he is unable to stand alone. It is questionable if the world would have heard of Emerson had it not first heard of Carlyle; and in this country Emerson could not have occupied that conspicuous position to which he can justly lay claim in his own country.

  Emerson … gives us [“English Traits”] probably the most masterly and startling analysis of a people which has ever been offered in the same slight bulk, unsurpassed, too, in brilliancy and penetration of statement.

  It is this depth of spiritual experience and subtility of spiritual insight which distinguishes Emerson from all other American authors, and makes him an elementary power as well as an elementary thinker. The singular attractiveness, however, of his writings comes from his intense perception of Beauty, both in its abstract quality as the “awful loveliness” which such poets as Shelley celebrated, and in the more concrete expression by which it fascinates ordinary minds. His imaginative faculty, both in the conception and creation of beauty, is uncorrupted by any morbid sentiment. His vision reaches to the very sources of beauty,—the beauty that cheers.

  Emerson, whom I have been reading all the winter, and who gives me immeasurable delight because he does not propound to me disagreeable systems and hideous creeds but simply walks along high and bright ways where one loves to go with him.

	Or will I wander out ’neath summer skies,
	With Concord’s sage to look in Nature’s eyes,
	And find therein new hopes for future years,
	The while she whispers in our listening ears
	Weird sentences and sibylline decrees
	From cave and bank of flowers, rock, fern, and trees,
	And brook that, singing, through the greenwood travels,
	Whose meanings he—her Priest—alone unravels.

  It is a subject of gratulation that Emerson, who has been before New England for the past half-century, has wielded a generally beneficial influence. With his powers and opportunities he might have done incalculable harm; but the weight of his authority has been thrown upon the side of general morality and natural development of strength of character…. He has preached the purest gospel of naturalism, shrinking at once from the bold and impious counsellings of Goethe and from the macularity of Carlyle. He has given us, in himself, glimpses of a noble character, and his ideals have been lofty and pure. New England could not have had a better apostle, humanly and naturally speaking. Its cultivated and rational mind turned in horror and disgust from its rigid Calvinism, its outré, religious frenzies, and its sordid and prosaic life. They found a voice and interpreter in Emerson. He marks the recoil from unscriptural, irrational, and unnatural religion.

  He was the Transcendentalist par excellence…. One certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of Emerson’s orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American mind, and they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a magic, and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets in especial that one might not have been present on a certain occasion which made a sensation, an era—the delivery of an address to the Divinity School of Harvard University, on a summer evening in 1838.

	Doors hast thou opened for us, thinker, seer!
	Bars let down into pastures measureless;
	The air we breathe to-day, through thee, is freer
	Than, buoyant with its freshness, we can guess.

  The intellectual life of Emerson for nearly half a century has affected educated men with an influence that is immeasurable; he is “the Columbus of modern thought.” Since Lord Bacon, there has not been another writer whose resources were so wholly in himself. He belongs with the three or four philosophic minds of the first order, born of the Anglo-Saxon race…. There was a mild Teutonic flavor in Emerson’s early style; and, as the great traits of German thought were then more noticeable than now, the reflecting public at once accused our philosopher of being an imitator of Carlyle. The statement was absurd, because the native qualities of the two men have always been diverse. There was never any similarity between Carlyle and Emerson except in regard to acuteness, honesty and fearlessness. If there was at one time observable in their writing the influence of the same German masters, there has since been a growing divergence. They have been occupied with widely different themes, and have gone on, each in his own way. The one has produced essays and poems, dealing mostly with abstract ideas; the other has written voluminous histories, biographies, and reviews. The one crystallizes thought into proverbs; the other can be downright when he will, but often indulges in long periods, connected, oratorical, and rising to climaxes. Carlyle has more energy, Emerson more insight. Carlyle is planted upon the actual, in the domain of the understanding; Emerson soars on the wings of imagination. Carlyle portrays kings, soldiers, and statesmen, with hard outlines and abundant detail; Emerson shows us the souls of poets, prophets, and philosophers, and conveys their wisdom and love. The history of a German prince, half robber and half tyrant, may not interest future ages; but the “Essays on Nature” are a part of the permanent treasures of thinking men, like the “Phædo” of Plato, and the “Essays” of Lord Bacon.

  There is, perhaps, no writer of the nineteenth century who will better repay a careful and prolonged perusal than Emerson. He enjoys the rare distinction of having ascended to the highest point to which the human mind can climb,—to the point where, as he says of Plato, the poles of thought are on a line with the axis on which the frame of things revolve…. He stations himself at the point where the ascending lines of Law pass into Unity. Once attain to that position, and every sentence becomes luminous. The connection of ideas becomes apparent; the illustrations are seen to be pertinent and exact; and the subject to be laid open on all sides by direct and penetrating insight. We can then turn to him, with the same delight, for the philosophical expression of the deep laws of human life, as we do to Shakspeare for their dramatic representation. For he is one of the profoundest of thinkers, and has that universality, serenity, and cosmopolitan breadth of comprehension, that place him among the great of all ages. He has swallowed all his predecessors, and converted them into nutriment for himself. He is as subtile and delicate, too, as he is broad and massive, and possesses a practical wisdom and keenness of observation that hold his feet fast to the solid earth when his head is striking the stars. His scientific accuracy and freedom of speculation mark him out as one of the representative men of the nineteenth century.

  “Well,” said Tyndall musingly, and half to himself, “the first time I ever knew Waldo Emerson was when, years ago, a young man, I picked up on a stall a copy of his “Nature.” I read it with much delight, and I have never ceased to read it; and if any one can be said to have given the impulse to my mind, it is Emerson. Whatever I have done, the world owes to him.”

