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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 
 
 EMERSON 
 
 ■■"r-r-rr- 
 
£!§qs^ 
 
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 
 
 RALPH WALDO 
 EMERSON 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 1907 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

 LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 Two Copies Received 
 
 J\U 22 I90r 
 
 Copyn«M Entry 
 
 Z Z,/?*7 
 LASS CI XXc„ No. 
 
 /GbS 7 I. 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 COPTBIGHT, 1907, 
 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1907. 
 
 NortoootJ $«gg 
 
 J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
EDITORIAL NOTE. 
 
 f I ^HE trust of editing the following Correspond- 
 ence, committed to me several years since by 
 the writers, has been of easy fulfilment. 
 
 The whole Correspondence, so far as it is known 
 to exist, is here printed, with the exception of a 
 few notes of introduction, and one or two essen- 
 tially duplicate letters. I cannot but hope that 
 some of the letters now missing may hereafter 
 come to light. 
 
 In printing, a dash has been substituted here 
 and there for a proper name, and some passages, 
 mostly relating to details of business transactions, 
 have been omitted. These omissions are distinctly 
 designated. The punctuation and orthography of 
 the original letters have been in the main exactly 
 followed. I have thought best to print much con- 
 cerning dealings with publishers, as illustrative of 
 
iv Editorial Note. 
 
 the material conditions of literature during the 
 middle of the century, as well as of the relations of 
 the two friends. The notes in the two volumes 
 are mine. 
 
 My best thanks and those of the readers of this 
 Correspondence are due to Mr. Moncure D. Conway, 
 for his energetic and successful effort to recover 
 some of Emerson's early letters which had fallen 
 into strange hands. 
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 
 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
 January 29, 1883. 
 
 NOTE TO REVISED EDITION. 
 
 The hope that some of the letters missing from 
 it when this correspondence was first published 
 might come to light, has been fulfilled by the re- 
 covery of thirteen letters of Carlyle, and of four 
 of Emerson. Besides these, the rough drafts of 
 one or two of Emerson's letters, of which the 
 copies sent have gone astray, have been found. 
 Comparatively few gaps in the Correspondence 
 remain to be filled. 
 
NOTE 
 
 The main sources for Emerson's biography are James 
 Elliot Cabot's Memoir and E. W. Emerson's Emerson 
 in Concord. These, together with Emerson's works, 
 afford the basis of the present volume, and for the 
 use which has been made of them the author takes 
 pleasure in thanking the publishers, Messrs. Houghton, 
 Mifflin, and Co., who kindly granted the necessary per- 
 mission. Other illustrations of Emerson's character 
 and career are found scattered in the reminiscences of 
 his contemporaries, particularly in the volumes by 
 Conway, Ireland, Albee, Alcott, Haskins, Sanborn, 
 and Holmes ; but these writers add little except detail. 
 Two other small books deserve mention for their 
 excellent rendering of Emerson's personality in old 
 age, — J. B. Thayer's A Western Journey with Mr. 
 Emerson, and C. J. Woodbury's Talks with Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson. The Correspondence of Emerson with 
 Carlyle and his Letters to a Friend, both edited by 
 C. E. Norton, and other letters to Hermann Grimm 
 and to a classmate, published respectively in the 
 Atlantic Monthly, May, 1903, and the Century, July, 
 1883, complete the list of sources. 
 
 G. E. WOODBERRY. 
 Beverly, Massachusetts, 
 November 11, 1906. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Voice obeyed at Prime 
 
 II. " Nature " and its Corollaries 
 
 III. "The Hypocritic Days 
 
 IV. The Essays 
 V. The Poems 
 
 VI. Terminus 
 
 Index .... 
 
 PAGB 
 1 
 
 44 
 
 64 
 107 
 158 
 178 
 199 
 
 ▼ii 
 
EALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 
 
 Emerson leaves a double image on the mind that has 
 dwelt long upon his memory. He is a shining figure 
 as on some Mount of Transfiguration ; and he was a 
 parochial man. In one aspect he is of kin with old 
 Ionian philosophers, with no more shreds of time and 
 place than those sons of the morning who first brought 
 the light of intellect into this world ; in the other he 
 is a Bostonian, living in a parish suburb of the city, 
 stamped with peculiarity, the product of tradition, the 
 creature of local environment. One is the image to 
 the mind ; the other to the senses. One is of the soul, 
 of eternity; the other, of the body, of time. It is 
 difficult to focus such a nature; to find the axis of 
 identity ; even the ray of truth is here doubly refracted, 
 on one side into ideality, on the other into incomple- 
 tion, the meaninglessness of matters of fact, uncon- 
 cerning things. But to Emerson himself his life was 
 of one piece, and seemed so, because he looked on it 
 from a point within, from that centre of integrity upon 
 which his being revolved as a personal law unto itself. 
 It is there that the mind must fix its insight. The 
 
2 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 " process of a soul in matter " was his biography. It 
 is a singularly personal life whose overmastering in- 
 terest is in the soul that lived it, not in events, not in 
 the crisis of the times, not in circumstance, in family, 
 in friendships, in nothing but the man himself, — a 
 strangely isolated, strangely exalted soul who came to 
 light in New England as other such souls have been 
 born in out-of-the-way places on earth since the spiritual 
 history of man began. And, as was the case with them, 
 there was nothing out of the ordinary in his origins 
 and the condition of his life ; he was, in all ways, one 
 of his own people. 
 
 He was born, May 25, 1803, in the old parish house 
 of the First Church of Boston, on Summer Street, in 
 a neighbourhood of gardens and open spaces of pasture, 
 characteristic of a large rural town, not far from tide- 
 water and not far from the State House on Beacon 
 Hill. From this environment he never travelled far 
 in the journey of his life. Heredity slept strong in 
 the boy. There was the special strain of clerical selec- 
 tion in his father's family, much dwelt upon, as if the 
 seven Puritan ministers of this ancestry — 
 
 " Were as seven phials of his sacred blood" ; 
 
 but nature had laid a broader base. There was no caste 
 in the old New England blood; the early stocks mingled 
 and in any long-descended stream were one ; born in 
 the seventh generation, Emerson derived from many 
 sources and was of the kin, one of the children of 
 Puritanism in that much inbred race, like Hawthorne 
 or Phillips, drawing from the whole soil. He was a 
 communal child. The religious element in him, so far 
 as it was priestly and Levitical, was rather a thing of 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 3 
 
 home-breeding than of physical heredity; and as he 
 grew away from the church, he returned to an old 
 wild virtue of the blood that was the blood of freemen. 
 Upon the side of his mother, Ruth Haskins, his ex- 
 traction was lay and practical. Her father, a good old 
 man of energetic and religious habit, was a cooper and 
 distiller, who traced his origin only one generation, 
 while by way of amendment he left forty-six grandchil- 
 dren. But, whoever were the many forbears, the boy 
 was first of all his father's son, an Emerson ; he was 
 never allowed in his growing up to forget that fact, — 
 his fundamental duty in life was to maintain the name. 
 Family pride was an important trait of old New Eng- 
 land ; it was not dependent on wealth, past or present ; 
 it was entirely self-sufficient. The Emersons had it. 
 If, as their Aunt Mary, the family Sibyl, said, they 
 " were born to be educated," they were educated to be 
 Emersons. In those stern and uncommunicating pa- 
 rental days, the tradition of life from father to son 
 was perhaps most deeply felt by this spur and example 
 of the blood. Emerson, in his opening years, naturally 
 turned to his father's family and this line of ministers 
 who were held up to him for admonition, — what the 
 family had been ; he felt in them near and personal ex- 
 amples of the Puritan ideal ; moral essence streamed 
 into him from this family sentiment. Nor was this 
 Puritan ideal, as it so touched the slim heir at the 
 hearthstone, a narrow one ; it displayed a many-sided 
 sufficiency for life in the new settlements. Perhaps 
 none of these silent figures came so near to him, in the 
 generosities of boyhood, as his grandfather William, 
 the young minister of Concord who before daybreak 
 of the fight encouraged his parishioners on the village 
 
4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 green and could hardly be restrained from standing 
 with them there, and soon afterward, joining the 
 patriot army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, died of 
 camp fever. 
 
 Of his father, Emerson remembered little more than 
 the grandeur of his funeral. Sixty coaches and the 
 Ancient and Honorable Artillery, whose chaplain he 
 was, followed him to the grave. This cultivated 
 preacher, as minister of the First Parish of Boston, 
 held an honoured position in the city. Preaching 
 was to Boston the chief art and ornament of its life. 
 The Puritans had brought it over in their ark ; it was 
 the highest exercise of the chosen spirits among 
 them, generation after generation ; and in their head- 
 city on the three hills it ,had a history not unlike 
 that of a fine art in more famous towns. The dog- 
 matic force of Peter Bulkeley and the fiery vehemence 
 of Father Moody — both ancestral strains in Emer- 
 son — had gone by, with their rude and primitive 
 traits' ; there had now come a more cultivated age — 
 what the fashion of that generation would have 
 called almost a Sophoclean hour — a time of modula- 
 tion of voice and sweet temper in speech, of rhetoric 
 and eloquence, within whose decorum was bred the 
 good taste of a Boston parish. Decorum, indeed, held 
 a place among the idols of the congregation as firm 
 as in any ritualistic establishment ; so independent of 
 creed and sect is form in religion when long prac- 
 tised on any soil. The chief of these " golden-lips " 
 was Channing, the flower of the art of Boston in his 
 high pulpit, so inaccessibly cold in the body, so 
 spiritually transporting when only a voice. There 
 were other examples. Historically these men an- 
 
l] the voice obeyed at PRIME 5 
 
 nounced the latter days of Puritanism : and if they 
 put forth colours of the mind and heart that wrapped 
 their little world with a quiet and sacred beauty in 
 the solemn Sabbath stillness, it was an autumnal 
 flame like that upon the Suffolk hillsides, and 
 signalized the deciduous power of time. Old religion 
 found in them its decadents ; orthodoxy spurned them 
 as a sophist race, dissolvers of the ancient faith, 
 rationalizers, mere moralists, for it is essential to 
 mark the fact that Emerson was born into a culture 
 already struck with mental death; he experienced 
 in himself this dying away, in youth and early man- 
 hood; and the core of interest in his life is how 
 his soul lived on, and on what strength maintained, 
 after that death. Of this race of Boston preachers 
 was his father, William Emerson, fluent, clear, and 
 polished in discourse, of social habits and literary 
 tastes, a quiet moralist in the pulpit, no formalist, 
 with the public functions natural to his position, the 
 chaplaincy of the State Senate, the delivery of the 
 Election Sermon; editor, too, of the Monthly An- 
 thology, suggester and supporter of the first learned 
 societies and libraries of the city. He filled his place 
 and was of- his times, a bland and pleasant gentleman, 
 a tolerant clergyman, handsome, tall, and fair, with 
 tinted cheeks, welcome at dinners, in literary con- 
 versations, on civic occasions, — a man of the cloth in 
 those days, a Boston minister. But grandeur in the 
 pulpit is nigh to week-day dust, and the intellectual 
 life in that democracy was not exempt from its eternal 
 law of earning only living wages ; and dying at the 
 age of forty-two, the minister left his family to a 
 period of trust in Providence — a normal condition 
 
6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 for Emersons, whatever the dispensation — tempered 
 by an allowance from the parish of five hundred 
 dollars annually for seven years. 
 
 In that simple community such a change of fortune 
 was not in itself remarkable ; the early death of the 
 father of a family was necessarily such a catastrophe. 
 The burden fell upon the mother ; the boys would 
 grow up and in time things would again fall into 
 comfortable order; life went on in this hope. The 
 boys in this case were five, — William, Ealph, Edward, 
 Bulkeley, and Charles; Bulkeley was mentally de- 
 ficient, and was cared for all his life ; there was 
 also a baby-sister. Two children had previously died. 
 William, the eldest surviving, was ten, and from an 
 early age, and prematurely for a child, shared with 
 his mother the responsibility and strain of their 
 straitened means. She impressed her friends most 
 by the serenity of her mind ; she was at work early 
 and late, firm in discipline and undemonstrative of 
 her affections, though her smile is recalled, of good 
 and sensible speech, soft in her manners, and in her 
 demeanour characterized by a quiet dignity. She took 
 in boarders. The object of the family life was to live 
 and educate the boys. Emerson, then eight, was sent 
 to the public grammar school ; his education had be- 
 gun at the age of two, at a dame-school, and just before 
 he was three his father had remarked that he did not 
 read very well ; at ten he entered the Latin School. 
 The other boys were at their several stations in the 
 same career. The household was firmly knit together, 
 with peculiarly close ties between the brothers, owing 
 to the sympathies bred in the identity of their ideal of 
 the future and the isolation of their self-help. They 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 7 
 
 were all ministers in embryo. They lived frugally 
 and were trained to habits of going without ; to serve 
 God when man-grown, and finally provide for the 
 family was their dearest hope ; they were bred in the 
 thought of it. They helped their mother at home as 
 much as they could, and at one time cared for the 
 vestry, but they do not seem to have earned much in 
 boyish ways: two of them shared a winter coat be- 
 tween them, jeered at, it is said, by other boys. Once 
 Emerson, having spent six cents on a novel from a 
 circulating library, and being chided by his Aunt Mary 
 for such an expense when it was so hard for his 
 mother to obtain the money, heeded the appeal, and 
 he recalled the anecdote because he had never finished 
 the novel. These are trifles that show the life of 
 years. Yet the Emerson household should not be 
 thought of as, in its kind, an unusual family group. 
 There were scores of such homes in old New England 
 then and in later days, with just such a scholastic 
 strain in them, such moral ambition and similar 
 hardships. 
 
 When Emerson was eleven, his little sister died. It is 
 on the morning after her death that his childish figure 
 is first clearly seen. He read the Scriptures at family 
 prayers, and, it is related, prayed " with a grave and 
 sweet composure." He was then the " spiritual-look- 
 ing boy in blue nankeen," a homely garb, that a school- 
 mate photographed on his memory. The habits of 
 the family were, of course, pious. There were morn- 
 ing prayers, in conducting which, as on this occasion, 
 the children joined ; after supper they said hymns 
 and chapters, and Saturday night was kept as a Sab- 
 bath season. Emerson records the history of a day's 
 
8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 doings at this time. He rose at six, made the fire, set 
 the table for prayers, and joined the other children in 
 a spelling lesson before breakfast ; Latin School fol- 
 lowed till eleven, writing school till one, dinner, Latin 
 School at two, errands after school and chores, supper, 
 hymns and chapters, and reading round in turn Kol- 
 lin's history ; then private devotions at eight, ending 
 the day. This was a scheme of work and duty fitted 
 to boyish years and quite in the manner of the com- 
 mon life of the old time in homes of family religion. 
 Whatever interval was left for play, duty was engross- 
 ing. In such conditions boys matured early and with 
 precocious moral ambition if their temperaments re- 
 sponded to the call. 
 
 The fibre of these boys was toned and toughened 
 by their Aunt Mary, a sister of their father, who in 
 Emerson's later judgment was an incomparable bless- 
 ing in their education ; she was their goad. At that 
 time forty years old and single, she was in the habit 
 of visiting her relatives, a welcome, but not too long 
 welcome, guest. She had a strong mind well practised 
 in hard reading, and her monomania with respect to 
 the shroud had not reached that extreme which after- 
 ward made her such a whimsical figure in the streets 
 of Concord and in the thoughts of her kindred. She 
 was of a type of lone women not unknown elsewhere 
 in New England — a type that only Scott's hand could 
 make relive — a stern enthusiast attended by a malady 
 of poverty, solitude, and fervour. She had a passion of 
 admiration for genius, for moral and intellectual suc- 
 cess, and she made herself a sitter by the hearth of 
 these boys, ambitious for their distinction, fierce and 
 jealous for their excellence, a continual incitement to 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 9 
 
 every task of mind or character. " Always do what 
 you are afraid to do" was her best-remembered 
 maxim; and all her sayings Emerson described as 
 " high counsels.'"' When bread failed, she was found con- 
 soling the boys with stories of heroic endurance. It is 
 a homely picture of common life, and doubtless its set- 
 ting was ordinary and humble ; but the Spartan trait, in 
 however half-ludicrous vesture, as befits divine things 
 sojourning on earth, was there. It is noteworthy that 
 these boys grew up wholly under the hands of brave 
 women, though with some external assistance from 
 good men. 
 