  In his teachings and in his life he is a great moral influence, he is an awakener and stimulator of the spiritual in man, while in his intellectual convictions he is a penetrating spirit of truth. He is a lark that heralds the coming day, a sunbeam that dissipates darkness. All the more pervasive, because purely moral and spiritual, will be his influence, reaching all hearts, pervading all forms, entering all sanctuaries, sustaining all right moral considerations, and invigorating every true resolve. Life will seem more sacred, the world holier, truth more sure, man diviner, heaven nearer, whenever we love the truth in that untrammeled spirit he has sought to vindicate. Whatever flaws may be found in his philosophic methods, none will be found in those moral and spiritual truths to which he has devoted his life for half a century.

	O Seer, to whose gift
	Looms large the Future’s better part,
	What other prophet voice shall lift
	This burden from the people’s heart!

  The most original and independent thinker and greatest moral teacher that America has produced…. Those who have felt throughout their lives the purifying and elevating power of Emerson’s writings, and who have recognised in his inspiring career the perfect sanity of true genius, can never think of him without affectionate reverence. He now rests, in that deep repose which he has so well earned, and on laurels that will never fade.

  Emerson’s mission was to individual minds. Those who were drawn to him, or those in whom he perceived a tendency of growth, found in him a good shepherd who carried them in his arms. He did not like to deal with people on general principles, but recognized the particular talent and the state of each who sought him, and was maternal in his faithfulness no less than his tenderness to them. He was the friend of souls. For this reason few of his conversations would bear to be reported. I was just twenty-one years of age when I first met him, and often since, reflecting how crude I was, his patience and kindness have been remembered with grateful emotion.

	Beside the ocean, wandering on the shore,
	I seek no measure of the infinite sea;
	Beneath the solemn stars that speak to me,
	I may not care to reason out their lore;
	Among the mountains, whose bright summits o’er
	The flush of morning brightens, there may be
	Only a sense of might and mystery;
	And yet, a thrill of infinite life they pour
	Through all my being, and uplift me high
	Above my little self and weary days.
	So in thy presence, Emerson, I hear
	A sea-voice sounding, neath a boundless sky,
	While mountainous thoughts tower o’er life’s common ways,
	And in thy sky the stars of truth appear.

  In essays which relate to concrete affairs classification is possible, and Emerson has availed himself of it. Wherever a genesis is attempted, logical order of sequence is necessary and is attained. In “English Traits” the matter is wisely arranged. You have first the occasion of his visit; then, in order, follow considerations on the land, race, ability, manners, etc., each one lifting us to the next without confusion. Every essay of Emerson is the result of much sifting and classifying. Seeing everything in its most universal aspects, as is habitual with him, it is quite natural that each suggests all to him. Accordingly, he resolutely excludes, by successive siftings, the matter that is less directly connected with his central theme, and retains only that which best illustrates his thought, and builds it out into a solid structure…. In seeing and uttering ethical laws specially befitting our modified conditions, he is the prophet of our century…. No one has preached more solemnly to us of our duties in a free government. Trickery and cunning, demagoguery,—these have received his rebuke, but their presence has never made him despair of our civilization. His teachings have borne noble fruit in this direction, and I believe that every American has received some impulse from Emerson that gives him greater moral courage and causes him to deal with his fellow men more frankly and generously than before. Self-respect has been taught us as the foundation of free government.

  His uncompromising devotion to Truth never hardened into dogmatism, his audacious rejection of all formalism never soured into intolerance, his hatred of sham never degenerated into a lip-protest and a literary trick, his inflexible moral purpose went hand in hand with unbounded charity. In him the intellectual keenness and profundity of a philosopher, and the imagination of a poet, were combined with that child-like simplicity and almost divine humility which made him the idol of his fellow-townsmen and the easily accessible friend of the ignorant and the poor. No discrepancy exists between his written words and the record of his life.

  Let me say, then, that Emerson, in my judgment, stands at the head of American literature in two of its most important functions: as philosophical essayist, and as lyric poet. As philosophical essayist he is marked by absolute sincerity, independent judgment, and the freshness of original thought…. I place Emerson at the head of the lyric poets of America. In this judgment I anticipate wide dissent; but the dissent, I think, will be less when I explain the sense in which the affirmation is intended. I do not mean that Mr. Emerson excels his competitors in poetic art. On the contrary, the want of art in his poetry may once for all be conceded. The verses often halt, the conclusion sometimes flags, and the metrical propriety is recklessly violated. But the defect is closely connected with the characteristic merit of the poet, and springs from the same root,—his utter spontaneity.

  Mr. Emerson gained nothing from his interpreters. Nor does he now. The key which they offered did not fit the wards of the lock. The vagueness of the oracle seemed to be deepened when repeated by any other lips than those which gave it first utterance. In most of the recent references in the newspapers and magazines to the opening of Mr. Emerson’s career in high philosophy, emphatic statements are made as to the ridicule and satire and banter evoked by the first utterances of this transcendentalism. It is not impressed upon my memory that any of this triviality was ever spent upon Mr. Emerson himself. The modest, serene, unaggressive attitude, and personal phenomena of bearing and utterance which were so winningly characteristic of his presence and speech, as he dropped the sparkles and nuggets of his fragmentary revelations, were his ample security against all such disrespect.

  He always talked as one quite sure that the plainest speech, the most direct way of “putting things,” was best liked, and he thus constantly awakened in one the feeling, that he never could be offended by the sharpest antagonism of a sincere man. This childlike simplicity, this “believing and therefore speaking,” was of itself a life-long power, characterizing not only the casual or private talk, but also the set public address…. The subtle affinity between Mr. Emerson’s distinctive style and line of thought and the old Gnosticism, a self-asserting transcendental philosophy, is quite clearly apparent. His completed life-work presents him to the world as the first New Englander, or rather American writer, whose speculative trend of mind took sympathetically to the Gnostic ideas, and whose inherited proclivity as a born New Englander necessitated the effort to combine those Oriental elements with the shrewd common-sense of practical Yankee life. Yet, alas, there is no vital unity. The incongruity is glaring and balks all effort to naturalize the alien mysticism as an aider to home-culture. The American will live out his supreme ideas, whatsoever they may be, in religion as well as in politics…. While musing, as at the beginning, over the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life-work, as a whole, tested by its supreme ideal, its method and fruitage, shows also a great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest of human life: “He that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.”

  I have never cared much for Emerson, he is little more to me than a clever gossip, and his egoism reiterates itself to provocation.

  Mentally, he is all force; his mind acts without natural impediment or friction,—a machine that runs unhindered by the contact of its parts. As he was physically lean and slender of figure, and his face but a welding together of features, so there was no adipose tissue in his thought. It is pure, clear, and accurate, and has the fault of dryness, but often moves with exquisite beauty. It is not adhesive; it sticks to nothing except to the memory, nor anything to it. After ranging through the philosophies of the world, it emerges clean and characteristic as ever. It has many affinities, but no adhesion; it is not always self-adherent. There are in many of his essays separate statements presenting no logical continuity; but though this may cause anxiety to disciples of Emerson, it never troubled him. Wandering at will in the garden of moral and religious philosophy it was his part to pluck such blossoms, as he saw were good and beautiful,—not to discover their botanical relationship. He might, for art or harmony’s sake, arrange them according to their hue or fragrance; but it was not his affair to go further in their classification…. Emerson does not solve for all time the problem of the universe. He solves nothing; but, what is more useful, he gives impetus and direction to lofty endeavor. He does not anticipate the lessons of the ages; but he teaches us so to deal with circumstances as to secure the good instead of the evil tissue. New horizons opening before us will carry us beyond the scope of Emerson’s surmise; but we shall not easily improve upon his aim and attitude.

  I do not, then, place Emerson among the great poets. But I go further, and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men of letters…. Emerson cannot, I think, be called with justice a great philosophical writer. He cannot build; his arrangement of philosophical ideas has no progress in it, no evolution; he does not construct a philosophy. Emerson himself knew the defects of his method, or rather want of method, very well; indeed, he and Carlyle criticise themselves and one another in a way which leaves little for any one else to do in the way of formulating their defects…. We have not in Emerson a great poet, a great writer, a great philosophy-maker. His relation to us is not that of one of these personages; yet is it a relation of, I think, even superior importance. His relation to us is more like that of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is not a great writer, a great philosophy-maker; he is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit. Emerson is the same. He is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit. All the points in thinking which are necessary for this purpose he takes; but he does not combine them into a system, or present them as a regular philosophy. Combined in a system by a man with the requisite talent for this kind of thing, they would be less useful than as Emerson gives them to us; and the man with the talent so to systemise them would be less impressive than Emerson.

  Emerson lived in a pale moonlit world of ideality, in which there was little that was adapted to tame the fierce passions and appease the agonizing remorse of ordinary human nature. He was a voice to the pure intellect and the more fastidious conscience of men, not a power of salvation for their wretchedness. But his gnomic wisdom will live long, and startle many generations with its clear, high, thrilling note.

  Everything Emerson wrote belongs to literature, and to literature in its highest and most serious mood…. All Emerson’s aspirations were toward greatness of character, greatness of wisdom, nobility of soul. Hence, in all his writings and speakings the great man shines through and eclipses the great writer. The flavor of character is stronger than the flavor of letters, and dominates the pages.

  It is too soon to say in what particular niche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough that in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the wise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did not fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search for truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or cumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the spirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the right governance of the soul. All this is generally realized and understood, and men may now be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrine without the critic’s prompting. Though it is only the other day that Emerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already one of the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled respect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of religion…. His books were for spiritual use, like maps and charts of the mind of man, and not much for “excellence of divertisement.” He had the gift of bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor of his musings, and knew how to use books as an aid to thinking, instead of letting them take the edge off thought. There was assuredly nothing of the compiler or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect that he introduces the great names of literature without regard for true historical perspective in their place, either in relation to one another, or to the special phases of social change and shifting time. Still let his admirers not forget that Emerson was in his own way Scholar no less than Sage.

  Emerson’s place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He can not properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments rather than of the results of sympathetic study. He was a man of intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism. This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost, if not quite, unintelligible…. But that which is mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one…. Too much has been made of Emerson’s mysticism. He was an intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being could breathe.

	That gray-eyed seer
	Who in pastoral Concord ways
	With Plato and Häfiz walked.

  In his first work, “Nature,” published in 1836, he revealed that vigorous idealism which has caused him to be surnamed, in the United States, the Prince of Transcendentalists. Notwithstanding the fact that the blood of eight generations of clergymen flowed in his veins, he was anything but a theologian and a controversialist. Imagination and feeling were his leading characteristics; he might almost be called an illuminé of Rationalism.

  “English Traits,” which evinces more genuine insight into the real character and underlying forces of the complex English civilization than any other book of like character, will hereafter be regarded as his clearest title to fame. The noble series of essays, “Nature,” is so great, that humanity must change radically if that book does not become immortal. The connection of thought in them is by a sort of mystical flight which none but he can take. To complain of a lack of unity in them would be like complaining of the lack of evolution in Isaiah.

  Crystal-sighted, truth-voiced.

  A good many years since, at the house of an American friend I happened to take up a volume of Emerson’s Essays which was lying upon the table. I looked into it,—read a page, and was startled to find that I had understood nothing, though tolerably well acquainted with English. I inquired as to the author. In reply I was told that he was the first writer in America, an eminently gifted man, but somewhat crazed at times, and often unable to explain his own words. Notwithstanding, no one was held in such esteem for his character, and for his prose writings. In short, the opinion fell upon my ears as so strange that I re-opened the book. Some sentences, upon a second reading, shot like a beam of light into my very soul, and I was moved to put the book into my pocket, that I might read it more attentively at home. I find it is a great deal to begin with if a book so far attracts us that we resolve, without urging, to look it through; since, as a measure of self-preservation, it is necessary to stand on the defensive now-a-days against books and people, if we would reserve time and inclination for our own thoughts. I took Webster’s Dictionary and began to read. The construction of the sentences struck me as very extraordinary. I soon discovered the secret; they were real thoughts, an individual language, a sincere man, that I had before me; naught superficial—second-hand. Enough! I bought the book! From that time I have never ceased to read Emerson’s works, and whenever I take up a volume anew it seems to me as if I were reading it for the first time…. We feel that Emerson never wished to say more than just what at the moment presented itself to his soul. He never set up a system; never defended himself. He is never hasty, and always impartial. He labors after no effects in style. He speaks with perfect composure, as if translating from a language understood only by himself. He always addressed the same public,—the unknown multitude of those who buy and read his works and wish to listen to him,—and ever in the same tone of manly affability.