 The good man in particular was Dr. Ezra ftipley, 
 minister of Concord and second husband of their 
 grandmother Emerson. In the earlier years the con- 
 nection of their mother with her own family was close, 
 especially with her youngest brother, Kalph, for whom 
 Emerson was named. Before her husband's death the 
 family festivals were kept on that side of the house ; 
 Thanksgiving united all at her home, Christmas at 
 her father's, New Year's and Twelfth Night at a 
 brother's and a sister's. But her father died in 1814, 
 commemorated in heroic verse by his grandson aged 
 twelve ; and though frequent intercourse was kept up 
 and affectionate relations were maintained, as time 
 wore on intimacy ceased on that side. It was in 1814, 
 after her father's death and in the time of the 
 distresses of the war with England, which pressed 
 heavily on the entire community, that the Concord 
 connection began to be close. Want had never been 
 far away from the family. There was some occasion 
 for prompt action. Dr. Eipley, a substantial citizen- 
 minister of the old school, took the entire family home 
 
10 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 with him to the Old Manse which their grandfather 
 William had built. Here the boys had schooling, in- 
 terspersed with declamations on barrel-heads in the 
 country store and romps in Peter's Field. They re- 
 turned to Boston, to boarders and the Latin School, 
 the next year, the doctor sending a cow along with 
 them — the one which Emerson is remembered as 
 driving down Beacon Street along by the Common to 
 an adjoining pasture. 
 
 Emerson was a home boy. The life of the brothers 
 was contained within the family ; it had no external 
 side that is salient in any one's recollections. There 
 were no chums, no adventures, no foray into nature with 
 boat and rifle. He was never given to games, to free- 
 masonries of the playground and the street, or to any 
 intimacy with one not of his own blood ; to these 
 things and what comes of them he was all his life a 
 stranger. He stood aloof, not wilfully but naturally. 
 As a child he had watched the rough boys from Round 
 Point go up to customary frays with " West Enders " 
 on the Common ; but he never went out to battle; he 
 seems to have had some timidity about town boys, and 
 gives this as the reason for his never owning a sled, 
 and his only appearance resembling warfare was on 
 the occasion when he went with the whole school to 
 Noddle's Island to assist in throwing up intrench- 
 ments against a threatened descent of the British fleet. 
 He swam, his father having, much to his terror, forced 
 him occasionally off a wharf into salt water; he 
 first learned to skate as well as to smoke at college. 
 He and his brothers were absorbed in their chores and 
 books, and fraternally in each other. " I can as little 
 remember," says Dr. Furness, who knew him from the 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 11 
 
 nursery, " when he was not literary in his pursuits as 
 when I first made his acquaintance." 
 
 It was a boyhood of study ; education was the one 
 gift sought ; and whether in Boston or at Concord, at 
 school or in the country store, in their home attic or 
 in their grandfather's barn, the true sport of these 
 boys was literature. They were bred on it. They 
 read, of course, good authors and improving works ; 
 but what most attracted them was the form of good 
 writing. The first awakening of their minds was to a 
 perception of rhetoric and to the sonorousness of de- 
 clamatory poetry and to the poise of prose. It is said 
 that schoolboys then went wild over the turn of a 
 phrase, the fall of a period. They all heard atten- 
 tively many sermons, and it is true that the church was 
 an early, long-continued, and efficient school of literary 
 expression in the community, and boybood shared in 
 this benefit. A certain enthusiasm even might be im- 
 bibed for the things of eloquent discourse ; such was the 
 air of the city and the tone of life there. Oratory flour- 
 ished, it should be remembered, in the same age in which 
 the literature of Boston was produced. The minds of 
 Boston boys were excited by the grace of spoken words 
 as well as by books ; rhetoric was not a school-exercise, 
 but a live art, and poetry was for this group of boys a 
 higher rhetoric. Emerson was only a fair scholar, as 
 the phrase is used of schoolboys ; but in this happy 
 environment he early developed a spontaneous literary 
 faculty, and he had taken to rhyming more quickly 
 than to prose. At ten he composed a heroic poem, 
 Fortus, which Dr. Furness illustrated ; he wrote verses, 
 and declaimed them, on the naval victories of the 
 war; and he commonly interlarded his letters to his 
 
12 RALPH WALDO EMEKSON [chap. 
 
 brothers with doggerel. They took pride in him as 
 the rhymer of the family. If their boyhood was lim- 
 ited on the ruder side, they had an abundant life in their 
 own way, and did not differ from their mates except 
 that being piously bred and poor and not gregarious, — 
 minister's sons, — some things were omitted from their 
 havings ; in other things they were the same. They 
 spelt and ciphered and had catechism; they piled 
 wood in the yard, like all New England boys ; they 
 waited at the meeting-house door to see if their favour- 
 ite, Edward Everett, would preach there or elsewhere ; 
 they read novels if they could get them ; and they had 
 a peculiar proud carriage of the head, a hereditary trait. 
 Emerson concentrated this life of the brothers and 
 borrowed its colours for the generalized picture that he 
 drew of such a group — a passage which by its old- 
 fashioned movement and antiquated tone, as much as 
 by its details, takes us back into a vanished world, to 
 the heart of the thoughts and habits and ideal of his 
 people as well as to his own childhood : — 
 
 "Who has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a 
 low roof, the eager, blushing boys discharging as they can 
 their household chores, and hastening into the sitting-room 
 to the study of to-morrow's merciless lesson, yet stealing time 
 to read one chapter more of the novel hardly smuggled into 
 the tolerance of father and mother, — atoning for the same 
 by some passages of Plutarch or Goldsmith ; the warm sym- 
 pathy with which they kindle each other in school-yard 
 or barn, or wood-shed, with scraps of poetry or song, with 
 phrases of the last oration or mimicry of the orator ; the 
 youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons ; the school 
 declamation, faithfully rehearsed at home, sometimes to the 
 fatigue, sometimes to the admiration, of sisters ; the first soli- 
 tary joys of literary vanity, when the translation or the theme 
 has been completed, sitting alone near the top of the house ; 
 
i.J THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 13 
 
 the cautious comparison of the attractive advertisement of 
 the arrival of Macready, Booth, or Kemble, or of the dis- 
 course of a well-known speaker, with the expense of the 
 entertainment; the affectionate delight with which they 
 greet the return of each one after the early separations 
 which school or business requires ; the foresight with which, 
 during such absences, they hive the honey which oppor- 
 tunity offers, for the ear and imagination of the others ; and 
 the unrestrained glee with which they disburden themselves 
 of their early mental treasures when the holidays bring 
 them again together ? What is the hoop that holds them 
 staunch? It is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of 
 austerity, which, excluding them from the sensual enjoy- 
 ments which make other boys too early old, has directed 
 their activity into safe and right channels, and made them, 
 despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful, and 
 the good. Ah, short-sighted students of books, of nature, 
 and of man ! too happy could they know their advantages, 
 they pine for freedom from that mild parental yoke ; they 
 sigh for fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre, and premature 
 freedom and dissipation which others possess. Woe to 
 them if their wishes were crowned ! The angels that dwell 
 with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful 
 brows, are Toil and Want and Truth and Mutual Faith." 
 
 The period of home-education was followed by one 
 of college years and school-keeping; for fourteen 
 years one or two of the brothers were always in col- 
 lege, and teaching was the family means of support. 
 Emerson entered Harvard in the fall of 1817, in his 
 fifteenth year. William had gone three years before, 
 and on graduating in 1818 taught one season at 
 Kennebunk in Maine and then set up a school for 
 young ladies in Boston in his mother's house. He 
 was the head of the family, a plain, dutiful, capable 
 boy, the prop of the home. The cost of Emerson's 
 education was eased in various ways, and the expenses 
 
14 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 were, of course, small. He was appointed President's 
 Freshman, or messenger, which gave him lodging in 
 Wadsworth House, the President's residence. He 
 tutored the first year, and taught in vacation at his 
 uncle Rev. Samuel Ripley's school at Waltham. He 
 received aid from the Saltonstall and Penn founda- 
 tions. In his Sophomore year he was appointed to 
 wait on table in the Junior Hall, which excused him 
 from three-fourths of the cost of board. " I do like 
 it and I do not like it," he wrote to William, " for 
 which sentiments you can easily guess the reason." 
 He felt his dependent situation, and was warned by 
 his Aunt Mary against indulging this feeling. How 
 it affected his bosom thoughts and quickened his in- 
 stincts is seen in a letter of his Freshman year to 
 William : — 
 
 " Just before I came from Boston Mr. Frothingham sent 
 mother a note containing twenty dollars, given him ' by a 
 common friend ' for her, with a promise of continuing to 
 her ten dollars quarterly for the use of her sons in college ; 
 not stipulating the time of continuance. At this time the 
 assistance was peculiarly acceptable as you know. It is in 
 this manner, from the charity of others, mother never has 
 been, and from our future exertions I hope never will be, in 
 want. It appears to me the happiest earthly moment my 
 most sanguine hopes can picture, if it should ever arrive, to 
 have a home comfortable and pleasant, to offer to mother ; 
 in some feeble way to repay her for the cares and woes and 
 inconveniences she has so often been subject to on our 
 account alone. To be sure, after talking at this rate, I have 
 done nothing myself ; but then I've less faculties and age 
 than most poor collegians. But when I am out of college I 
 will, Deo volente, study divinity and keep school at' the same 
 time, — try to be a minister and have a house." 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 15 
 
 Emerson was regarded as the least promising of the 
 brothers, and he had the least successful college 
 career ; he was not especially noticed, either at school 
 or college, by his teachers or his classmates. On his 
 own side, he did not look back on college studies as 
 very profitable things, and he habitually wrote slight- 
 ingly of collegiate education in later life. It was this 
 view on which he acted as a student. "To tell the 
 truth," he writes to William, " I do not think it neces- 
 sary to understand mathematics and Greek thoroughly 
 to be a good, useful, or even great man." His old 
 Latin School master, concerned for his boys, visited 
 him in his room to remonstrate with him on his defi- 
 ciencies in mathematics, in which he says he was always 
 a " hopeless dunce." He did not succeed too well with 
 philosophy, that is, Locke, Stewart, and Paley. The 
 truth is, he indulged his vein, — that native truancy of 
 mind which first disclosed itself in the "idle books 
 under the bench at the Latin School." Colleges never 
 change ; and Emerson was as homeless as his kin 
 have always been in college halls. The only school 
 in which poets ever came to their own was Plato's 
 Academy. He tried to do his duty by his studies, 
 but it was against the grain. There were some allevi- 
 ations. He was fortunate in having Edward Tyrrel 
 Channing as his instructor in rhetoric the last two 
 years, and he heard and carefully noted the lectures 
 of George Ticknor. The best of his education he 
 gave to himself in rambling reading and incessant 
 practice in writing, and by that note-book in which 
 from his Junior year he began the process of storing 
 thoughts, phrases, suggestions, horoscopes of essays 
 and paraphrases of reading, for future use ; and, doing 
 
16 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 this, his successes were in the line of his talent. He 
 took a Bowdoin prize in his Junior year on The 
 Character of Socrates, and a second prize in the Sen- 
 ior year on The Present State of Ethical Philoso- 
 phy, to the surprise of his teachers ; and he also 
 took a Boylston prize for declamation. He sent the 
 money for this proudly home, hoping "his mother 
 would buy a new shawl" with it, but William assigned 
 it to the baker. Perhaps at the bottom of his heart 
 he hoped this little success would seem some amends 
 for his deficiencies, and so he devoted it to her. He 
 graduated not far from the middle of the class in 
 rank. Summing it up, he said, — "A chamber alone, 
 that was the best thing I found at college." 
 
 Outside of his studies he is seen in the brief annals 
 of his class, and as an unimportant figure in their 
 memories, coming up to the groups of students with 
 his President's messages or in walks to Mount Auburn 
 with a friend, or in talks with the same friend in his 
 Freshman room, where he had a volume of Montaigne, 
 a set of Shakespeare, Swift, Addison, Sterne — books 
 probably brought from his father's library. In his 
 three later years he roomed at 5, 15, and 9 Hollis with 
 his classmates, Dorr and Gourdin, and his brother 
 Edward, in turn. He was younger than most of 
 his class, a slender, grave boy, not physically vigor- 
 ous ; he was not popular, though well liked, and he 
 was not a conspicuous member. He was of a sluggish 
 nature, and reserved; he had as a child among his 
 brothers a vein of silliness with which he reproached 
 himself, but he had none of the older playfulness of a 
 college student, though as a listener he was not averse 
 to merriment and stories; he did not bashfully or 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 17 
 
 sourly withdraw himself from his fellows, but rather 
 tried to overcome the barriers of his na f ure. He 
 declared lifelong, that his isolation which he felt from 
 his boyhood was not wilful, but inevitable — " my 
 doom to be solitary." He had, even then, boy that he 
 was, the hesitating courtesy of address that marked 
 his demeanour through life. He was neither shy nor 
 proud, he was slow. He was one of the group that, 
 after a Sophomore rebellion had unified the class, 
 organized the Conventicle Club for cheer and comrade- 
 ship, and he was a member of the Pythologian Society 
 which held weekly debating and literary exercises, 
 followed by a supper at a total expense of two dollars ; 
 he professed to remember the Malaga from the Cam- 
 bridge grocer's as the best wine he had ever drunk, 
 though instead of finding in it a solvent with his 
 companions he " grew graver with every glass." He 
 wrote a long serious poem for this Society, and an ode 
 for a convivial college occasion. He had also, early 
 in the course, helped to establish a Book Club, which 
 bought Reviews not afforded by the college library and 
 novels, of which Scott's were read aloud. His class 
 was not more clairvoyant of the future than were the 
 college authorities ; they made him Class Poet, but 
 only after seven others had refused the post. It was 
 to this happier, later period of college life that he 
 referred when, a year after, he wrote, " I was then 
 delighted with my recent honors, traversing my 
 chamber, flushed and proud of a poet's fancies and 
 the day when they were to be exhibited ; pleased with 
 ambitious prospects, and careless because ignorant 
 of the future." Except that other " peculiar pursuit," 
 to which he more solemnly looked forward, poetry was 
 
18 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 the most dearly cherished in his solitude. It was, 
 after all, the boyish rhymester that had most lived on 
 in him through the four years. He was so disap- 
 pointed at not being allowed a poetical part at Com- 
 mencement that, it is said, he neglected the part assigned 
 to him, a defence of Knox, and delivered it only with 
 much prompting and little to his credit. So ended 
 college for him ; schoolboy self-apology and penance 
 for tutors' tasks, vagrancy in English books, and 
 pleasant country strolls in study hours were his most 
 lasting memories of Harvard. 
 
 The only live colour in these college days that re- 
 mains to us is Emerson's own account of his adoration 
 of Edward Everett. It was an idolatry ; " the Idol " 
 was the name by which Everett was known in the 
 boys' jargon. Emerson was laughed at for his enthu- 
 siasm, but he did not mind. The passage incidentally 
 discloses the state of the Boston atmosphere in which 
 the commonplace of those early years had its unseen 
 background and rounded into a world; the "Athe- 
 nian" style, too, contains the drop of time and cir- 
 cumstance, the weather-stain of contemporary life. 
 What modern pen could preserve these old perspec- 
 tives without some vein of irony? Though anti- 
 quated, the sketch is characteristic of a culture, and 
 though written with the cold criticism of maturity, it 
 has, nevertheless, gleams and flashes that take us 
 straight to the boy's heart : — 
 
 "Germany had created criticism in vain for us until 
 1820, when Edward Everett returned from his five years in 
 Europe, and brought to Cambridge his rich results, which 
 no one was so fitted by natural grace and the splendor of 
 his rhetoric to introduce and recommend. He made us for 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 19 
 
 the first time acquainted with Wolff's theory of the Ho- 
 meric writings, with the criticism of Heyne. The novelty 
 of the learning lost nothing in the skill and genius of his 
 relation, and the rudest undergraduate found a new morn- 
 ing opened to him in the lecture-room of Harvard Hall. 
 
 " There was an influence on the young people from the 
 genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of 
 Pericles in Athens. He had an inspiration which did not 
 go beyond his head, but which made him the master of 
 elegance. If any of my readers were at that period in 
 Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember his radiant 
 beauty of person, of a classic style, his heavy large eye, 
 marble lids, which gave the impression of mass which the 
 slightness of his form needed ; sculptured lips ; a voice of 
 such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, 
 although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beau- 
 tiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The 
 word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, 
 became current and classical in New England. He had a 
 great talent for collecting facts, and for bringing those he 
 had to bear with ingenious felicity on the topic of the mo- 
 ment. Let him rise to speak on what occasion soever, a fact 
 had always just transpired which composed, with some other 
 fact well known to the audience, the most pregnant and 
 happy coincidence. It was remarked that for a man who 
 threw out so many facts he was seldom convicted of a 
 blunder. He had a good deal of special learning, and all his 
 learning was available for purposes of the hour. It was all 
 new learning,' that wonderfully took and stimulated the 
 young men. It was so coldly and weightily communicated 
 from so commanding a platform, as if in the consciousness 
 and consideration of all history and all learning, — adorned 
 with so many simple and austere beauties of expression, and 
 enriched with so many excellent digressions and significant 
 quotations, that, though nothing could be conceived before- 
 hand less attractive or indeed less fit for green boys from 
 Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, with their 
 unripe Latin and Greek reading, than exegetical discourses 
 in the style of Voss and Wolff and Ruhnken, on the Orphic 
 
20 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 and Ante-Homeric remains, — yet this learning instantly 
 took the highest place to our imagination in our unoccupied 
 American Parnassus. All his auditors felt the extreme 
 beauty and dignity of the manner, and even the coarsest 
 were contented to go punctually to listen, for the manner, 
 when they had found out that the subject-matter was not 
 for them. In the lecture-room, he abstained from all orna- 
 ment, and pleased himself with the play of detailing erudi- 
 tion in a style of perfect simplicity. In the pulpit (for he 
 was then a clergyman) he made amends to himself and his 
 auditor for the self-denial of the professor's chair, and, with 
 an infantine simplicity still, of manner, he gave the reins to 
 his florid, quaint, and affluent fancy. 
 
 " Then was exhibited all the richness of a rhetoric which 
 we have never seen rivalled in this country. Wonderful 
 how memorable were words made which were only pleas- 
 ing pictures, and covered no new or valid thoughts. He 
 abounded in sentences, in wit, in satire, in splendid allusion, 
 in quotation impossible to forget, in daring imagery, in 
 parable and even in a sort of defying experiment of his 
 own wit and skill in giving an oracular weight to Hebrew 
 or Rabbinical words — feats which no man could better 
 accomplish, such was his self-command and the security of 
 his manner. All his speech was music, and with such 
 variety and invention that the ear was never tired. Espe- 
 cially beautiful were his poetic quotations. He delighted in 
 quoting Milton, and with such sweet modulation that he 
 seemed to give as much beauty as he borrowed ; and what- 
 ever he has quoted will be remembered by any who 
 heard him, with inseparable association with his voice and 
 genius. He had nothing in common with vulgarity and 
 infirmity, but, speaking, walking, sitting, was as much aloof 
 and uncommon as a star. The smallest anecdote of his be- 
 havior or conversation was eagerly caught and repeated, 
 and every young scholar could recite brilliant sentences 
 from his sermons, with mimicry, good or bad, of his voice. 
 This influence went much farther, for he who was heard 
 with such throbbing hearts and sparkling eyes in the lighted 
 and crowded churches, did not let go his hearers when the 
 church was dismissed, but the bright image of that eloquent 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 21 
 
 form followed the boy home to his bed-chamber; and not a 
 sentence was written in academic exercises, not a declama- 
 tion attempted in the college-chapel, but showed the omni- 
 presence of his genius to youthful heads. This made every 
 youth his defender, and boys filled their mouths with argu- 
 ments to prove that the orator had a heart." 
 
 Emerson had no personal intercourse with this 
 Boston world, just as he had not come near to his 
 professors at college. He was only one of the com- 
 munity who sat under the lights of the pulpit, an 
 ambitious schoolboy of eighteen, with humble and 
 unobserved business of his own. He assisted William 
 in his school at his mother's house. He had acquired 
 some slight experience in teaching at his clerical 
 uncle's school in vacations, where his pupils were raw 
 boys of his own age ; and he cordially hated it. He 
 was hardly better pleased with the task of instructing 
 the fashionable young ladies, also of not uneven age 
 with his own, who came to his brother to finish their 
 education. He was timid about his French ; he de- 
 tested mathematics; and he was vexed by youthful 
 defects. He was easily embarrassed, blushed, and had 
 " no power of face," such as he especially admired in 
 Edward ; his cheeks, he long complained, were tell- 
 tales against his interests and dignity. The young 
 ladies found means of confusion, and he had never 
 lived with girls; when they became impossible, he 
 would send them to his mother's room to study. 
 These were trifles. The young schoolmaster, in the 
 serious part of his task, did by teaching as he had 
 done by his college work : he tried to do his duty, 
 but it was against the grain. "Better tug at the 
 oar," he writes toward the close of the year, " dig the 
 
22 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 mine, or saw wood ; better sow hemp or hang with it 
 than sow the seeds of instruction." But he was soon 
 broken to the harness, and showed sufficient capacity 
 to be left in charge of the school while William went 
 for an absence of two years to Gottingen to study for 
 the ministry. 
 
 During this period, in 1823, the family removed to 
 Canterbury Lane, a country suburb, and for some years 
 afterward their habits were migratory, and one or 
 more of the boys were .always away from home. 
 Emerson, now the responsible head, indulged some 
 hope of becoming acquainted with Nature and reaping 
 the fruits of her solitude ; but he was disappointed — 
 he was a town-boy with slow pulses and had not then 
 the secret of the woods and fields ; perhaps one rea- 
 son was that he always took a book with him. He 
 was happy in the fact that he earned money honestly, 
 and there was enough of it, but otherwise he was sub- 
 ject to youthful depression; he had besides strained 
 his constitution, of which what he calls his apathy 
 was a sign. He was at all times a most discouraging 
 critic of himself. He had been ambitious, notwith- 
 standing his lack of precocity ; and in the chill that 
 followed the enthusiasms of boyhood and before the 
 approaching prospect of mediocrity he discomf ortably 
 wrote that not any " application of which I am capa- 
 ble, any efforts, any sacrifices, could at this moment 
 restore any reasonableness to the familiar expectations 
 of my earlier youth." He did not cease from effort, 
 however, or waver in his own strict line. He was 
 always persistent in self-will. He was still the des- 
 ultory reader of literature and history that he had 
 ever been ; and he had written from the beginning of 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 23 
 
 his teaching, every night in his chamber, his first 
 thoughts on morals and genius. Montaigne, in Cot- 
 ton's translation, was his great discovery at Canterbury 
 Lane. " I remember the delight and wonder in which 
 I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself 
 written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it 
 spoke to my thought and experience." The book 
 was the first that addressed him as an equal soul ; 
 and there were never many that were so fortunate. 
 
 A moment of stress is discernible, just before he 
 reached his majority, in the natural deepening of his 
 self-examination and solemnizing of his moral pur- 
 pose ; but it is more significantly marked by that con- 
 scious retirement upon himself as his true base, which 
 is expressed in the first line of verse that has his 
 voice in it and has always been remembered in spite 
 of the very proper disfavour with which he regarded 
 the poem as a whole, — 
 
 " Good-by, proud world ! I'm going home." 
 
 His future rings in it. At the moment, however, it 
 seemed a digression, for his habitual thoughts were 
 centred on beginning to prepare for that profession 
 to which his .birth and breeding and all the common 
 reason and utility of life, as well as his own choice, 
 assigned him. " In a month," he writes, " I shall be 
 legally a man ; and I deliberately dedicate my time, 
 my talents, and my hopes to the church." Other sen- 
 tences in this boyish autobiographic record of the 
 moment are significant. " I cannot dissemble that my 
 abilities are below my ambition. ... I have, or had, 
 a strong imagination, and consequently a keen relish 
 for the beauties of poetry. My reasoning faculty is 
 
24 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 proportionally weak ; nor can I ever hope to write a 
 Butler's Analogy or an Essay of Hume. Nor is it 
 strange that with this confession I should choose 
 theology; for the highest species of reasoning upon 
 divine subjects is rather the fruit of a sort of moral 
 imagination than of the reasoning machines, such as 
 Locke and Clarke and David Hume. ... I inherit 
 from my sire a formality of manners and speech, but 
 I derive from him or his patriotic parent a passionate 
 love for the strains of eloquence. I burn after the 
 aliquid immensum infinitumque which Cicero desired. 
 What we ardently love, we learn to imitate. But 
 the most prodigious genius, a seraph's eloquence, will 
 shamefully defeat its own end if it has not first won 
 the heart of the defender to the cause he defends." 
 All his points of view, in the prospect of the future, 
 are here contained; they summarize and carry for- 
 ward past tendencies, — ambition, self-examination, 
 the contempt of reasoning, the thought of eloquence, 
 the preoccupation with morals, intellectual integrity. 
 Throughout early years and into manhood Emerson 
 was in exclusively clerical surroundings. The tradi- 
 tions of the house, his circle of relatives, all the conver- 
 sation of his life, were in this atmosphere. There was 
 no outlet from it except into books which he read by 
 himself. He was without intellectual companionship ; 
 he had in his forming years neither comrade nor 
 leader. He kept up a commonplace correspondence 
 with some of his classmates ; but his only true sympa- 
 thizer was his Aunt Mary, to whom he confided his life, 
 even sending her his private journal to read. His 
 mental growth thus isolated contained no elements of 
 disturbance. He did not conceive religion intellectu- 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 25 
 
 ally, and hence was little vulnerable on that side ; 
 religion in his habit of thought was rather a moral 
 discipline than an argument of the mind ; the profes- 
 sion was, in his notion of its practice, a mode of 
 hortatory moral discourse, and his ideal of it was " to 
 put on eloquence as a robe." Doubt, however, in the 
 form in which it was to end the clerical hopes of this 
 household, had already entered the family, and this 
 may have been in his mind when he wrote down his 
 conviction of the need to scrutinize the cause he was 
 to defend. William was consulting Goethe at Weimar 
 as to his duty in entering the ministry, and notwith- 
 standing the conventional advice he received to ac- 
 commodate himself to the world and not disappoint 
 the hopes of his family, he was coming to an adverse 
 decision. 
 
 In Emerson himself, who did not have William's 
 contact with a larger world of thought and life, there 
 is no early sign of reluctance to follow the career to 
 which his environment and traditions pledged him. 
 There was no breaking up of the old system ; no 
 storm and stress ; he was born free from all that ; it 
 was neither in his situation nor his nature to be so 
 stirred ; and. when he went on to the Divinity School 
 at Cambridge, though not without thought about the 
 matter, suggested apparently by Hume, he was resolved 
 if not assured in his course. He closed the school Feb- 
 ruary 8, 1825. Summing up the results of the four 
 working years, he says : " I have written two or three 
 hundred pages that will be of use to me. I have 
 earned two or three thousand dollars, which have 
 paid my debts and obligated my neighbors ; so that 
 I thank Heaven I can say none of my house is the 
 
26 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 worse for me." He had won his first and fundamen- 
 tal success in the homely task of earning his bread 
 and paying his way. He had also continued to write 
 verse and to read history and literature, in which 
 together with his meditation on morals his real life 
 had been ; school-keeping was a makeshift and an 
 interruption. The family circumstances were more 
 comfortable than they had ever been, and the pros- 
 pect brighter. Edward, after a brilliant career at 
 Harvard, had opened a school at Roxbury, and 
 Charles, the youngest, whom Dr. Holmes describes as 
 "the most angelic adolescent my eyes ever beheld," 
 was taking his turn at college. His mother returned 
 to Boston for a brief period. 
 
 Emerson immediately went to Cambridge, where 
 he took a room at 14 Divinity Hall, being permitted 
 to join the studies of the middle class in consideration 
 of his private reading the past year ; but the prospect 
 soon clouded. The weakness of constitution that was 
 disclosed in all the brothers in turn showed itself 
 unmistakably in his general condition. Ill health 
 began to afflict him. His eyes failed and after a 
 month's residence he gave up and sought recuperation 
 in working on his uncle Ladd's farm at Newton. By 
 summer he was well enough to drag the chain of 
 school-keeping again, taking a few pupils at Cam- 
 bridge, and in the fall a public school at Chelmsford, 
 where his brother Bulkeley was cared for ; and the 
 new year, 1826, coming round, and Edward in his turn 
 and for the second time falling ill from overwork at 
 his law studies in addition to other employments, and 
 being sent off to the Mediterranean, he took his school 
 at Roxbury. This winter he suffered much from rheu- 
 
L] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 27 
 
 matism, and especially a lame hip. In April his 
 mother moved to Cambridge, and he joined her, tak- 
 ing pupils for the last time that summer. At Chelms- 
 ford William had visited him on returning from 
 abroad and had told him his decision to relinquish the 
 ministry, and pursue the law. " I was very sad," 
 Emerson said, " for I knew how much it would grieve 
 my mother; and it did." He was himself not then 
 affected by the example. He had kept an inter- 
 mittent connection with the Divinity School, at such 
 times as he was in Cambridge, and on October 10, 
 1826, was approbated to preach by the Middlesex 
 Association of Ministers, without examination, for the 
 reason that the state of his eyes had not permitted 
 him to take notes of such lectures as he had attended. 
 He afterward said had they examined him they would 
 not have accepted him, a remark which indicates that 
 he was aware later, if not then, that there had been 
 much heterodoxy in his belief at an early time. He 
 preached his first sermon, October 15, at Waltham. 
 
 Emerson was now, at twenty-three, externally a young 
 candidate, with weak eyes and rheumatism and a low 
 physical tone. He had struggled against his disabili- 
 ties, but his health was steadily worse. A stricture 
 developed in his right chest, giving him much pain 
 after the effort of preaching. It was thought advis- 
 able to send him to the South for the winter ; and, his 
 unfailing uncle, Samuel Ripley, furnishing the means, a 
 few weeks after Edward's return from the Mediterra- 
 nean he sailed, November 25, in the ship Clematis from 
 Boston to Charleston, and soon went on to St. Augustine 
 in Florida. There he spent the winter months, thor- 
 oughly bored. " I stroll on the sea-beach and drive 
 
28 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 a green orange over the sand with a stick," he wrote 
 home disconsolately. The single bright spot in this 
 southern journey was his acquaintance with Achille 
 Murat, who took him for a visit to his plantation at 
 Tallahassee and accompanied him by sea from St. 
 Augustine to Charleston a rough nine days' passage. 
 He arrived there in April and slowly came north, hav- 
 ing preached at St. Augustine, Charleston, Washington, 
 Philadelphia, and New York, and reached home in 
 June, going to the Old Manse, where his mother had 
 spent the year with Dr. Ripley. He was better, but he 
 had not been cured of the trouble in his chest. 
 
 He took a room at the Divinity School in Cambridge 
 and resided there through the year and afterward 
 very happily, it would appear, and idly, according to 
 his own impression. He applied the best medicine to 
 his case, indulging his desultory instincts, seeking out 
 pleasant companions, laughers, he says, by preference, 
 and slipping off into the woods, with old clothes and 
 old hat, picking berries and anticipating the sauntering 
 country habits of later years, a " lounging, capricious, 
 unfettered mode of life." Edward was in Daniel 
 Webster's office in Boston, incessantly alive and striv- 
 ing, of a more burning spirit, the pride and hope of 
 many friends, and most of Emerson, who never mentions 
 him without some adoring word of brotherly delight ; 
 but there were already warnings to which the impetu- 
 ous, ambitious, overflowing boy would not listen. 
 Charles, too, then in his last year at Harvard, where 
 like Edward he had been a first scholar, was near at 
 hand and came to call occasionally — " the same honey- 
 catcher of pleasure, favor, and honor that he hath been, 
 and without paying for it, like Edward, with life and 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 29 
 
 limb. He reads Plato and Aristophanes in Greek, and 
 writes, as the President said of the brood, like hoary 
 hairs. " Emerson wrote new sermons, but none too 
 many, having his store of old writings ; and he often 
 preached, sometimes at his father's church in Boston, 
 but usually as a substitute in the neighbouring towns. 
 He was still unwilling to settle, owing to his health. 
 
 In June, 1828, the first great grief fell upon the 
 family. Edward went suddenly insane : " there he 
 lay, Edward, the admired, learned, eloquent, striving 
 boy, a maniac." He recovered his reason, but his 
 future was at an end. He required a southern climate, 
 and took a clerkship at Porto Rico, where he continued 
 to live an invalid life. Emerson, though he had long 
 recognized the family weakness of constitution, felt 
 no foreboding for himself from this incident. He had 
 always looked on himself as an opposite to Edward ; 
 his own sluggishness, embarrassment, passivity, were 
 protective, he justly thought, — kindly integuments 
 of nature round his spark of life ; and he favoured his 
 rather low vitality by stopping in time, by waiting, by 
 wastingthe days, never forcing his mind, never straining. 
 He read if his eyes allowed, he walked if his hip per- 
 mitted, he preached if his lungs held out; he went slow. 
 He now, in December, 1828, became engaged to Ellen 
 Louisa Tucker, a daughter of a Boston merchant, whom 
 he had met while preaching at Concord, New Hamp- 
 shire; she was a beautiful young lady of seventeen, a 
 consumptive. It was perhaps under the incitement 
 of life caused by this new change that, a good oppor- 
 tunity arising, he decided to accept a settlement. He 
 was ordained colleague of the Rev. Henry Ware, at the 
 Old North Church in Boston, March 11, 1829 j and a few 
 
30 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 weeks later, on the departure of Dr. Ware to Europe pre- 
 paratory to assuming a Divinity School chair at Har- 
 vard, he came into sole charge of the parish. He was 
 married September 30, of the same year ; he lived in 
 Chardon Street, and gathered his mother and his brother 
 Charles, who was studying law, into his household. 
 