  One of the few higher spiritual voices of the century that have spoken in clear, unmistakable tones of hopefulness and cheer. His coming was as the breaking of the sun through the clouds to a people long living under dreary skies. The power of the man was felt by all. Not only America, but England, the world, recognized a new and telling force…. One thing Emerson possessed, which was to him all-indispensable, and without which, in his age, he could never have exerted the influence he unmistakably did. His mind was essentially faithful, truthful, exact. With all his tendency to idealism and rapture, to abstraction and mysticism, he never wholly forgot the necessity of clinging to the fact.

  Emerson’s works, like the Bible or Shakespeare or those collections of proverbs in which in every language are summed up the wit and wisdom of unnumbered nameless poets and philosophers, might furnish texts for sermons of any color. Theist or pantheist or agnostic might bind his arguments with quotations from the many-sided Essays. Nay, at different times Emerson tells a different story to the same person,—as I have experienced in reading his essay on Fate, for instance, which has seemed to me an inspiring assertion of the freedom of the will and an unanswerable argument for fatalism. This apparent shifting is the obstacle that prevents many persons from understanding Emerson…. If in one place Emerson makes a half-statement, be sure that somewhere else its complement and corrective have been recorded. He can be understood only by those who seek for the spirit of all his work. To single out a paragraph or chapter as representative, generally misrepresents him…. Emerson is the unwearied champion of Individuals. All his sentences are addressed to them. He reveals to them the possibilities lying within reach of all. Mere bigness and burly multitudes get no praise from him. The glib cant of the demagogue issues not from his lips.

  Emerson had at one time a great influence on me that was good in some ways, but not in all. His philosophy is stimulating and encouraging, but not quite true, because it is too optimistic for real truth. He encourages young readers in the desire to be themselves and develop their own faculties, which is very good, but at the same time he encourages a degree of self-confidence which is not always good either for young people or old ones.

  It was Emerson’s experience, both in Europe and in America, so far as people gave his work serious consideration, to be regarded as one of the authors whom Goethe would have included in his world-literature…. He sees everything as if he were the sole person in the universe, but this is united with the capacity to grasp things as wholes, to feel atmospheres, to measure life and force through the imagination. The real and the ideal meet in him in such equal proportions as they have met in few men at any time. It is as if Plato and Aristotle had wrought at their best in imparting to him their characteristic qualities. There is no boyhood, no youthful period in Emerson; he is a man, and has the thought and expression of his ripest years almost from the start.

  In literature, as in life, his aim was spiritual manhood, and he valued books and men mainly as he found or deemed them to conduce to it…. Diamonds, however, are no material for statues; and Emerson’s writings, some short poems excepted, prefer no claim to the yet higher grace of logical unity and symmetrical completeness. His usual method of literary work, already described, precluded the composition of an essay in the proper sense of the term. The thought that came to him to-day generally bore slight affinity to the thought of yesterday or to-morrow. In exploring the notebooks where these casual visitations of the Spirit lay stored like autumn leaves heaped in a forest dingle, Emerson might find numerous analogies, but to fashion these into a coherent whole were a task akin to that which Michael Scott rightly judged too hard for the devil himself. There is just enough unity of purpose and endeavour after artistic construction in each several Essay to raise it from the category of Table-Talks, the desultory record of the wisdom of an Epictetus, a Luther, a Coleridge, and to inscribe the collection upon the roll of a great unsystematic book, along with Marcus Aurelius and Thomas à Kempis, Pascal and Montaigne…. Emerson is rarely sublime like Marcus Aurelius, but he disposes of a wealth of varied illustration of which Marcus Aurelius knew nothing; and he has turned every page of the book of Nature, which, until these latter ages, it has been the fault of ethical writers to neglect…. Emerson was a connoisseur in style, and said there had never been a time when he would have refused the offer of a professorship of rhetoric at his Alma Mater. The secret of his own method is incommunicable; for it is even truer in his case than in Carlyle’s that the style is the man. To write as Emerson, one must be an Emerson. His precepts, nevertheless, may be studied by artists in all literary manners. They seem especially aimed at the crying sin of nineteenth century authorship, its diffuseness…. More than any of the other great writers of the age, he is a Voice. He is almost impersonal. He is pure from the taint of sect, clique, or party. He does not argue, but announces; he speaks when the Spirit moves him, and not longer. Better than any contemporary, he exhibits the might of the spoken word. He helps us to understand the enigma how Confucius and Buddha and Socrates and greater teachers still should have produced such marvellous effects by mere oral utterance.

	To thee the prayer of all was granted—Light!
	Thou hast felt life-warmth through the age’s rime,
	Hast pierced the mask of flesh, the veil of time,
	That heart from heart and soul from soul benight.
	And whoso kens thy word to man aright
	Finds in the world a spiritual clime,
	Beholds the Present as a land sublime,
	Peopled with beings of heroic height.

  It is well that we American students of philosophy should seek to learn and to teach the doctrine of this greatest master of ours, and greatest—perhaps the only great—American philosopher,—for, much more than philosopher,—so much more that the philosopher is but one simple element in the harmonious man, in no wise monopolizing or tyrannizing over temperament and powers,—yet is Emerson truly one of the greatest philosophers of all time, and has given the deepest answers in his time to the soul’s Whence? and What? and Whither? So harmonious and synthetic is he, so interfused in his philosophy with life and poetry and beauty and counsel, that it is not a wholly grateful task to discuss him in that analytic and departmental manner which our programme imposes.