 It is plain that Emerson was scholastically ill pre- 
 pared for his profession. His studies, pursued mainly 
 in private, and broken in upon by ill health and school 
 tasks, must have been of the most superficial kind, 
 and intellectually flimsy. He was never grounded in 
 theology or metaphysics. His principal intellectual 
 acquisition was literary, lying in the region of poetry 
 and the more ponderous English prose ; his own think- 
 ing was mainly ethical ; and in his mind he responded 
 most to the stimulus of the ideas of Coleridge and 
 the images of Swedenborg. A religious decadence, 
 such as occurs periodically in history, had taken place 
 in New England; he became a writer of this deca- 
 dence and its chief example ; that is his true position. 
 The decadence was already fully accomplished in the 
 bones of his spirit before he began to think ; the theo- 
 logical blood had run out in him ; the historical ideas 
 of Christianity had faded from his mind ; his inner 
 biography, under the lethargy of his invalidism and the 
 unexacting nature of his ministerial employment as a 
 substitute, was the story of a gradual detachment 
 from traditional religion so natural that it may be 
 described as a painless death. He seems not aware 
 himself how honeycombed was his belief ; if it re- 
 tained an apparent outline of convention and conform- 
 ity, it was nevertheless such a shell as would at one 
 touch fall into dust. 
 
i.J THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 31 
 
 His youthful journals and family letters from the 
 time he began to prepare for the ministry show the 
 drift of his mind, and the more clearly because they dis- 
 close no friction, no disturbance, no unrest. The weak- 
 ness of his intellectual interest was earliest and most 
 continually in evidence. At twenty he had written of 
 his blindness to " the truth of a theology" that " sounds 
 like nonsense in the ear of the understanding," the fac- 
 ulty which is " made in us arbiter of things seen, the 
 prophet of things unseen " ; and four years later at St. 
 Augustine he hoped for the hour when " disputed truths 
 in theology" would cease to absorb the elucidative 
 genius of ministers while these should at last concern 
 themselves with " passages in the history of the soul." 
 He spoke of God as " the unseen idea." He began to 
 look on Christianity, viewed in time, as " a piece of 
 human history." He got " bare life " for a belief in im- 
 mortality without Christianity. There was in all these 
 years a general elimination going on in his mind, just 
 as in the quoted instances he reduces the importance 
 of historical elements, depreciates theology, and puts 
 the concept of God farther off, and all without a trace of 
 feeling, very tranquilly, at most with a touch of irony 
 in his question. There was also a concentration deepen- 
 ing down within him, especially in the moral part ; his 
 mind was rounding in to one centre, to the immediacy 
 of religion, to the individual man and the present 
 moment, to intuitional life. " Every man is a new 
 creation ; " "a portion of truth lives in every moment 
 to every man ; " "a revelation proceeding each moment 
 from the divinity to the mind of the observer: " such are 
 typical sentences and carry with them by implication 
 some derogation of the distant, the past, the things of 
 
32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 another. " I am curious to know what the Scriptures 
 do in very deed say about that exalted person who died 
 on Calvary ; but I do think it, at this distance of time 
 and in the confusion of language, to be a work of 
 weighing of phrases and hunting in dictionaries." 
 The stream of tendency in all this is plain ; it is away 
 from doctrinal theology, from a personal God, from an 
 authoritative church, from a historic Christ, from an ex- 
 clusive Scripture ; it is toward the evangel of the self- 
 lighted soul. The centre so found was, for Emerson, 
 primarily a moral one, his thought lying principally 
 in that region at all times ; but from the beginning he 
 shows traces of a different perception, of the notion 
 of illumination, of the presence of the divine in the 
 individual's life at exalted moments. 
 
 Such a development, though still in its inchoate 
 stages, harmonized with Emerson's temperament. 
 He was by nature an extreme individualist. In our 
 political phrase he carried his sovereignty under his 
 own hat. He took no counsel of any man, or of any 
 mind. Montaigne, his only literary enthusiasm, ap- 
 pealed to him as his own voice speaking out of another 
 century. He had been bred to practical indepen- 
 dence ; and paying one's way and thinking one's way 
 are good neighbours. He had been always intellectu- 
 ally alone ; his mind had never ranged very far, had 
 never been developed by extension, but had worked 
 intensively with a certain narrowness of view and few- 
 ness of ideas. It is fair to acknowledge also that his 
 physical limitations predisposed him to the course he 
 took. He could never be a scholar. If the sanction 
 of Christianity was a matter of theological learning, 
 historical criticism, and the abilities of a doctor of the 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 33 
 
 church, it was not for him at first hand, and he could 
 take nothing at second hand. It is not that he would 
 have come to any different conclusion, had he been 
 learned ; but in the actual working out of the case his 
 scant preparation, his weak eyesight, and ill health 
 made it easy for him to slight the importance of that 
 which belonged to the past and reposed on history and 
 learning. He was, indeed, a liberal by birth, and had 
 no need to kill the twice-slain already ; but his mind 
 had worked only in the religious field, and with much 
 restriction even there. It was against the narrowness 
 of religion, as he knew it, that he revolted ; the old 
 formulas, emptied of essential meaning as he received 
 them, could not hold the expansion of his own spirit- 
 ual life, and he had, in fact, already substituted others 
 for them derived from Coleridge. It is surprising 
 that he did not better appreciate the state of his faith 
 with regard to that of his flock. The rifts under his feet 
 were cracking wide between them and him, but he 
 seems not to have known it ; and when he gave his 
 first sermon, characteristically telling his parishioners 
 that Christianity was less the expounding of texts 
 than the revelation of a present Deity, there is no 
 reason to believe that he did not contemplate long 
 service in the pulpit. 
 
 If Emerson felt any misgivings in his position, 
 they arose from the sense of prosperity after clouded 
 days. Edward was relieved from the worst of afflic- 
 tions ; William was established in the law at New 
 York ; he was himself a Boston minister, as his father 
 had been before him, and able to give a home to those 
 dearest to him ; he was blessed in a happy marriage 
 for his private lot. He doubted the continuance of such 
 
34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 happiness. He followed in his father's footsteps as a 
 public character of the city, was on the school-board, 
 chaplain of the State Senate, and gave the "charity 
 sermon " at the Old South. He assisted Father 
 Taylor in founding the Sailors' Mission, and earned the 
 lifelong respect of that strong and vehement evange- 
 list. He opened his church to the antislavery orators 
 who twice preached emancipation there. In parochial 
 work he was not fitted to excel. His character as a 
 visitor is best remembered by the anecdote of the old 
 veteran on his death-bed, who, in view of Emerson's 
 hesitations, flared out, — " Young man, if you don't 
 know your business, you had better go home ; " and by 
 the sexton's remark, — " He does not make his best 
 impression at a funeral." In his own church he held 
 weekly expositions of the Scriptures, giving careful 
 attention to such exegesis. In the pulpit he preached 
 on Sundays and there won his first admirers. His 
 manner was solemn and simple, with much earnestness ; 
 his clear elocution made the charm of his delivery ; 
 his ministerial behaviour in all the offices of the desk 
 was refined, select, high-bred. He was a master of 
 pulpit decorum. His youth was still an element in the 
 personal attraction of his presence and his message, 
 and it was especially the young who heard him gladly. 
 Two only of his sermons have been printed ; the re- 
 mainder, one hundred and seventy-one, are in manu- 
 script, and the bulk of them must belong to this period. 
 They are described by his literary executor, Mr. Cabot, 
 as both ethical and doctrinal and differing less from con- 
 ventional modes of the day than would be expected, the 
 moral ideas being " presented in Scriptural language, 
 as if they belonged to the body of accepted doctrine," 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 35 
 
 and sometimes possibly supported " by arguments that 
 had more weight with his hearers than with him- 
 self." The diction is occasionally marked by an un- 
 clerical phrase, but this is not more noticeable than the 
 homely word characteristic of his literary style. " In 
 general," says Mr. Cabot, " all is within the conven- 
 tions of the Unitarian pulpit." He was well received 
 by his people ; he got near to younger hearts, at least, 
 who found some novelty in him, a spiritual quality ; 
 but his thought was still put forth in the dress of 
 Christian truth. 
 
 The crisis which brought an end to this superficially 
 admirable condition after three years, and before 
 Emerson was thirty, proceeded wholly from himself ; 
 it was of his own making ; he was the only person 
 truly interested. His constitutional incapacity to 
 adapt himself to others in personal relations — the 
 embarrassment, coldness, and reluctances of which he 
 always complained — belonged also to his mental re- 
 lations ; he could not adapt himself to the thoughts 
 of others. He began to question his own integrity in 
 conforming to the will of the church in external prac- 
 tices. The most intractable thought is that which 
 takes to itself form in a rite, and so becomes organic 
 in the custom and habit of a people, a part of the 
 order of things. The observances of the church are 
 such an inveterate form of truth. It was the office of 
 Emerson as a minister to perform one high ecclesias- 
 tical act in which such truth was so embedded through 
 all the Christian centuries, — the rite of the communion. 
 It was the last tie that held him to historical Christian- 
 ity, but it was the holiest bond of Christendom. He 
 desired to sever it. In June, 1832, he proposed that 
 
36 EALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 the use of the elements be discontinued and the occa- 
 sion should be held as a mere commemoration of 
 the founder. The church declined to accede. It was 
 characteristic of his youth of mind, in which there was 
 at all times much naiveness, that he thought this a 
 proper and natural proposal and that he believed that 
 it might be accepted ; he found nothing revolutionary 
 in it, but only a simple and sincere admission that 
 religion was of the spirit and in a pure state excluded 
 forms ; such a religion he conceived Christ had meant 
 to initiate. The example of William, who wrote a 
 letter to Dr. Ripley two years before this time, setting 
 forth the objections to the communion service, may have 
 weighed with him ; he had come up to the particular 
 question more slowly as was his wont, but he had 
 answered it in the same way. His own words closing 
 the argument, in a sermon preached September 9, 
 1832, deserve to be quoted : " Having said this, I have 
 said all. I have no hostility to this institution ; I am 
 only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither 
 should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other 
 people had I not been called by my office to admin- 
 ister it. That is the end of my opposition, that I am 
 not interested in it. I am content that it stand to the 
 end of the world if it please men and please Heaven, 
 and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces." Quiet 
 as the words are, they contain an aggressive personality 
 as the velvet contains steel ; and it is the first time 
 that he showed it. He had hardened and stiffened 
 under the pressure of a duty, and he now exhibited 
 his quality, that radical and fearless will to assert 
 himself, which determined his life. Emerson had 
 seriously considered what he should do, and had 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 37 
 
 come to the only conclusion possible for him. It was 
 a necessity of his character. He could not accommo- 
 date himself to others. After preaching his sermon, 
 he resigned on the same day. Outward honesty was 
 a necessary supplement to his inner integrity. There 
 was no shock to his own mind; the motions of his 
 mind were always as smooth as light, as silent as growth. 
 He had believed in morals and ideas rather than in 
 Christ all the time, and in Unitarianism from the start 
 Christ occupied a diminished place. The only jar for 
 Emerson was to his affections, for he was sorry to give 
 pain to his kindred ; a family hope and pride were sacri- 
 ficed. " Whosoever loves father or mother more than me 
 is not worthy of me " was a text often in his thoughts. 
 Truth in the spirit of the Master had taken the vacant 
 place that even the Master had never held in him. He 
 had come to his maturity, to be a law unto himself, to 
 be no other's man ; he withdrew into himself as saints 
 of old into their solitary caves. He was, as has been 
 said, an extreme individualist, young and self-willed ; 
 and he had come now into his own. 
 
 It must be recognized that the particular occasion 
 of his leaving the church was incidental ; he was 
 already disjoined from all social and institutional re- 
 ligion in spirit, and knew the fact. He had gone out 
 on a question of form ; but the fact was that his faith 
 had ceased to be Christian, and no longer moved 
 through the channels of organized religion except 
 with friction and embarrassment. Public prayer in 
 an official form was unwelcome to him, and he had 
 long felt that it contained an essential element of 
 insincerity, of inadequacy, of suppression of individu- 
 ality. He was incapable of taking a social view, of 
 
38 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 subduing himself to the mass even as their leader. 
 He had nothing in him of the orator who finds him- 
 self in the hearts of his audiences, or of the politician 
 who embodies the thought and aspiration of a party; 
 he could not take on the character of a representative 
 person and be the organ of a community of worship. 
 As early as January, 1832, he wrote in his Journal, 
 " It is the best part of the man, I sometimes think, 
 that revolts most against his being a minister " ; and 
 again he wrote, " The profession is antiquated." He 
 seems to have behaved with regard to it as he had 
 done with respect to his college studies and to school- 
 keeping ; he tried to do his external duty, but it was 
 against the grain. In the end his own character pre- 
 vailed. Yet he did not recognize the. gravity of his 
 act. He seems to have looked on Christianity and all 
 its adjuncts as an accident that the church could lay 
 aside, and yet the church remain, — a universal reli- 
 gion in which he could still minister in his place. In 
 severing his relation with his charge, and abandoning 
 ritual, he did not look on himself as separating from 
 the church itself; he was slow to understand that 
 his place was no longer in the pulpit, and he discov- 
 ered the fact only much later and with reluctance. 
 
 The incident of his resignation had come in the 
 train of private misfortune and grief. His wife had 
 died February 8, 1831 ; through these months it was 
 his habit to walk out to Eoxbury in the early morn- 
 ing to visit her grave. The strain of these events had 
 affected his health, and it was thought best that he 
 should seek relief in a foreign voyage. He wrote a 
 letter of farewell to the church, December 22, and 
 sailed from Boston, Christmas Day. He landed at 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 39 
 
 Malta, passed on into Sicily by Syracuse and Messina 
 northward to Naples, Rome, and Venice, and arrived 
 in Paris by June. His health was greatly improved ; 
 he had not been so well since college days. He was, 
 however, lonely and Weary; he was not a good trav- 
 eller; and he was neither adapted by cultivation to 
 appreciate the things of an old civilization, nor had 
 he any entrance either to popular or social life. He 
 had the eye of a foreigner, and was swathed in pro- 
 vincialism. He was so impervious that the voyage 
 had no effect in enlarging his mind, and he after- 
 ward shows in his writings a certain contempt for 
 the benefits of travel. What he wrote of Venice 
 is a sufficient illustration ; seen from the sea, in June, 
 it " looked for some time like nothing but New York. 
 It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but to my 
 thought a most disagreeable residence. You feel 
 always in prison and solitary. It is as if you were 
 always at sea. I soon had enough of it." He sums 
 up his journey : "A man who was no courtier, but 
 loved men, went to Rome, and there lived with boys. 
 He came to France, and in Paris lives alone and sel- 
 dom speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edinburgh, 
 he may go back to America without saying anything 
 in earnest, except to Cranch and Landor." The hope 
 of meeting some of the writers whom he most ad- 
 mired, and especially Carlyle, had been the determin- 
 ing cause of his going to Europe rather than to the 
 West Indies to see Edward. The day spent with 
 Carlyle at Craigenputtock was memorable as a recog- 
 nition by each other of two highly contrasted spirits 
 and the beginning of lifelong friendship between them. 
 H!e also saw Landor, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. But 
 
40 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 in meeting these men lie lost his last illusion; there 
 was to be no companionship for him even with great 
 men; he was disappointed in their quality, and never 
 afterward expected to find sufficiency in others. To 
 avoid great men became a maxim with him ; they 
 were sure to disappoint one's hopes. The particular 
 defect in these four was their lack of insight into 
 religious truth. " They have no idea," he writes, " of 
 that species of moral truth which I call the first 
 philosophy." That is, to speak bluntly, they did not 
 measure to his yard. It was almost a professional 
 narrowness ; he had the mind of the minister, though 
 he had the ideas of the transcendentalist. Upon the 
 voyage home he reviewed the situation ; there was 
 much seething within him ; his own thoughts came in 
 flocks, like birds preparing for a flight ; but the mo- 
 ment had not yet arrived. He ends, " I know not, I 
 have no call to expound ; but this is my charge, plain 
 and clear, to act faithfully upon my own faith; to 
 live by it myself, and see what a hearty obedience 
 will do." He arrived in Boston, October 9, 1833. 
 
 He joined his mother and lived with her at Newton. 
 The difficulty of self-support was obviated by an in- 
 heritance from his wife's share of her father's estate, 
 which assured him an income of twelve hundred dol- 
 lars a year. He had a dream of settling in the Berk- 
 shires, calling Edward home to live with him, and 
 starting a magazine of which the brothers should be 
 chief contributors ; but nothing came of this scheme. 
 He occupied himself with preaching and lecturing. 
 He gave a sermon at his own church immediately on 
 his return, of which the burden was that a reform was 
 at hand, a change from the ancient federal idea of 
 
i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 41 
 
 religion as a thing of the race to an individualistic 
 conception of it as .a thing of the private soul. Such 
 a millennial expectation of the approach of a new state 
 of things, or the appearance of a great man to renew 
 and purify the days, was a frequent mental condition 
 with him in the after course of his life and thought. 
 He usually preached every Sunday for four years. 
 He added lecturing to his labours, generally in con- 
 nection with some association, like the Natural 
 History Society, the Mechanic Apprentices' Library, 
 the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or 
 the American Institute of Instruction — Boston organ- 
 izations. He began with popular science and travel, 
 but soon passed on to biography and literature. In 
 this way he lectured in the season of 1833-1834 on 
 TJie Relation of Man to the Globe and on Water, for ex- 
 ample ; in 1834-1835 on Italy and also on Michael 
 Angelo, Luther, Milton, George Fox, and Burke, with 
 an introduction on the Tests of Great Men; and in 
 1835-1836 on English Literature, a complete popular 
 survey from the Anglo-Saxons to Scott, in ten lectures. 
 He gave the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in the 
 summer of 1834, his first personal appearance as a 
 poet, but the Hymn written for the ordination of his 
 successor in the North Church shortly before was the 
 earliest poetical publication. He also gave, Septem- 
 ber 12, 1835, the Address on the occasion of the sec- 
 ond centennial anniversary of the incorporation of the 
 town of Concord, and on the 19th of April, 1836, 
 he contributed the Concord Hymn to the patriotic 
 celebration of the day at the dedication of the battle 
 monument. During these years he especially preached 
 at New Bedford, where he failed to be settled because 
 
42 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 he stipulated that he should neither celebrate the 
 communion nor offer prayer unless moved to pray at 
 the moment, and at East Lexington, near Concord, 
 where he served regularly for three years. 
 
 He had now settled at Concord. In October, 1834, 
 he and his mother had joined Dr. Ripley at the Old 
 Manse. It was at the moment of Edward's death in 
 Porto Rico, where his life ended on the first of that 
 month. After a year's residence, in the fall of 1835, 
 he took the house which was ever after his home, hav- 
 ing bought it for thirty-five hundred dollars. He had 
 married, September 14, Lydia Jackson, a lady of Ply- 
 mouth. Charles and his mother both joined him in 
 his new home, and all were happy in the expectation 
 that his brother also would soon be married and the 
 two families would live together. In the spring of 
 1836, however, Charles, who had fulfilled the promise 
 of his college career and was well advanced in his 
 legal studies, fell suddenly ill with quick consump- 
 tion, and died in May, in New York, while on his 
 journey south. This second bereavement of a beloved 
 brother was met by Emerson with his customary 
 placid fortitude, but he felt it as a deflowering of his 
 life. Solemnized by such sorrow, his youth became to 
 him a sacred memory ; he again and again returned to 
 it in his verse, and this music of his boyhood with his 
 brothers is the deepest personal chord of his poetry. 
 How strangely things fall out ! The group of rosy 
 boys — none too ruddy, it is to be feared — had gone 
 to their fates ; poverty and ambition are hard task- 
 masters, hardest to the best ; two, the most brilliant 
 and admired, were dead; the eldest had found a use- 
 ful and undistinguished career in the law ; and the 
 
I.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 43 
 
 last, hardly surviving by those dull integuments of 
 apathy and coldness and slowness, had lived only to 
 leave the profession which had been the goal of their 
 youthful hopes. The old mother had her chamber of 
 peace in his home where she w T as to pass many tranquil 
 years. For him life went on in his Concord seclusion, 
 but it was robbed of its morning. In the fall his first 
 child, a son, was born. Though he had, in a sense, 
 stood aside from life, and seemed in many ways to 
 hold but a left-handed relation to the world, he was 
 much occupied. If the world did not- want him, — and 
 this is a note often heard in his self-confidences and 
 letters at this time, — yet that was not his affair. He 
 would do his part, as he had opportunity, in his un- 
 regarded corner. He could help to introduce Carlyle 
 to his countrymen, for example, and in the summer 
 of this year did so with a preface to the first Ameri- 
 can edition of Sartor Resartus. He had taken one 
 unalterable resolution on settling in Concord, "Hence- 
 forth I design not to utter any speech, poem, or book 
 that is not entirely and peculiarly my work." He had 
 achieved self-reliance, and in this leave-taking of all 
 others he had found the pathway of his leadership. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 " NATURE " AND ITS COROLLARIES 
 
 Emerson had at all times an enormous power of re- 
 sistance to his environment. Through these early years 
 in the home of his boyhood, in his obscure and sickly 
 youth, in the Old North Church, however he might be 
 externally occupied with things of use and wont, be- 
 neath the daily crust of college work, school work, and 
 church work, he lived another life ; there the new life 
 was forming as under an old shell. He expressed this 
 life in verse ; nothing is more significant than the per- 
 sistence with which he continued to write it, though 
 undistinguished and mediocre and without any mark 
 of genius ; it was the sign of his solitude, of his self- 
 trust and self-absorption. He was intimately aware 
 of the poetic part of his nature, and early idealized it 
 and set it apart as a higher self. "A certain poet 
 told me," he was afterward accustomed to write, and 
 later he named him Osman ; it was this poet known 
 within ; and The Discontented Poet : a Masque, a work 
 never completed, was self-portraiture begun in these 
 years. He was not deceived, for he was primarily 
 a poet, though with imperfect faculty, and had the 
 habits of a poet, both personal and mental. Thus 
 from the budding of his mind he meditated and brooded 
 and waited; and whatever came to him to be received, 
 he demanded of it that it should have a preestablished 
 
 44 
 
chap, ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 45 
 
 harmony with his life and a power of intimacy with 
 his soul, self-evidence that should lie in its being a 
 revelation of himself ; indifferent to argument, impa- 
 tient of opinion, he would have only that conviction of 
 truth which consists of the life itself. He was also, 
 in the intellectual part of his nature, a moralist; it 
 was the moral nature of things that was dearest to 
 him, not passion or action as such, not science nor 
 letters, not divinity, but morals. He had collected 
 truisms, since he could think at all, — old saws as he 
 afterward designated them ; but these had more than 
 their proverbial and commonplace character of scat- 
 tered wisdom in his eyes ; they brought law with them 
 from the first, they showed the moral nature of man, 
 they declared God. He was, too, in the third place, 
 deeply pledged to that mood which makes the uni- 
 verse the theatre of the soul, and for each man prima- 
 rily of his own soul, as that in which from the forma- 
 tion of the world all that is is interested ; no thinker 
 has more exalted the private soul, and no man has 
 borne his "eternal part" with greater pride. He 
 required an arrangement of truth that should corre- 
 spond to this threefold nature of the poet, the mor- 
 alist, and the mystic devotee, and in his germinating 
 time he found it in the group of related ideas known 
 as transcendentalism for which Channing had prepared 
 him and in which Coleridge instructed him ; he had 
 truly no other teachers. Transcendentalism contained 
 the preestablished harmony with himself that he de- 
 manded ; it was adapted equally to his strength and to 
 his weakness ; impulse, character, preference, his de- 
 ficiency and his redundancy, it chimed with all his 
 temperament and the natural motions of his mind, 
 
46 EALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 and gave him to himself upon every side. It disbur- 
 dened him of the incubus of the past; it made him 
 sovereign in his own right ; it delivered into his hands 
 the entire universe to be his own. Morality was fun- 
 damental in it ; poetry radiated from it ; it crowned 
 self, and invested the private soul with a universal 
 sceptre. In proportion as he absorbed the ideas of 
 transcendentalism, Emerson came to intellectual ma- 
 turity; he was made a man-thinker; his original force 
 was released. These discoveries, this illumination 
 slowly going on, all this formation of a new soul in 
 nature was accomplished at his thirtieth year. The 
 time was ripe. Old things began to fall away in that 
 protective external environment in which he had 
 grown, and especially the temporal and circumstantial 
 marks of Christianity fell off. He left the "antiquated 
 profession " ; he ceased to put his thoughts forth in a 
 Christian dress ; he put them forth in the dress of 
 transcendental ideas. There was really less change 
 than appeared. They were the same thoughts ; he 
 was the same man ; he had never changed his faith, 
 for he had only one. But he had cast the old skin. 
 
 The little book called Nature was the publication of 
 this fact. It announced Emerson's genius. It might 
 seem a slender offering for a young man of thirty- 
 three, a few chapters of poetical thoughts upon well- 
 worn themes. In the substance there is nothing novel, 
 but there is in the book a certain exhilaration, a vitali- 
 zation. It was published in the fall of 1836 ; like all 
 his work it had been much rewritten. Three years 
 earlier, on his voyage home, he had mentioned in his 
 Journal being pleased with "my book about Nature," 
 and it was doubtless this which he recast and added to 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 47 
 
 in the summer of 1836 to make the published volume. 
 Its inception would seem to belong to the period of 
 his resignation. That event threw him back upon his 
 own mind ; and in the solitude of travel and under the 
 stimulus of a new mode of public appeal he wrote 
 his first secular essay. It bears the mark of its origin. 
 It has the bloom of the mind upon it. It is one of 
 those rare books which seem the fruit and treasury 
 of happy moments ; joy in the truth irradiates it, and 
 at times the excited and delighted mind puts forth 
 moods like dreams and passages that are a rhapsody 
 of intellect. The intoxication, however, is sparingly 
 indulged; there is nothing in excess; the ideas and 
 scenes are few; the argument is brief. Emerson's 
 grasp upon transcendentalism was neither profound 
 nor various ; he was not a metaphysician. He was a 
 literary man who read miscellaneously, and picked 
 and chose what he liked, taking his own where he 
 found it, and his own was what appealed to him, 
 what stimulated him, what he could make his own. 
 It was no part of his purpose to set forth transcen- 
 dentalism itself, but to show its working in him. The 
 book, in fact, does not so much directly address the 
 mind as use the indirections of Nature herself upon 
 the soul ; the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter 
 starlight, seem the interlocutors, the prevailing sense 
 is that of an exposition in poetry, a high discourse ; 
 the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from 
 the landscape as from his own breast ; it is Nature com- 
 muning with the seer. Emerson never again rendered 
 the state of his own soul in the visible world with 
 such reality ; here he showed himself played upon by 
 the ministries that shaped him with invisible hands. 
 
48 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON [chap. 
 
 There is this personal charm in the book. The few 
 stems of transcendental thought, dry and stiff in state- 
 ment, are readily discerned, most clearly in those more 
 extraneous parts of the discourse which were added for 
 the sake of rounding out his treatment of the subject, 
 but they ramify in every part alike. 
 
 These ideas may be briefly described, for there is no 
 occasion to elaborate them in this place. There are 
 but three, but they are all-embracing. First, with 
 regard to the soul : the soiil is divine and identical in 
 all men, a spark of eternity, yet with light to disclose 
 the infinite of nature without and by an inner ray to 
 reveal its own eternal ground of being ; thus it pos- 
 sesses the meaus of all knowledge, whether of self, of 
 Nature, or of God. Secondly, with regard to Nature : 
 Nature is the gigantic shadow of God cast in the senses, 
 or, metaphysically, the realization of God in the un- 
 conscious ; its sole function is to unlock the capacities 
 of the soul, whether as energy or as knowledge; to 
 supplement it as the material supplements the tool, to 
 distribute its consciousness as the prism distributes 
 the ray, to fulfil its being as his destiny fulfils the man ; 
 it is the agency by which the soul becomes apparent in 
 power and knowledge, and it is adequate to unfold the 
 entire latency of the soul. Thirdly, with regard to 
 God : deity has unobstructed access to all of every 
 soul, and conversely every soul has like access to all 
 of deity, the process in either case being a divine in- 
 flowing, yet not continuously felt but rather in moments 
 of exaltation such as are and can be only self-certified, 
 the mystic moments of seemingly impersonal or 
 expanded being. These three ideas — the primacy of 
 the soul, the sufficiency of Nature, and the immediacy 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 49 
 
 of God — are the triple root from which grows Emer- 
 son's entire thought of the universe, in a philosophical 
 sense. In this slim volume the first and last of these 
 ideas are subordinated ; it is the second that is in full 
 play, the idea of Nature. Nature is presented in four 
 aspects of her service : that of commodity, or natural 
 utility ; that of beauty, for delight in the visible scene 
 as such or as the setting of man's action, or, again, as 
 the material of art ; that of language, experience being 
 the ground of all expression and hence facts the means 
 of speech, both directly and symbolically, and the last 
 is a higher degree of value, since the series of things 
 in Nature corresponds to the series of thought in the 
 mind, and therefore things of themselves are a better 
 expression of thought than any words can be ; lastly, 
 that of discipline, both of the understanding in learning 
 and of the will in conforming, and most importantly 
 of the latter, since Nature is completely moral, made 
 of the moral, permeated with it, filled by it without 
 a flaw, and imposes the moral upon man to which he 
 must yield as to the necessary laws of his welfare. 
 This account of the offices of Nature is followed by a 
 lightly framed presentation of the doctrine of philosophi- 
 cal idealism and of the immanence of spirit, and a conclu- 
 sion is made by akind of epilogue in which the purification 
 of the soul is represented as bringing about the reno- 
 vation of nature, and the individual is counselled to 
 begin so to build a new world. Such, slightly indicated, 
 is the character of the contents of this book, which, 
 however, is less remembered for its substratum of 
 philosophy than for the lovely scenes of rural descrip- 
 tion sown through it, the flashing facets of the ideas 
 it handles in the detail of the meditation, and the uni- 
 
60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 versal mould of poetry into which it casts the general 
 notion of all being. It is, properly speaking, a medi- 
 tation upon Nature, originating from poetical incite- 
 ment, and it affects the reader at first, rightly or 
 wrongly, as a dream of the mind in which the com- 
 binations of image and thought take place with a sense 
 of strangeness, and although without a jar, yet without 
 reality. It admirably fulfils the conditions laid down 
 toward its conclusion, " A wise writer will feel that 
 the ends of study and composition are best answered by 
 announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so 
 communicating, through hope, new activity to the 
 torpid spirit." 
 
 The spirit of this dictum was a powerful control- 
 ling principle in Emerson's method of life. He had 
 observed the obvious fact that the minds of men are 
 stirred by ideas which they imperfectly comprehend ; 
 and being by predisposition a moralist, he was inter- 
 ested rather in the energy of ideas than in ideas them- 
 selves. He was not a pure thinker ; his mind did not 
 rest in the intellectual plane and there endeavour to con- 
 nect logically and systematically truth in the abstract ; 
 he viewed truths in their moral action. Ideas were to 
 him like a drug, of which the essence lies in the states 
 of mind it induces, or like a political principle of which 
 one examines not the abstract soundness, but how it 
 works in practice. Empiricism and expediency, in spir- 
 itual matters, are large elements in his reflection upon 
 life. It belonged to his intuitional mind to be careless 
 of the correlations of thought, since the process by which 
 he arrived at conviction was sure, not liable to error; 
 all truths would harmonize in the end, being self -exist- 
 ent in the order of things ; for the logical faculty, for 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 51 
 
 argument, for probable opinion and deferred judg- 
 ment, for reasoning and its limitations, he had little re- 
 gard — these things did not interest him. Hardly less 
 fundamental in his character than his power of resist- 
 ance to his environment was his power to ignore what 
 did not interest him. He seized on certain ideas 
 which brought with them conviction to his mind, and 
 concerned himself with their operation rather than 
 their justification by any other mode; he was, thus, an 
 applier of ideas to life — that was his function. In 
 this small book of Nature there was an entire arsenal 
 of ideas, in the energetic sense ; it was a reservoir of 
 power to which he constantly returned ; in fact, he 
 added but little to the store, intellectually speaking, 
 in after life ; there is, perhaps, no important idea 
 in his later writings which is not here contained full 
 grown or in embryo. But the application of this 
 material was a lifelong story, a never ending sermon 
 from this text. Placid and poetical and far away as 
 the little transcendental tract appeared in its blue 
 covers, it contained a sheaf of swords ; it seems a wild 
 bower of quiet foliage starred with bloom and with 
 outlooks into the blue distance, a talk in the antique 
 portico, a philosophical dialogue in some old Italian 
 garden ; but it was a twig of the Revolution, its ideas 
 had riving force, they were explosive, anarchic. 
 
 Emerson made the first important application of his 
 ideas to life on the occasion of his Phi Beta Kappa 
 Address at Harvard, August 31, 1837, — " an event," 
 says Lowell, " without any former parallel in our liter- 
 ary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the mem- 
 ory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What 
 crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering 
 
52 KALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what 
 grim silence of foregone dissent ! " Alcott described 
 the Address as "the first adequate statement of the 
 new views that really attracted general attention." 
 Its subject was The American Scholar. It presented 
 the scholar as the thinker of the community, formed 
 and fashioned by Nature, which is the direct source 
 of truth, indebted to books but only as their master, 
 and developed by action in which alone truth is 
 vital; the duty of the scholar is self-trust, and his 
 office is, in an age marked by democracy and individu- 
 ality, to affirm himself in the faith that if he obeys 
 his own instincts the whole world will come round to 
 him. There was nothing startling in this, to read it 
 now, save in the vigorous expression; one sees it is 
 his own apology and declaration of principles, for the 
 man was the main part of the speech ; but the living 
 words touched the time. The gleam of them was a 
 rally to one party, and the other party felt their edge ; 
 for he stood there as a champion. 
 