  Mr. Emerson protested, set up human reason, and a low phase of it at that, and with varying consistency assailed revelation and exaggerated human self-sufficiency in all his writings, both verse and prose; with occasional misgivings wrung from him by the sorrows of human infirmity, which human reason had no power to console. He failed; we know it and the world knows it.

  As regards Emerson, it seems to be this consideration alone which brings out his true greatness—that he discerned the universe as divine to its inmost core. We rightly call him a seer. And what did he see? God, everywhere. It is the sight of God that he helps us to,—the sense of God that he wakes in us. The truest lover of Emerson loves him best for making an access into heaven,—a heaven both present and eternal; and it is not Emerson’s personality, dear though that be, on which his thought most rests, but that vision of the heavenly reality to which the poet has helped him.

  Certain men, themselves writing-masters in the highest sense, such as Henry James, the late Matthew Arnold and David A. Wasson, have criticised Mr. Emerson as having so failed of achieving a style for himself as to threaten the permanence of his literary work. But style is of many kinds, and Emerson has one of his own, lawful, memorable and characteristic. There is a style of reasoned truth like that of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and of authors not a few beside. There is, too—and quite legitimate—the oracular style, the style of intuition and ejaculation. Has Solomon no style in the Proverbs, and David none in the Psalms, because neither of them has any logical continuity on the page? Is Paul,—that, “double and twisted old Calvinist” as a friend of mine affronted Mr. Lyman Beecher with calling him,—to be rather credited with a style through the labyrinth of his epistles, in which it is sometimes so hard to find the clew? In prose and in poetry there may be too much of what is called style, like a rocking-horse that does not get on, or a stream flowing so smooth it lulls us to sleep. Emerson’s expression answers to the stylus once used to cut the thought into letters, not on a paper-surface but sunk into substantial and enduring form. If the style be the man, the man in this case was in his style, which will not shorten but perpetuate by so sharply marking what he had to say.

  As a man grows older he cares less and less for other people’s mental processes. He must, for better, for worse, rely on the tools he has. And, year by year, he comes to closer reliance on the eternities. It has been the great good-fortune of us who write more or less now, that we have been contemporaries of Mr. Emerson. Of course, we cannot say how largely we are indebted to him. If the obligation is not direct, it is none the less an obligation because the gift came from him indirectly.

  I have listened to him with much pleasure, and have felt the genuineness of his mind. And yet, his sudden insight and prophetic anticipation have always lacked for me that clear, extended, inner coherence which no intensity of light can replace. This sufficient possession of the entire territory occupied, this extension of thought within itself, by which we lay down the bounds of our spiritual inheritance, are something far more than mere logic—a chain of fortresses stretching over a territory within easy range of each other. They may better be likened to the diffused, unequal, but marvelously united light which falls, in a moment of creation, on a landscape. Everything is coherent, interdependent, but with the most subtile interplay of a thousand variable relations. Such a landscape is far more than detached gleams of revelation; it is a complete presentation, palpitating with its own unity. The tendency of Emerson, not so much to dwell in a land of ideas as to move continually through it, made him too migratory for my intellectual household. I could hardly keep even a chamber for him, as did the Shunammite woman for Elisha.

  There can be no greater misfortune for a sincere and truthful mind like Emerson’s than to have to get a living by “orating.” This was his position, however; and there can be no doubt that his mind and his writings were the worse for this necessity. His philosophy afforded him only a very narrow range of subject. In all his essays and lectures he is but ringing the changes upon three or four ideas—which are really commonplace, though his sprightly wit and imagination give them freshness; and it is impossible to read any single essay, much more several in succession, without feeling that the licence of tautology is used to its extremest limits. In a few essays—for example, “The Poet,” “Character,” and “Love”—the writer’s heart is so much in the matter that these endless variations of one idea have the effect of music which delights us to the end with the reiteration of an exceedingly simple theme; but in many other pieces it is impossible not to detect that weariness of the task of having to coin dollars out of transcendental sentiments to which Emerson’s letters and journals often bear witness. But, whether he were delighted with or weary of his labour, there is no progress in his thought, which resembles the spinning of a cockchafer on a pin rather than the flight of a bird on its way from one continent to another.

	His soul was one with Nature everywhere;
	Her seer and prophet and interpreter,
	He waited in her courts for love of her,
	And told the secrets that he gathered there,—
	What flight the wild birds dared; why flowers were fair;
	The sense of that divine, tumultuous stir
	When Spring awakes, and all sweet things confer,
	And youth and hope and joy are in the air.

  From his neighbourhood, one always returned reinvigorated, with choice moods, and sometimes even ecstacies, which carried those of extreme æsthetic sympathies and deficient ratiocinative powers quite off their feet. He knew well the wearying and prostrating moments that assault and often destroy intellectual life at its very birth, the haunting longing and aspirations, the vague unrest and insurrections which characterize the passage forth from immaturity; and he condensed the vapour into rain; his presence broke the shards of the will and concentrated the man. Nothing came afterwards precisely as it had come before; and our new eyes saw that things are not entitled to respect simply because they are. It may be that too often the old become obsolete, but this could be corrected. With his coming, adolescence ended and virility began. He aroused the best elements of the soul, agitated it to its depth and precipitated all it had of intellectual principle. He first taught us to think, and who can forget the opener of that door? The dawn of life to the mind—is there a greater boon one being can receive from another? Is there one like unto it, except the dawn of love to the heart?

  A most winning and delightful personality on the side of the affections and conscience, he somewhat disappoints me intellectually. With deep and lovely flashes of insight, characteristic of real genius, I find mixed many dicta which, though striking in their epigrammatic form, do not speak to me as true. And in the failure of coherent continuity of thought, apparently commended to him by a mistaken interpretation of the Kantain distinction of Understanding and Reason, leave his fine materials in an unorganised and patternless condition. Much as I love the man, I seek in vain to learn from him. The fault is probably in me. I do not mean to criticise him, but only to describe my felt relation to him.

  In this country Mr. Emerson led the dance of the hours. He was our poet, our philosopher, our sage, our priest. He was the eternal man. If we could not go where he went, it was because we were weak and unworthy to follow the steps of such an emancipator. His singular genius, his wonderful serenity of disposition inherited from an exceptional ancestry and seldom ruffled by the ordinary passions of men, his curious felicity of speech, his wit, his practical wisdom raised him above all his contemporaries. His infrequent contact with the world of affairs, his seclusion in the country, his apparitions from time to time on lecture platforms or in convention halls, gave a far off sound to his voice as if it fell from the clouds. Some among his friends found fault with him for being bloodless and ethereal, but this added to the effect of his presence and his word. The mixture of Theism and Pantheism in his thoughts, of the personal and the impersonal, of the mystical and the practical, fascinated the sentiment of the generation, while the lofty moral strain of his teachings awakened to increased energy the wills of men.

  He was sometimes superficial, but never flippant. He never argued; he never even unfolded truths; he formulated and declared ex cathedra dogmas, and gathered together, without sequence of system, a number of apposite apothegms in a single theme. In common with Longfellow, he was often led to say what sounded well and meant little, but unlike Longfellow he was seldom commonplace at once in manner and matter. Although no writer is in reality more provincial than Emerson, no writer has such a semblance of superiority to all prejudices of race, nation, religion, and home training as he. But if there was much that was factitious in Emerson, there was also much that was genuine. He had at times an illuminating insight into the heart. His essays are elevating and suggestive. He was gifted with great powers of imagination. His severity had its source in his innermost character, and was more effectual against the storms of life than was the stoicism of the Romans, or the light-headedness of the Greeks. He was so free from all worldliness in motives or in tastes that he seemed immaculate. He had that courage in his faiths which only purity can give. He lived as in another world. If not quite the seer he purports to be, he was unquestionably a genius.

  “Can you emit sparks?” said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit it could not. Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all sparks and shocks. If one were required to name the most non-sequacious author one had ever read, I do not see how he could help nominating Emerson…. The unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the Correggiosity of Correggio. You never know what he will be at. His sentences fall over you in glittering cascades, beautiful and bright, and for the moment refreshing, but after a brief while the mind, having nothing to do on its account but to remain wide open, and see what Emerson sends it, grows quite restive and then torpid. Admiration gives way to astonishment, astonishment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to stupefaction.

  Emerson, as I read him, had no self-sufficiency. He lived and felt with the minimum of personal color, reflecting nature and man; and the study of the guide, the savage man thrown out of society like a chip from a log under the ax of the chopper, returning to the status of pure individuality,—men such as our guides were,—aroused in the philosopher the enthusiasm of a new fact. He often spoke of it, and watched the men as a naturalist does the animals he classifies. I remember Longfellow’s once saying of Emerson that he used his friends as he did lemons—when he could squeeze nothing more from them, he threw them away; but this, while in one sense true, does Emerson a radical injustice. He had no vanity, no self-importance; truth and philosophy were so supreme in their hold on him that neither himself or any other self was worth so much as the solution of a problem in life. To get this solution he was willing to squeeze himself like a lemon, if need were; and why should he be otherwise disposed to his neighbor?

  If we hold ourselves, in a definition of unity, to meaning by the word oneness of subject, we may admit Emerson’s paragraphs to have unity. More than half the time, at least, every sentence bears on the point concerned. Sequence in the analytic (i. e., redintegrating) sense he had none. There is no tracking him. You are conscious that he has arrived, and from a place worth coming from, for his hands are full of gems; but no other man can find out his way, nor can he. He was always complaining that he had no system; speaks of his own “impassable paragraphs, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.” He has little close ordering of words for coherence, few inversions, few parallelisms of structure. Out of a desperate desire to indicate relations, he uses 49 sentence-connectives to 300 periods; but not always do they catch and hold the true relation…. How then, without sequence, does our author make himself clear? His statements are intuitive; but we shall find that he has a curious alternating method of intuitive statement which amounts to resolution of the main idea. The paragraph contains a half-dozen intuitive sentences, each stating the main idea from a different point of view; so that perforce some of the steps omitted in one statement are supplied in another, if only by the great variety of associations. Emerson must state the point intuitively; but he does so under so many metaphors that he is sure somewhere to hit your experiences, your quickest road to apprehension.

  I have had a high joy in some of the great minor poems of Emerson, where the goddess moves over Concord meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandaled tread expresses a high scorn of the india-rubber boots that the American muse so often gets about in.

  Emerson was not, indeed, a man of letters in the narrowest sense. He was more than that. He was a prophet, a sage, an inspirer of other men, who used literature, sometimes a little impatiently, as an imperfect instrument for imparting the truths he felt himself destined to convey. But he had many qualities the man of letters would do well to imitate. He was essentially a modern man. He was familiar with the past and loved many things about it; but he was “up to the times” in the fullest sense, in science, in theology, in politics. He looked forward and not back; it cannot be too often emphasized.

  Different as they are, Franklin and Emerson are both typical Americans—taken together they give us the two sides of the American character. Franklin stands for the real, and Emerson for the ideal. Franklin represents the prose of American life, and Emerson the poetry. Franklin’s power is limited by the bounds of common sense, while Emerson’s appeal is to the wider imagination. Where Emerson advises you to “hitch your wagon to a star,” Franklin is ready with an improved axle-grease for the wheels. Franklin declares that honesty is the best policy; and Emerson insists on honesty as the only means whereby a man may be free to undertake higher things. Self-reliance was at the core of the doctrine of each of them, but one urged self-help in the material world and the other in the spiritual. Hopeful they were, both of them, and kindly, and shrewd; and in the making of the American people, in the training and in the guiding of this immense population, no two men have done more than these two sons of New England.