 For some years a movement had been gathering 
 and growing in the community. It began, perhaps, 
 by 1820 ; it was assisted by the writings of Carlyle ; 
 but essentially it was an indigenous change consequent 
 on the decadence of Puritanism in the more intelligent 
 and better instructed circles, and especially in the im- 
 mediate neighbourhood of Boston ; and it fed on what- 
 ever came to hand from the flotsam of time, and 
 especially from the East. It was a wave of new life, 
 of innovation in thought. The freedom of a democ- 
 racy, ungyved by the presence of an old civilization, 
 favoured it. In a score of years it found expression, and 
 all its vagaries were blanketed with one name, New 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 53 
 
 England Transcendentalism. Simultaneously, cognate 
 agitations, currents, and eddies in the great stream 
 of general reform were going on. The variety of its 
 manifest modes was infinite, and many of them af- 
 fected men with laughter. Lowell and Hawthorne, 
 who were young men at the time, have amply indulged 
 their humour in describing what they saw ; and Emer- 
 son's own account hardly veils his amusement. The 
 general unrest came to a head in the Chardon Street 
 Convention, 1840-1841, of which he names the compo- 
 nent parts : " Madmen, mad women, men with beards, 
 Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agra- 
 rians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, 
 Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers," — a convoca- 
 tion of dissent. The catalogue of the pure transcen- 
 dental sectaries would be quite as disorderly and 
 picturesque. It was a decade of carnival for reform. 
 Eccentricity of opinion and behaviour reached the 
 extreme. The great causes, Abolition, Labour, Temper- 
 ance, survived ; the rest fell back among the anomalies 
 of life always present in society that awake no atten- 
 tion by their harmless singularity. In general, how- 
 ever, the features of a period of extreme individualism 
 stand out; and in that province where transcendental- 
 ism peculiarly ruled the hour, it was a time of libera- 
 tion, of experiment and speculation, and of active 
 effort to incorporate a better social state. It was in 
 education, religion, and economic reorganization that 
 the new energy most worked, but the " Apostles of the 
 Newness," as they were called, were gifted with many 
 tongues ; the mood of all was that of individualism in 
 rampant protest; and it was this mood — the mood of 
 the hour — which found its bold, peaceful, and inspir- 
 
54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap, 
 
 ing spokesman in Emerson. But he stood apart and 
 joined with none of the reformers ; for association with 
 others was as impossible for him under the new rule as 
 it had been under the old dispensation. All, however, 
 were aware of his presence; and he fed from that 
 time, whenever he spoke, the spirit of revolt and 
 renewal. 
 
 The edge of his attack lay in the bold advocacy of 
 the rights of the individual, of whom under the guise 
 of the scholar he presented the ideal type. Scholar, 
 in the new vocabulary, took the old place of saint; 
 he was man perfected in the attribute of self-trust, the 
 fundamental virtue. Authority was eliminated from 
 life ; for the soul alone is master, and being in direct 
 union with God upon one side and Nature upon the 
 other, needs neither mediator nor teacher, and in fact 
 cannot allow their intervention, but must directly cer- 
 tify all truth ; or, in other words, truth cannot come 
 by mediation. The axe is laid to the root of the past 
 with one blow; the past is superfluous and abolished 
 is a means of arriving at truth; all truth is here 
 and now, divinely present and divinely communicated. 
 Past books may, indeed, be read, when the direct 
 communication slackens, but it is only to restore the 
 interrupted flow ; for there is an equality in souls, ' 
 whence no man, however great, shall impose truth 
 upon another; but what Goethe knew as truth the 
 reader shall know as truth in the same way as Goethe, 
 that is, not by Goethe's superscription, but by an in- 
 ward warrant to his own soul, and thus is Goethe's 
 equal, and what does not bear this private warrant 
 he shall reject though the writer were ten times 
 Goethe; all great writers were but young men in 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 55 
 
 libraries when they wrote those books, and the read- 
 ers are young men in libraries now. Institutions of 
 all sorts, which are the past incarnated, must answer 
 to the same challenge. It is the day of private judg- 
 ment, of direct intuition, of the sufficient soul — of 
 the individual ; authority, tradition, institutions, are 
 under his feet ; he alone is sovereign, and only in the 
 exercise of his own powers in a sovereign way is he a 
 man. It is this serene and complete control of the 
 past, this self-confidence in the present, this unfettered 
 freedom to remake the world in our own image, that >' 
 Emerson upholds as the ideal of the scholar's duty 
 and the hope of the America that shall be. 
 
 The second notable occasion on which Emerson put 
 forth a practical application of his thought was the 
 delivery of the Divinity School Address, also at Har- 
 vard, July 15, 1838. In this he engaged himself more 
 closely with the times and dealt in particular with the 
 state of religion in the community. He dwelt on 
 the decay of religion in the churches and sought for 
 the source and remedy of this condition. He attacked 
 historical Christianity, of which the church of tradition 
 is the institution, and he concentrated his criticism 
 upon the sacred authority that belongs to the person 
 of Christ as the divine that became human and thence- 
 forth the lawgiver of the soul in the Christian world. 
 The course of the argument is plain from what has al- 
 ready been brought forward in presenting his thought. 
 The authority of the church had already been abolished 
 by the doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the soul by 
 virtue of its intuitive faculty which is the sole means 
 of truth. With regard to Christ, Emerson reversed 
 the old conception; instead of a divine person becom- 
 
56 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 ing human, he is a human person becoming divine, 
 and the chief illustration of that process of perfection 
 by which every soul unites with the divine; but he 
 differs from others only in the degree of his progress, 
 nor does his superiority vest him with authority over 
 others, any more than in the case of Goethe, but each 
 soul must follow the path of and from himself and 
 draw strength, not from Christ, but from that common 
 source which, as it once fed the soul of Christ, now 
 feeds every soul born into the world of Nature. The 
 doctrine of the equality of souls is applied to Christ 
 as to all other masters of the past. Emerson also in- 
 dicated, though less clearly, a fresh position or corol- 
 lary. " The soul," he said, " knows no persons." This 
 denied the personality of God ; nor did he at any time 
 figure deity as a form of personal being. The general 
 plea, urged with great spirituality of feeling, was that 
 men should abandon the past, that is, in this case, the 
 church and Christ as its head, and no longer seek truth 
 there, but should return to the living fountain of the 
 divine in themselves. 
 
 The Address stirred the waters of controversy. The 
 authorities of the Divinity School felt it necessary to 
 disown the opinions set forth. Dr. Ware, the friend 
 and predecessor of Emerson in the Old North Church, 
 preached a kindly sermon, defining the serious nature 
 of the bearing of these ideas in subverting Christianity, 
 and Dr. Andrews Norton denounced them as an irrup- 
 tion of German atheism in the community. There 
 were many pamphlets, discourses, and criticisms. 
 Emerson stood aloof from all, seemingly indifferent 
 though annoyed by the publicity that the agitation 
 caused. Dr. Ware, however, drew from him a re- 
 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 57 
 
 markably plain statement of his intellectual method 
 and the ground of his conviction in general. He 
 wrote, in reply to a friendly letter, excusing himself 
 from any polemical statement : " I could not give 
 account of myself if challenged. I could not pos- 
 sibly give you one of the ' arguments' you cruelly 
 hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands ; for 
 I do not know what arguments mean in reference to 
 any expression of a thought. I delight in telling 
 what I think ; but if you ask me how I dare say so, 
 or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal 
 men." The claim of intuition to immediate know- 
 ledge could not be more lucidly presented than in this 
 declaration. 
 
 Emerson loved the church. He never ceased to be 
 at heart a minister ; he was preaching at this time in 
 Unitarian pulpits, and he continued to preach, though 
 with diminishing frequency, for nine years after this 
 Address. He seems never to have understood why his 
 doctrines could not be consistently put forth at the 
 Christian assembly on the Sabbath, for he regarded 
 the Sabbath and the office of preaching as the greatest 
 benefits that Christianity had transmitted to the social 
 life. He valued traditional religion in a threefold 
 way. He retained the sentiment for the old-time 
 Sabbath day and often refers to its disappearance 
 with regret, both for its atmosphere of external quiet 
 and for its devotional joy in the gathered congre- 
 gations in the meeting-houses. He retained also a 
 deeply founded respect for the old-fashioned Calvin- 
 ism of his ancestry, as a form of strong character and 
 fervid piety. "What a debt is ours to that old 
 religion," he exclaims, "which in the childhood of 
 
58 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 most of us still dwelt like a Sabbath morning in 
 the country of New England, teaching privation, self- 
 denial, and sorrow. A man was born not for pros- 
 perity, but to suffer for the benefit of others, like the 
 noble rock-maple which all around our villages bleeds 
 for the service of man. Not praise, not men's accept- 
 ance of our doing, but the spirit's holy errand through 
 us absorbed the thought. How dignified was this ! " 
 It is a sincere motion of- patriotism, of faith to the 
 country of our origins, that beats in this passage — 
 the voice of an old dweller on the soil ; and this re- 
 spect, that is half sad affection, Emerson was rich in. 
 Lastly, he valued traditional religion in a less attrac- 
 tive way, as a concession to a lower type of intelli- 
 gence and culture, as the best of which its adherents 
 were capable of receiving, and as, at its lowest, a 
 useful police power. There was this much of accom- 
 modation in his mind. He had made Carlyle's dis- 
 covery of "the fool-part of man," and ten years 
 before this time he had applied it to the interpreta- 
 tions of Scripture given by the New Jerusalem Church. 
 "The interpretation is doubtless wholly false," he 
 says, " and if the fool-part of man must have the lie, 
 if truth is a pill that can't go down till it is sugared 
 with superstition, — why, then I will forgive the last, 
 in the belief that truth will enter into the soul so 
 natively and assimilantly that it will become part 
 of the soul, and so remain when the falsehood be- 
 comes dry and peels off." A similar view remained 
 in his mind with regard to all forms of religious 
 teaching, and harmonized with that invincible pre- 
 disposition to value ideas for their moral energy 
 rather than their intellectual purity, for their effect 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 59 
 
 on life rather than their mental precision. In this 
 spirit, and from a position conscious of superiority, 
 he saw traditional religion continue in another level 
 of life with content and even satisfaction. But when- 
 ever he spoke, despite his attachments to the old faith 
 in these various ways, he advanced an attack, how- 
 ever disguised in many forms, upon the establishment 
 of Christianity ; he sapped its bases in the mind, and on 
 all occasions, whatever his topic, preached the divine 
 authority of the soul itself in all life, free of, every 
 form of priest or creed or ritual, of church or Saviour, 
 or of any God other than the inflowing divine essence 
 whose operation is impersonal, private, and unshared 
 with any other. Orthodoxy was a strong power in 
 New England and comprised the mass of the people ; 
 his own sect of Unitarianism excluded him from their 
 ranks, with the exception of a small group of radicals 
 and their associates ; it is not strange that, in such 
 circumstances, Emerson, after the delivery of this 
 Address, was commonly regarded as atheistical, anti- 
 Christian, and dangerous. Condemnation was the more 
 unqualified because attention was naturally given at 
 first rather to what he denied than to what he af- 
 firmed; what he denied, all men understood; but what 
 he affirmed, few, if any, clearly made out. 
 
 A third notable Address, not because of any imme- 
 diate stir it caused, but on account of its containing 
 something supplementary to his view of Nature pre- 
 viously exposed and also introducing a new quality 
 to its substance, was given at Waterville College, 
 Maine, August 11, 1841. It was entitled TJie 
 Method of Nature. In this he elaborates the general 
 statement that Nature works not to particular ends but 
 
60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 to a universe of ends ; her superabundance of energy- 
 is such that particular ends become insignificant and 
 indifferent ; and this whirl without special direction 
 Emerson denominates " the ecstasy of Nature." It is 
 to be observed that he here specifically denies that 
 man is the first end of creation ; it appears to him that 
 the actual product, man as he is, or as he has been, is 
 a result altogether inadequate to such an apparatus of 
 an entire universe to prepare him. Nature is therefore 
 regarded as an inexhaustible overflow of power without 
 determination, — pure energy. In this aspect she and 
 her ways are held up as a model for human life. It is 
 affirmed that life should be characterized similarly by 
 an ecstasy, a release of power as such, without solici- 
 tude for particular ends to be achieved. Life, in fact, 
 is said to lose itself in determinate action, for the 
 action limits it progressively, the end comes to be 
 an enslaving element, at last it destroys the energy 
 which has its finality in it. " I say to you plainly," 
 he declares, " there is no end to which your practical 
 faculty can aim so sound or so large that, if pursued for 
 itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to 
 the nostril." Life lies in tendency, in quality, in the 
 release of energy, not in its results, not in deeds, not 
 in successes. The purpose of this advice is to throw 
 the soul back on its own being, as the main of life, to 
 save it from the self-limitation inherent in applied 
 power, from specialization, from preoccupation with 
 particular causes, from anxiety for practical effects ; the 
 soul should rejoice in its power, should retain its power, 
 above all things, and should ignore ends as things 
 that may be left to take care of themselves after 
 Nature's fashion. The term "ecstasy" is intended 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 61 
 
 specifically to mark this mood of oblivion to results, 
 this absorption in the sense and exercise of power, 
 this exaltation of the working energy in itself, as the 
 primary value of life ; love and genius are dwelt on as 
 the greater forms of this energy, but the weight of the 
 thought goes to depreciate the practical and earthly 
 affairs of the soul as things essentially indifferent and 
 on a lower plane than its own being. Apart from its 
 general interest, the Address explains and in a sense 
 defends Emerson's habitual withdrawal from practical 
 projects of reform and his apparent indifference to 
 the effect of his words upon the society about him. It 
 contains, like all his opinions, a personal point of view. 
 Emerson delivered other Addresses, neighbouring 
 these in time and matter : Literary Ethics at Dart- 
 mouth College, 1838 ; Man the Reformer, TJie Times, 
 TJie Conservative, at Boston, in 1841 ; The Tran- 
 scendentalist, in 1842, and The Young American in 
 1844, also at Boston. They contain further illus- 
 tration and elaboration of these leading ideas. He 
 also gave courses of lectures in Boston. The cir- 
 cle that he reached was, however, not large. Na- 
 ture , his single book, sold only five hundred copies 
 in twelve years. His audiences were generally from 
 three hundred to five hundred persons, and are said 
 to have been the same persons year after year. The 
 propaganda of his views was therefore limited. His 
 influence was of the intensive kind. It is described 
 by most of those who have reported their impression, 
 rather as an effect on the spirit than on the mind ; 
 whether the ideas were valid, or precisely what they 
 were, might be a matter of doubt even then and there, 
 but "they did the hearers good." It was an enfran- 
 
62 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 chising power that Emerson put forth, a liberation 
 that he accomplished; and, secondly, and hardly 
 less, it was a stimulating power felt in invigorating 
 the confidence and hopes of the party of intellectual 
 advance and especially of the young and ardent souls, 
 many of whom were isolated in the community. He 
 made for liberalism in all its forms. He did not 
 endeavour to replace old ways with a new confession 
 and rite ; he merely supplied a spirit to those suscept- 
 ible of it, who for one reason or another were left to 
 self-guidance and came under his influence. 
 