  Emerson stalks like a giant from mountain peak of thought to mountain peak, while the reader is often sorely puzzled to know how to cross the deep gullies between. Emerson was a genius, and prophesied so gloriously on his mountain-tops, that we struggle forward after him despite all difficulties. Those who are not geniuses cannot hope that readers will follow their lead unless the road is shown and the chasms bridged.

  Compare for one moment the style of Emerson with that of Wendell Holmes. The style of one represents him as much as the style of the other represents that other. The style of Emerson is manly, clear, deep, and direct; full of verve and poetical energy: it reflects the writer. The style of Wendell Holmes is subtle, charming, full of opalescent colour, witty, brilliant, and caustic: it also reflects the author…. His grand work, “Representative Men,” which is, for its power of intellectual stimulation, of the greatest possible value.

  In Emerson, we have, if not an acknowledged master, yet a poet whose lyricism is so strange and rare as to defy the critics. They can compare him to nobody, measure him by nothing, and are sometimes driven by sheer perplexity to pronounce him not a poet at all. They accuse him, justly enough, of abstract themes, irregular rhymes and rhythms, bewildering passages and unearthly ecstasies, a passion too “thin-piercing.” Yet many readers find a unique and unwithering charm in his ethereal notes. It seems to such that here, as nowhere else in American poetry, may be felt the thrill of a spiritual secret, a whisper from beyond.

  But, be it said, in the year of 1837, on the last day of August, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at Cambridge what for sixty years has been known as his Phi Beta Kappa address. Its subject was “The American Scholar.” It was the first of the great addresses which the great man made. In his published works it stands next the essay on “Nature,” which was his first noteworthy volume. It was a great address. Oliver Wendell Holmes calls it our “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”: we might denominate it our Declaration of Intellectual Independence…. For two generations this oration has been the intellectual bread for college and other folk. Like so many other first addresses and works, it seems to be a microcosm of the whole message which the great author subsequently thought or spoke. He who would be moved by the best of the early Emerson must stoop and drink of this early and steadily flowing spring.

  His freshness and his courage remained undamped by the failures of others, and his directness of judgment and poetical intuition had freer scope in his rhapsodies than it would have had in learned treatises. I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had nothing to say to his essays because they did not seem to advance their favorite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life again in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times.

  In 1837 he was asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge. This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. The mystic and eccentric young poet-preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns out to be a man exclusively interested in real life. This recluse, too tender for contact with the rough facts of the world, whose conscience has retired him to rural Concord, pours out a vial of wrath. This cub puts forth the paw of a full-grown lion. Emerson has left behind him nothing stronger that this address, “The American Scholar.” It was the first application of his views to the events of his day, written and delivered in the heat of early manhood while his extraordinary powers were at their height. It moves with a logical progression of which he soon lost the habit. The subject of it, the scholar’s relation to the world, was the passion of his life. The body of his belief is to be found in this address, and in any adequate account of him the whole address ought to be given…. Emerson is never far from his main thought.

  The divine spirit of gentle peace and loving faith abiding in the man is even better than any direct teachings in his books. We of to-day find it simply impossible to imagine what the spiritual air of New England was before Emerson breathed his message and lived his life.

  But here in this same day is Emerson, the good morning shepherd of pale meadows, green with a new optimism that is natural and sensible. He does not lead us to the edge of the abyss. He does not take us away from the humble and familiar close, for the glacier, the sea, the eternal snows, the palace, the stable, the pauper’s funeral pall, the invalid’s pallet, are all to be found beneath the same heaven, purified by the same stars, and subject to the same infinite energies. He comes to many at the moment when he ought to come, and in the very instant when they were in mortal need of new interpretations. Heroic moments are less obvious, those of abnegation have not yet returned; only daily life remains to us, and yet we cannot live without grandeur. He has given to life, which had lost its traditional horizon, an almost acceptable meaning, and perhaps he has even been able to show us that it is strange enough, profound enough, great enough, to need no other end than itself. He does not know any more of it than the others do; but he affirms with more courage, and he has confidence in the mystery. You must live, all you who travel through days and years, without activities, without thought, without light, because your life, despite everything, is incomprehensible and divine. You must live because no one has a right to subtract any commonplace weeks from their spiritual sequence. You must live because there is not an hour without intimate miracles and ineffable meanings. You must live because there is not an act, not a word, not a gesture, which is free from inexplicable claims in a world “where there are many things to do, and few things to know.”

  Emerson was pure in thought as he was high in thought, and his thought often reached spiritual altitudes where even the front rank of preachers never climbed: hence there was lacking that high fellowship which might have strengthened and stayed him, and the want of which sometimes broke over him with a blighting sense of loneliness.

  Who is not his debtor who has ever held converse with that virile and inspiring personality? Who has not gathered from his page mental booty and intellectual enrichment such as he has derived from few other masters? A profound and original thinker himself, he has set up many other thinkers. A seer, he has taught many others to see. Rich with a Californian wealth of thought and illustration, which he has dealt out with spendthrift profusion, he has supplied intellectual capital sufficient to endow a whole crowd of mediocrities…. When he approaches the momentous question of God’s existence, he denies the validity of all the customary arguments, such as are usually formulated in theological text-books, on the ground that they all share the fatal defect of being based on logical processes. He substitutes a shorter and more expeditious method of reaching the same great conclusion. While others are climbing with slow and toilsome effort Nature’s ladder up to Nature’s God, or the equally tedious ladder of syllogism, Emerson sees God by immediate perception, knows Him by direct cognition. By an agile mental leap, he vaults at a single bound into a knowledge of the Divine existence, using as his only spring-board the native intuitions of his own soul. What others reach only after long and laborious courses of reasoning, he reaches by a flash of intelligence.