 In his general position, Emerson represents in re- 
 ligion the substitution of philosophical for theological 
 thought. There comes a time in human develop- 
 ment when the more thoughtful of mankind reject the 
 mytholog}^ which under whatever form the race has 
 inherited from its past ; theogonies and all their ap- 
 paratus are disregarded as outworn, and in their place a 
 metaphysical explanation of the universe is set up, in 
 which the universe is contemplated not as being in the 
 order of time, of history, but in the present as it must 
 always be, sub specie etemitatis, an eternal Now. This 
 step out of the past into the present, out of theology 
 into philosophy, out of mythology into metaphysics, 
 was taken by Emerson. He is the sole important 
 representative of this stage in American literature ; 
 that is his true significance. He was the incarna- 
 tion of the moment of change, and by the genius of his 
 temperament and the accident of his situation so per- 
 fectly adapted to embody and express it that his ideas 
 seem phases of his own soul, parts of his personality. 
 He is integral with his thought. His defects even, as 
 they must seem from one point of view, gave greater 
 
ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 63 
 
 purity to his qualities as the interpreter of the 
 moment of change. He was, for example, destitute of 
 the historic sense ; he saw life in one dimension only, 
 in the plane of the present, the Now of the metaphy- 
 sicians. This partly accounts for his contented disre- 
 gard of the past with its vast accumulations, for 
 the slight value he placed on the things of old civiliza- 
 tion, on its art, for example, as well as on its religion, 
 and for his slackened hold on the institutional life 
 of the race through its entire range. It accounts, 
 too, for his native sympathy with lonely and especially 
 early minds which have something primitive and 
 released from contemporaneity in their greatness, in 
 whose presence as in reading classic books he felt that 
 time was abolished. A raw and provincial commu- 
 nity and the democracy were his natural milieu. He 
 was emancipated from Europe by his birth, and he 
 was never naturalized there by his culture. Yet all 
 of which he was denuded in rejecting the past, and 
 whatever else by omission simplified him and made 
 him more elementary as a man, suggests the more his 
 likeness to those early Greek thinkers, whom he often 
 recalls, who' were not dissimilarly placed with respect 
 to old religion in newly colonized lands and an un- 
 ecclesiastic democracy, and who, strangers to the sci- 
 entific intellect and the historic sense alike, first gave 
 out physics and metaphysics intertangled, and substi- 
 tuted in the schools the myth of reason for the myth 
 of old faith. At all events it is necessary to recog- 
 nize in Emerson, though in a far different time and 
 place, such an emancipator. 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 "the hypocritic days" 
 
 When Emerson settled in Concord in the honse 
 which, was his home thereafter, lying on the outskirts 
 of the village and not far from woods and wild pas- 
 ture, he found himself in a situation well adapted to 
 his needs and was perhaps more truly among his 
 own people than he had ever been. The long associ- 
 ation of his family with the town and his frequent 
 residence there had made him acquainted with the 
 community almost family by family ; he was neither 
 a stranger nor among strangers, but was felt by all to 
 belong there as one of themselves. He led the ordi- 
 nary life of a democratic citizen, interesting himself in 
 his neighbours and in town affairs; notwithstanding the 
 unpopularity of his opinions, he was deeply respected, 
 and on the few occasions when any annoyance was 
 directed against him, it was obviated by his friends with- 
 out any intervention of his own. He lectured for his 
 fellow-citizens at least once every year. He served on 
 the board of the School Committee and of the Library, 
 was one of the managers of the Lyceum, a member of 
 the Social Circle, and on all proper occasions took the 
 public part of a leading citizen and was often the 
 spokesman of the town. He attended the town-meet- 
 ing, though he rarely took part in it. He liked to 
 meet men of all sorts in their natural pursuits and 
 
 64 
 
chap, in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 65 
 
 occupations, and enjoyed the rough reality of their per- 
 sonalities ; he observedthem more closely than was real- 
 ized, and in his walks or in the stage-coach, which was 
 then the means of communication with Boston, or in his 
 commonplace contact with them in small affairs, he had 
 ample opportunity for democratic fraternalism. He 
 was, however, a minister and a scholar, and knew and 
 respected the barrier thus established between him 
 and them, and did not attempt to mix with them famil- 
 iarly ; his manners of themselves would have forbade 
 it. He was not, in spite of this respectful distance, 
 either by his habits or his interests, remote from 
 the townsmen, like a hermit or an aristocrat ; on the 
 contrary, he was naturally keen for human commu- 
 nication, and most enjoyed it in the form of character 
 rather than of conversation. He was always interested 
 in the business of men. 
 
 His life, nevertheless, was not in their sphere. He 
 spent his time in his own family and in solitude. He 
 worked in the morning and evening in his study, 
 together from eight to nine hours ; in the afternoon 
 he took a walk in the country. He often preached on 
 Sunday in the earlier years, and he gave lectures in 
 Boston and in neighbouring places. His means were 
 straitened in comparison with his necessary ex- 
 penses, and he lived economically as well as plainly. 
 He gave a succinct account of his worldly estate to 
 Carlyle, in a letter, May 10, 1838, but the statement 
 holds good for a period of years : — 
 
 "I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres 
 only of God's earth ; on which is my house, my kitchen-gar- 
 den, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My 
 house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in 
 it 
 
66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, twenty-two thou- 
 sand dollars 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 eight hundred dollars. 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 free- 
 dom to spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither 
 ami, 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 philos- 
 ophy from Antinomianism ; my mother, whitest, mildest, 
 most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her uni- 
 versal 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 repel- 
 lent particle." 
 
 He added to his realty by the purchase of adjoining 
 land until his estate comprised nine acres, and he also 
 bought a considerable wild tract of wood and pasture 
 by Walden Pond where he liked to walk and meditate. 
 
 Emerson's position in the eyes of the larger com- 
 munity outside is fairly described by James Free- 
 man Clarke : " The majority of the sensible, practical 
 community regarded him as mystical, as crazy or affected, 
 or as an imitator of Carlyle, as racked and revolution- 
 ary, 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 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 67 
 
 believed in him, took him for their guide, teacher, and 
 master." He himself feared that his public audiences 
 would diminish at his lectures in Boston, in conse- 
 quence of the obloquy visited upon his name in many 
 quarters, and in the winter after the Divinity School 
 Address this was the case. In private he was, by 
 general consent if not by open avowal, the centre of 
 thought of the transcendentalism then active and ambi- 
 tious. Its chief organization, if one may so describe 
 it, was the Transcendental Club, which, originating in 
 a conversation of Emerson and some of his friends on 
 the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the 
 founding of Harvard College, first met in Boston at the 
 home of Mr. Eipley, September 19, 1836, and afterward 
 held other meetings at the homes of its members in 
 Boston and the neighbouring towns. It was a means 
 of assembling the stronger and more ambitious inquir- 
 ers for the purpose of conversation which took the 
 form of monologue rather than discussion, one speaker 
 holding forth after another, according to the half- 
 humorous accounts that have come down concerning 
 its proceedings. Its members were very respectable 
 persons, and several of them became at least locally 
 distinguished in later life. Emerson was, of course, 
 one of the main stays of this friendly association and 
 a most interested listener. 
 
 In this club, or in the sympathies and hopes which 
 there found cultivation, originated the project of a 
 periodical publication which should be an organ of 
 expression for all the free thought of the time and act 
 upon the public so far as the community might be ac- 
 cessible to influence in this way. The proposal was 
 long considered and apparently with some timidity 
 
68 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 and lack of confidence from the beginning. The re- 
 sult was the publication of TJie Dial as a quarterly 
 magazine for " literature, philosophy, and religion." 
 The first number was issued July, 1840, and its precari- 
 ous existence was maintained until April, 1844, when 
 it expired. Margaret Fuller was the literary editor, to 
 whom Emerson acted as adviser ; and on her relin- 
 quishing the task after two years, he became sole 
 editor. The magazine brought forward some new au- 
 thors, particularly Thoreau, who there found his first 
 audience, and contained much of Emerson's and of 
 Margaret Fuller's writings beside contributions from 
 many capable pens. It was, however, intended to be 
 an organ of free thought in a very generous sense, 
 and the general effect it made upon its few readers 
 was disconcerting. Emerson himself is apologetic, but 
 prizes it as an expression of "youthfulness" ; Carlyle, 
 who described it well enough as " all spirit-like, aeri- 
 form, aurora-borealis like," bitted himself with his best 
 manners in striving to make polite mention of receiv- 
 ing it. There was some excellent substance in it, but 
 this was lost in the cloud of feebleness which befogged 
 the time. The Dial may be said to survive only as 
 one of the curiosities of our literature and on account 
 of Emerson's connection with it. His only other 
 association with a periodical was as the writer of the 
 opening address of the Massachusetts Quarterly in 
 1847 ; though his name appeared as an associate editor 
 upon its covers, he had nothing further to do with it, 
 and the name was soon withdrawn. 
 
 Brook Farm was another experiment which had its 
 origin in the Transcendental Club. Its history has 
 been elaborately written. It was an attempt to or- 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 69 
 
 ganize a socialistic group in the community, of which 
 elsewhere there were other examples, and was espe- 
 cially notable because of the men afterward of distinc- 
 tion who were associated with it. Emerson was among 
 those who were first consulted by the founder, Mr. 
 Ripley, and gave some thought to it. But he did not 
 vary from his customary rule of withholding from 
 association with any particular project of reform. 
 He did not object to the practical application by 
 others of theoretic ideas, and even made some experi- 
 ments of a personal sort himself. He adopted vege- 
 tarianism, in some form, or at least a novel and 
 Spartan diet, but he soon gave it up ; he proposed to 
 have only one table at his home at which the servants 
 should also eat, but he was saved from this by the re- 
 fusal of the cook ; he applied himself to manual labour, 
 but this also he abandoned as a folly for any man of 
 mind. He found himself observant, in larger matters, 
 of Fourierism and other projects of social reorganiza- 
 tion ; property was an institution, inherited from the 
 past, no more sacred than other institutions, and there 
 was only too much reason to believe that it contained 
 large elements of injustice. But he was constitution- 
 ally an individualist, and incapable of allying himself 
 with a socialistic scheme ; the whole action of his 
 mind was against such an organization. He indulged 
 the hypothesis of a general renovation of society ; but 
 his objection to all reform, which he always looked at 
 dubiously in the concrete, was its partial and particular 
 nature. He dwelt in his own soul and truly desired 
 that all the world that was his world should depend 
 on that. " It would please me," he wrote, " to accept 
 no church, school, state, or society which did not 
 
70 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 found itself in my own nature." But "this rotten 
 system of property" was only a part of a more far- 
 reaching corruption, one item of the manifold separa- 
 tion of life from the inward reality. " Diet, medicine, 
 traffic, books, social intercourse, and all the rest of 
 our practices and usages are equally divorced from 
 ideas, are empirical and false." He could do his work 
 in the world quite as well in his own Concord house 
 as in any community socialistically organized; nor 
 did the ends of the community, essentially economic 
 ends, appear to him sufficiently spiritual in essence. 
 It seemed a scheme to provide comfort and conven- 
 ience on the scale of a large hotel. The more he 
 thought about it, the less he liked it. He consulted 
 his neighbour, Farmer Hosmer, who advised him that 
 "gentleman-farming" would not pay. He wrote to 
 Mr. Eipley and declined to join in the enterprise ; but 
 he remained an interested spectator of the progress 
 and trials of the group from its beginning in 1841 to 
 its end in 1847. 
 
 A more difficult subject to meet was the question of 
 Anti-Slavery. Here was a reform upon which it was 
 necessary for every thoughtful citizen to take sides. 
 Emerson was not unfamiliar with the South ; he had 
 roomed with a Southerner in college, and he had jour- 
 neyed in slave-holding states. He was humane and 
 enlightened, and had already shown his disposition 
 by opening his church to Anti-Slavery meetings in Bos- 
 ton; and at the time of the visit of Harriet Marti- 
 neau, in 1835, he had befriended her, sustained her 
 cause, and received her in his home. He desired the 
 abolition of slavery, and in private and as an individ- 
 ual on all proper occasions he spoke out in defence 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 71 
 
 of the negroes. But he did not see his way to joining 
 the organization f Or abolition, the Anti-Slavery Society. 
 He was not one of those who take the burden of the 
 world upon their shoulders; he never assumed any 
 responsibility for the universe ; he was content to do 
 what he could to alleviate life in his neighbourhood ; 
 but in the presence of the great miseries of the world 
 he was dumb. This was, in part, a practical view and 
 consonant with his nature ; he carefully guarded the 
 peculiarity of his own mind, its self-possession, or 
 absorption in its own ideas, and especially the one 
 method by which he might affect the world as a writer 
 by announcing the infinitude of the soul in its moral 
 nature ; he looked to the total regeneration of the soul 
 in itself, to truth as a general, original, and unmodi- 
 fied power, not to particular applied measures and 
 special remedies for the ills of nature, of life, or of 
 the state. He exercised, so to speak, a constant inhi- 
 bition of the particular part of life with the aim 
 thereby to reconcentrate force in the unconfined soul 
 which is the source and master of all life; the in- 
 crease of its native energy was more important than 
 any of its works. To preach this was, he thought, 
 his peculiar business, which no one else was much 
 concerned about, and whatever withdrew him from it 
 was a distraction, enfeeblement, and loss. 
 
 The Anti-Slavery movement, however, was too large 
 a part of the social and political life of the nation to 
 allow such neglect as might be permitted by inferior 
 causes. It came home to men's doors, to their self- 
 respect, their love of their country, their sense of hu- 
 man right and of national honour. Emerson, though 
 slowly and in a sense unwillingly, took a part increas- 
 
72 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 ing in activity and intensity in proportion to the 
 growth and spread of the agitation. He first spoke 
 on the subject of slavery at Concord in the vestry of 
 the Second Church in November, 1837, and again in 
 the Concord Court House, August 1, 1844, on the anni- 
 versary of the liberation of the slaves in the British 
 West Indies, and a year later on the same anniversary 
 at Waltham. He took part in public meetings at 
 Concord, January 26, 1845, remonstrating against the 
 expulsion of his fellow-townsman, Samuel Hoar, by a 
 mob from Charleston, South Carolina, whither he had 
 gone as the accredited representative of Massachu- 
 setts to protect the rights of her negro citizens, and 
 also, September 22, remonstrating against the annexa- 
 tion of Texas. On May 3, 1851, he addressed the 
 citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law, and he 
 repeated this speech on several occasions on the stump 
 in the campaign for his Congressional district, meet- 
 ing there in Cambridge for the first time " the hisses, 
 shouts, and cat-calls " of politics. On March 7, 1854, 
 he made an address in New York on the same subject, 
 and gave a new lecture on slavery in January, 1855, 
 in Boston, in which he advocated emancipation by the 
 purchase of the slaves by the nation. In May, 1856, 
 he spoke at Concord at the public meeting on the 
 occasion of the assault on Sumner in the Senate 
 Chamber at Washington, and in September at Cam- 
 bridge in behalf of the arming of Kansas settlers, to 
 which cause he also contributed money. In 1857 he 
 received John Brown in his house at Concord, and in 
 his lecture in Boston, November 8, 1859, when Brown 
 was lying under sentence of death in Virginia, he 
 spoke of him as "that new saint than whom none 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 73 
 
 purer or more brave was ever led by love of man into 
 conflict and death, — the new saint awaiting his mar- 
 tyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the 
 gallows glorious like the cross." The words were 
 long remembered. He took part in several Brown 
 meetings then held in Boston and the neighbourhood, 
 and it was in connection with this affair that he 
 resembled most distinctly an agitator with the zeal 
 of one. He had been known as a Free-soiler in poli- 
 tics, but he was now classed by public opinion with 
 the abolitionists. The last occasion on which he was 
 called upon to appear in this cause was at the annual 
 meetiug of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 
 January 24, 1861, in Boston; he rose to speak, but 
 he was howled down by the mob, and after several 
 attempts withdrew. 
 
 In these repeated addresses he spoke with increas- 
 ing force and decision, and when stirred he was gifted 
 with that eloquence that goes home to its mark. His 
 denunciation was uncompromising, as when he said of 
 Webster, whom he had revered from boyish days, — 
 " All the drops of his blood have eyes that look down- 
 ward." His' counsel was direct, as when he declared 
 that the Fugitive Slave Law "is a law which every one 
 of you will break on the earliest occasion, — a law 
 whicli no man can obey or abet the obeying without 
 loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of 
 gentleman." His speeches were sown with sentences 
 that were maxims, — " He who writes a crime into the 
 statute-book digs under the foundations of the Capitol ; " 
 and with sharp appeals that stung like insults, — 
 "The famous town of Boston is his master's hound." 
 Perhaps no spoken words of his were more instant in 
 
74 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 eloquent effect than the sentences which he injected 
 into his lecture on Heroism at Boston in the early 
 days of 1838 ; when he suddenly said, looking up from 
 his manuscript : " The day never shines in which this 
 element may not work. ... It is but the other day that 
 the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a 
 mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and 
 died when it was better not to live." In that quiet 
 hall the sentence rang like a rifle-shot. It is, however, 
 useless to multiply examples of his quality in such de- 
 bate. His civic courage was flawless, and he was never 
 more effective as a speaker than in handling these live 
 topics. He did not, however, associate himself much 
 with the abolitionist agitators, for the ways of many 
 of whom he had little sympathy and still less for their 
 suggested methods of political action. He had a true 
 and profound respect for Garrison as a man, and per- 
 haps he was least contented, taken all in all, with 
 Wendell Phillips. His letter to the President on the 
 removal of the Cherokees from Georgia, sent April 18, 
 1838, and his welcome to Kossuth at Concord, May 11, 
 1852, were the only other notable civic actions of this 
 period. It is in his conduct as an opponent of slavery 
 that Emerson revealed his height as a citizen and par- 
 ticipant in the public affairs of his generation. 
 