  It may be fearlessly said that, within the limits of a single sentence, no man who ever wrote the English tongue has put more meaning into words than Emerson. In his hands, to adopt Ben Jonson’s phrase, words “are rammed with thought.” No one has reverenced the divine art of speech more than Emerson, or practiced it more nobly. “The Greeks,” he once said in an unpublished lecture, “anticipated by their very language what the best orator could say;” and neither Greek precision nor Roman vigor could produce a phrase that Emerson could not match. Who stands in all literature as the master of condensation if not Tacitus? Yet Emerson, in his speech at the anti-Kansas meeting in Cambridge, quoted that celebrated remark by Tacitus when mentioning that the effigies of Brutus and Cassius were not carried at a certain state funeral: and in translating it, bettered the original.

  A veritable prophet, telling each individual that being is better than seeing; telling the orator and publicist that it is good for a man to have a hearing, but better for him to deserve the hearing; telling the reformer that the single man, who indomitably plants himself upon his divine instincts and there abides, will find the whole world coming around to him.

  Emerson’s work is so individual that you can probably get no true impression of it without reading deeply for yourself. To many this may be irksome. Like all powerful individualities his can hardly leave a reader indifferent; you will be either attracted or repelled, and if repelled, the repulsion will very likely make the reading demand a strenuous act of will. But any student of American letters must force himself to the task; for Emerson, thinking, talking, writing, lecturing from that Concord where he lived during the greater part of his life, produced, in less than half a century, work which as time goes on and as the things which other men were making begin to fade, seem more and more sure of survival. America produced him; and whether you like him or not, he is bound to live.

  A certain disquiet mingled in the minds of Emerson’s contemporaries with the admiration they felt for his purity and genius. They saw that he had forsaken the doctrines of the Church; and they were not sure whether he held quite unequivocally any doctrine whatever. We may not all of us share the concern for orthodoxy which usually caused this puzzled alarm: we may understand that it was not Emerson’s vocation to be definite and dogmatic in religion any more than in philosophy, yet that disquiet will not, even for us, wholly disappear. It is produced by a defect which naturally accompanies imagination in all but the greatest minds. I mean disorganization. Emerson not only conceived things in new ways, but he seemed to think the new ways might cancel and supersede the old. His imagination was to invalidate the understanding. That inspiration which should come to fulfil seemed too often to come to destroy. If he was able so constantly to stimulate us to fresh thoughts, was it not because he demolished the labour of long ages of reflection? Was not the startling effect of much of his writing due to its contradiction to tradition and to common sense?

  Mr. Emerson’s way of looking at things was certainly just the opposite of Carlyle’s and of Ruskin’s too. To him the universe was in good health, if some of its denizens were not. His diagnosis was always made on affirmative lines, and justified the highest hopes. His critics said that he left out of the equation the forces of evil, and brushed away from his vision the persistence and ubiquity of sin. What the Creator is reported in Genesis to have seen, that all that he had made was good, Emerson continued to believe. In his vernacular even Sheol had its benefits.

  If you draw a mark of equality between “Representative Men” and seventy-five cents you will see how much richer I was with the book than with the money. This was the first volume that I bought with my own money, and none since has educated me so much and none now pleases me so well to see with its broken back and bent corners, its general look of shabbiness, worn with much packing and travel, and its scribblings on the wide margins made in the days when I read it with ambitious zeal and began to feel wise and melancholy, and even to think I could piece out Emerson’s sentences with reflections of my own. I read this book until I had drawn out as much as there was for me at that time. It seemed to be written for me…. With Emerson one never sees anything less than a vision, hears no voice but that of the soul; yes, and beyond that the Over Soul. All is in the distance, a vast perspective lined with majestic figures of men and women as they would be if they but knew their own worth; and at the end a lofty temple consecrated to the moral sentiments. In reading “English Traits” I cannot divest myself of the feeling that I am reading of a people much further removed than England and in no way related to our time and country; they seem as distant and in truth as dead as Greeks or Romans, with such a cool, remote and contemplative pencil does he paint them. Is it his imagination that produces this effect or is it that he sees things never before disclosed and hence the illusion of distance and unfamiliarity? The essential, national qualities are there, but abstracted in such a manner that they stand out like a scientific diagnosis; the diagnosis is so interesting and acute that the poor patient is forgotten…. The “Essays” contain the harvests of Emerson’s lifetime; plain food for daily life, rare fruit and dainties for life’s holidays. The quality is as the products of the sun’s light and warmth; the form is spontaneous and simple, and everywhere expressive of the man. He wrote when he felt inspired; when not, he sought in right living and high thinking the renewal of the sources of inspiration. The reserve of Emerson’s Essays is one of their most notable and instructive characteristics. He sees more than he says. He is like a general overlooking the field of battle, determining the strategical points and concentrating his forces upon them. What he does not heed is not important for a comprehension and complete grasp of the situation.

  One charm of Emerson is due to this affable reception of all opinions. On his first appearance in a pulpit he is described as “the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity,” and preached with an indefinite air of simplicity and wisdom. His lectures radiate benignity and simplicity. He had no dogmas to proclaim or heretics to denounce. He is simply uttering an inspiration which has come to him. He is not a mystagogue, affecting superinducal wisdom and in possession of the only clue to the secret. If you sympathize, well and good; if you cannot you may translate his truth into your own. The ascent into this serene region, above all the noise of controversy, has its disadvantages.

  The gentle simplicity of the man, his unswerving faith in humanity, in Nature, in the unseen Powers that guide the universe, must count for more than any mere piece of literary art he has left behind him. He certainly created no philanthropic system, perhaps taught no absolutely novel truth. He had literally no dramatic power, or large constructive imagination. His utterance is always direct and personal, as it were in his own calm, natural voice. His essays are not only without rigid local cohesion, they are often mere loose series of more or less kindred thoughts, and at times justify the extravagant legends which are current as to their haphazard growth. He has no painful or scholastic accuracy. He quotes or refers offhand to authors of all ages, with some of whom he had but nodding acquaintance. Least of all men would he desire his own books to be studied critically and accepted as authoritative.