 Emerson's service to the Anti-Slavery cause must 
 be gauged by the inertia of his reluctant nature which 
 he overcame in entering on the active strife. He 
 speaks of an analogous reluctance in lecturing, which 
 he even described at times as a kind of "charlatanry." 
 He meant that sense of an accommodation to the world 
 which is inherent in all action, that adaptation of truth 
 to time and place and the minds of the hearers, all 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 75 
 
 of the concession there is in popularizing truth, in 
 seasoning it with anecdote and allusion, all the artifice 
 there is in the handling an idea persuasively instead 
 of trusting simply to its pure self, and also, and 
 perhaps more intimately, the sense of desecration of 
 the truth by its utterance which is a not uncommon 
 feeling in highly intellectualized and aloof natures like 
 his own. It is better not to act, but to contain the 
 soul; it is better not to speak, but to refrain the word : 
 this is the mood to which his entire philosophy as a 
 spiritual life initiated him ; yet what he remarks of 
 this sort is to be lightly taken. In another part of 
 his nature he liked to feel himself as the communi- 
 cator of truth ; he liked, too, the act of preaching, 
 which was his natural office, born and bred in him, 
 exercised and breathed by him, and his sole outlet 
 into action ; though he had thrown off the harness, 
 he liked to move in the old motions. He gradually 
 abandoned speaking as a pulpit preacher and confined 
 himself to the platform ; but he never ceased to be, in 
 garb and manner, the preacher. He lectured much ; 
 whatever was the announced subject of the winter 
 course in Boston, the substance was the same ; and, 
 more importantly, the man was the same. " We do 
 not go," wrote Lowell, " to hear what Emerson says 
 so much as to hear Emerson." His account of the 
 actual scene is by far the best : — 
 
 " We used to walk in from the country to the Masonic 
 Temple (I think it was), through the crisp winter night, and 
 listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle 
 meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to 
 the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and 
 rescue. Cynics might say what they liked. Did our own 
 
76 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into ambro- 
 sia ? At any rate, he brought us life, which, on the whole, is 
 no bad thing. Was it all transcendentalism? magic-lantern 
 pictures on mist? As you will. Those, then, were just 
 what we wanted. But it was not so. The delight and the 
 benefit were that he put us in communication w r ith a larger 
 style of thought, sharpened our wits with a more pungent 
 phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the 
 dry husk of our New England ; made us conscious of the 
 supreme and everlasting originality of whatever bit of soul 
 might be in any of us ; freed us, in short, from the stocks of 
 prose in which we had sat so long that we had grown w T ell- 
 nigh contented in our cramps. And who that saw the au- 
 dience will ever forget it, where every one still capable of 
 fire, or longing to renew in himself the half-forgotten sense 
 of it, was gathered? Those faces, young and old, agleam 
 with pale intellectual light, eager with pleased attention, 
 flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of the years 
 with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brim- 
 ming with love and hope, wholly vanished now in that other 
 world we call the Past, or peering doubtfully through the 
 pensive gloaming of memory, your light impoverishes these 
 cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they 
 turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some 
 keener flash of that humor which always played about the 
 horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now 
 like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling 
 around me. 
 
 " . . .To some of us that long-past experience remains as 
 the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emer- 
 son awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It 
 is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, 
 careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the 
 ballad of Chevy Chase and we in Emerson. Nor did it 
 blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of victory. Did 
 they say he was disconnected? So were the stars, that 
 seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with that excitement, as 
 we walked homeward with prouder stride over the creaking 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 77 
 
 snow. And were they not knit together by a higher logic 
 than our mere sense could master? Were we enthusiasts? 
 I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man 
 who made us worth something for once in our lives. If 
 asked what was left? what we carried home? we should 
 not have been careful for an answer. It would have been 
 enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed 
 that way. Or we might have asked in return what one 
 brought away from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough 
 that he had set that ferment of wholesome discontent at 
 work in us. 
 
 "... I have heard some great speakers and some ac- 
 complished orators, but never any that so moved and per- 
 suaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow 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 deliberate 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. In that closely filed speech of his at the Burns 
 centenary dinner, every word seemed to have just dropped 
 down to him from the clouds. He looked far away over the 
 heads of his hearers, with a vague kind of expectation, 
 as into some private heaven of invention, and the 
 winged period came at last obedient to his spell. ' My 
 dainty Ariel ! ' he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast 
 down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of approval 
 and caught another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that 
 lay before him, ambushed behind a dish of fruit and seen 
 only by nearest neighbors. Every sentence brought down 
 the house, as I never saw one brought down before, — and 
 it is not so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has 
 no hint of native brogue in it. I watched, for it was an 
 interesting study, how the quick sympathy ran flashing from 
 face to face down the long tables, like an electric spark 
 thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of 
 
78 RALPH WALDO EMEKSON [chap. 
 
 plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, 
 found myself caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my 
 excited fancy set me under the bema listening to him who 
 fulmined over Greece. I can never help applying to him 
 what Ben Jon son said of Bacon : ' There happened in my 
 time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his 
 speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No man 
 ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or 
 suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. 
 No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. 
 His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without 
 loss. He commanded where he spoke.' " 
 
 Another view is given by Willis from a different 
 angle, and completes the picture : — 
 
 "Emerson's voice is up to his reputation. It has a curi- 
 ous contradiction in it which we tried in vain to analyze 
 satisfactorily. 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 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-necessaries-of-lif e ' sort of 
 exterior gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine noth- 
 ing 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. . . . Indeed (to use one of his own similitudes), his 
 body seems ' never to have broken the umbilical cord ' which 
 held it to Boston ; while his soul has sprung to the adult 
 stature of a child of the universe, and his voice is the 
 utterance of the soul only." 
 
 This recalls Alcott's remark that some of Emerson's 
 " organs were free, some fated ; the voice was entirely 
 liberated." It was, says his son, " agreeable, flexible, 
 and varied, with power unexpected from a man of his 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 79 
 
 slender chest/' Its effect was supplemented, however, 
 by the tranquil decorum of the speaker, by the power 
 of his large-featured face, and the light of the spirit 
 that shone from the serene and expressive counte- 
 nance; moreover, he had high-bred manners at all 
 times, and solemnity. 
 
 He was more sought for as the years passed on, and 
 after 1850 he was accustomed to make a journey to 
 the West each year, lecturing in the lyceums there. 
 These journeys were fatiguing and abounded in hard- 
 ships of travel, in exposure to cold and storm and in- 
 conveniences of lodging. He did not complain, but 
 made the best of rude conditions, and returned better 
 in health after each expedition. He crossed the 
 Mississippi several times on the ice, on foot or partly 
 by boat, as the case might be, and he had long drives 
 on the prairie in snow and mud, and adventures in 
 canal boats and taverns. His love of the primitive was 
 appealed to by this contact with weather and char- 
 acter, and an appreciation of the West was formed in 
 him such as no other man of letters possessed ; it 
 cannot be doubted that the broad American strain in 
 his writings, which distinguishes them, owed much to 
 this development by repeated contact through a series 
 of years with hard and raw conditions, and the race 
 growing up in them. The fact that he found an 
 audience in these then somewhat remote places illus- 
 trates the mode by which the New England spirit 
 penetrated the West. He was received, it would ap- 
 pear, in, much the same mixed way there as in the 
 East, with a limited enthusiasm, an awakened interest 
 and curiosity, and also with some vague astonishment 
 of mind and dubious listening. For the growth of his 
 
80 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 reputation at large in the country and for the infiltra- 
 tion of his thought into liberal and intelligent minds 
 these lecturing tours were of the first consequence, 
 and it was rather by the spoken than the written word 
 that he first gained the attention of his countrymen. 
 He continued to lecture regularly until after the Civil 
 War; it was his means of earning, and the active 
 period of such influence extended over forty years. 
 
 The various public employments of Emerson con- 
 stituted his external life which was filled with inter- 
 esting action, keeping him in unbroken contact with 
 affairs and men. It may be said that nearly every 
 eminent man of his neighbourhood and generation was 
 his respectful friend, and in his study at Concord the 
 higher interests of society were often in play. Yet in 
 the midst of all this he led a private life, altogether 
 his own, in the family about him, which he most 
 valued. Here he was at home, and here also he was 
 in that solitude which was, to his eyes and in his 
 heart, the place of his genius. It is only at Concord 
 that one obtains a near and private view of him, and 
 it is given principally by the recollections of his son. 
 His mother lived with him for eighteen years until 
 her death, and her room, where the children went for 
 their Bible readings on Sunday, was a chamber of 
 peace. Besides the firstborn son, there were another 
 son and two daughters ; but the eldest died at the 
 age of five years. He was a beautiful child, with 
 dark blue eyes and long lashes, and would stay si- 
 lently in his father's study for hours. He was pecul- 
 iarly dear to Emerson, and the loss was a great grief. 
 Miss Alcott's first memory of him was on the occasion 
 of the boy's death : — 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 81 
 
 " My first remembrance is of the morning when I was sent 
 to inquire for little Waldo, then lying very ill. His father 
 came to me, so worn with watching and changed by sorrow, 
 that I was startled, and could only stammer out my mes- 
 sage. 'Child, he is dead ! ' was his answer. Then the door 
 closed, and I ran home to tell the sad tidings. I was only 
 eight years old, and that was my first glimpse of a great 
 grief, but I never have forgotten the anguish that made a 
 familiar face so tragical, and gave those few words more 
 pathos than the sweet lamentation of the Threnody." 
 
 Emerson, however, after the bereavement, passed 
 into a state of resignation with respect to it, in which 
 the mysteriousness of the event was the abiding trait, 
 so that he used in a lecture these words about it : 
 "Grief, too, will make us idealists. In the death of 
 my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have 
 lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I cannot get it 
 nearer to me." He means that his own soul has suf- 
 fered no loss, as if it were his own " eternal part " 
 that was made plain to him in the experience. His 
 natural grief was not the less, and indeed this 
 seems to have been the greatest shock that life gave 
 him. He was fond of children, and inexpert with 
 his hands in other ways was skilful in handling- 
 babies; he liked the company of the young always, 
 and drew no line of age or of intelligence in their case. 
 As his own children grew up, he gave unusual atten- 
 tion to them and made them companions, and was not 
 only firm but thoughtful in discipline, using ways of 
 avoidance and prevention before trouble came or dis- 
 sipating it by turning the channel of attention with 
 something like a woman's tact. He took interest in 
 their games and studies and affairs, and was their con- 
 fidant; and if he bred them seriously, it was with 
 
82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 much liberality. He required of his sou, for example, 
 regular reading of Plutarch's Lives, and he discour- 
 aged morning idleness even on holidays. He repressed 
 light conversation even on their childish romances of 
 boy and girl, and especially on the subject of death, 
 and ill nature or silliness was rebuked or frowned upon. 
 He did not romp with them, but he took them to walk, 
 especially on Sunday afternoons, when he came into 
 the room at four o'clock and whistled or spoke as a 
 signal ; and then all would go out into the fields and 
 woods, where he would show them the first flowers or 
 repeat old ballads or amuse them in other ways. He 
 liked them to go to church, and they were taught 
 hymns as he had been ; they were allowed on Sunday 
 to stroll by themselves and to read and even to go 
 bathing in Walden ; but not to play games, to have 
 toys, or to drive or row. He disliked card-playing at 
 all times. When they grew to be thirteen or fourteen, 
 he allowed them much latitude in their own affairs, 
 and developed their initiation and responsibility. He 
 had their companions into the house for parties, was 
 anxious that all should come, and interested himself 
 in their entertainment. It is plain that children were 
 the light of the house. 
 
 He was himself in these years of maturity usually in 
 good health, though he had somewhat the temperament 
 of a valitudinarian, owing to his invalidism in younger 
 days, and he perhaps underrated his physical strength 
 and consequently indulged the more his rambling and 
 country habits ; he did not overtax himself. He had 
 a horror of invalidism, and would never permit talk 
 about sickness. His son thus describes him in these 
 years : " Mr. Emerson was tall, — six feet in his 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 83 
 
 shoes, — erect until his latter days, neither very thin 
 nor stout in frame, with rather narrow and unusually 
 sloping shoulders, and long neck, but very well-poised 
 head, and a dignity of carriage. His eyes were very 
 blue, his hair dark brown, his complexion clear and 
 always with good colour. His features were pro- 
 nounced, but refined, and his face very much modelled, 
 as a sculptor would say." The portraits of him show 
 the general character of his face excellently. His 
 manner of address was courteous, in the old sense, 
 and hesitating, which Hawthorne best struck off, — 
 "and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, 
 encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive 
 more than he would impart." It was a sincere attitude, 
 for nothing was more characteristic of him, as Dr. 
 Furness tells it, than " the eagerness and delight with 
 which he magnified the slightest appearance of any- 
 thing like talent or genius or good that he happened 
 to discover, or that he fancied he discovered in an- 
 other." In demeanour he was always reserved, as he 
 had been in boyhood, and he disliked to have this 
 habit, which, was a state rather than a mask, at all 
 shaken. He complained that Margaret Fuller made 
 him laugh too much. He never laughed aloud, but the 
 suppressed commotion of his lungs and face on being 
 affected with laughter has often been humorously and 
 vividly portrayed. He had hidden humour, which is 
 apt to take the form of irony in writing, and he was 
 amused in secret over many things ; in his family he 
 would joke after a scriptural fashion by perverse 
 quotation of Bible texts, and he is said to have en- 
 joyed the parody of his poem Br amah, that was 
 then current. It was a clerical and Yankee humour 
 
84 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 that he had, and was not allowed to encroach upon the 
 day; and, besides, there is much silence in Yankee 
 humour of the true breed. He was not fond of pictures, 
 and enjoyed design more than colour. He had no ear 
 for music, and could not distinguish simple tunes from 
 one another, though he enjoyed singing in a moderate 
 degree. He did not care for garden flowers, and if he 
 brought home flowers from the woods he did not fur- 
 ther notice them or what was done with them. In 
 outdoor habits he still skated in winter and swam in 
 Walden on hot days in summer; he did not ride horse- 
 back, though he could do so, and he did not enjoy 
 driving, but on going to preach in the neighbourhood 
 he generally drove himself. He preferred walking 
 even between stations in the city, and would stride away, 
 alert and swift, carrying his own bag. He had coun- 
 try habits of self-dependence, and held to them with 
 tenacity and simplicity as the natural way of living. 
 He once bought a rifle, and learned to shoot with it in 
 the Adirondack s, but did not shoot at any living thing. 
 Indoors there was ancient simplicity, plain fare, which 
 he seldom noticed, or if he did so, only for a word of 
 thanksgiving ; not suffering further comment or any 
 talk of it ; he did not drink wine habitually, but he 
 offered it to guests, and on such occasions took one 
 glass ; he smoked very moderately, but only after fifty, 
 though he had learned to smoke at college. He was 
 very kind to his servants and considerate of them. 
 He rose at six and retired at ten, but he was able to 
 keep later hours with visitors and suffered no incon- 
 venience from it. In business he was not shrewd. 
 " He had no business faculty," says his son, " or even 
 ordinary skill in figures ; could only with the greatest 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 85 
 
 difficulty be made to understand an account." He 
 found it to his advantage finally to allow a commer- 
 cial friend to attend even to his arrangements with 
 his publishers, and in the management of his property 
 he had relied previously on the counsel of another 
 elder and lifelong friend, the staunchest, perhaps, of 
 all at that time, his parishioner, Mr. Abel Adams. 
 
 The mode of his dealing with books was one of his 
 most characteristic and interesting traits. He was a 
 reader, but not a student of books ; a writer, not a 
 scholar. He held the opinion that a man who writes 
 must abandon reading in the scholastic sense. His 
 command of foreign languages was inconsiderable. 
 He had that tincture of Latin and Greek that Har- 
 vard in those days of ineffective classical instruction 
 gave ; but he never read either language at home, 
 though he seems to have tried occasionally a Latin 
 author on a journey, — Martial or a treatise of Cicero. 
 He read German, and accomplished the perusal of 
 Goethe's entire works as a task and partly out of re- 
 spect to Carlyle's judgment; but he used the language 
 comparatively little and had no first-hand acquaint- 
 ance with German philosophy. He also read French, 
 Sainte-Beuve and George Sand, for example, but he did 
 not care for the language or its literature. He was, 
 in fact, for all practical purposes, an English reader 
 and used translations in making acquaintance with 
 his most revered authors, Plato and the Neo-Plato- 
 nists, Plutarch, Montaigne, and others, whenever an 
 English version was available. He read two kinds of 
 books: biography, anecdotes, and certain kinds of 
 travel and science, which satisfied his taste for the 
 expression of character and manners, and also fur- 
 
86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 nished him with particular illustrations of life, and, in 
 the case of science, examples of law, which were useful 
 in lectures ; and secondly, books of philosophy and old 
 religion, generally mystical, which stimulated his mind 
 and affected him as he says Alcott's conversation did, 
 during which he listened to his own thoughts instead 
 of his friend's ; he used them to tone his mind, as Gray 
 read Spenser before composing. He was also preoc- 
 cupied, in reading, with style or expression, had an 
 eye to the good sentences and noted down numberless 
 quotations which he kept in a book as a treasury for 
 use. He was strictly independent in his preferences 
 and estimates. " He could see nothing," says his 
 confidential biographer, Mr. Cabot, " in Shelley, Aris- 
 tophanes, Don Quixote, Miss Austen, Dickens ; " per- 
 haps his characterization of Dante as " another Zerah 
 Colburn" is the most lucid instance of his mental 
 ineptitude ; but non-conductivity was a large element 
 in his make-up, in general, and in these examples of 
 limited sympathy and understanding the confined 
 character of his culture is manifest. He was no more 
 rich in critical faculty than in scientific intellect and 
 the historical sense. He was, in fact, singularly in- 
 dependent of books, and indifferent to knowledge as 
 such, but valued them as one, though an inferior, 
 source of the power to live. His maxim, "Expres- 
 sion is what we want ; not knowledge, but vent," sum- 
 marizes his point of view and implies his method. 
 His reading was wide, but not deep, desultory but not 
 catholic, strange but not learned, and reflected the 
 idiosyncrasy of his character so perfectly that, hardly 
 less than his writings, it is a mode of his self-portrayal 
 and stamped with reality. One follows him into the 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 87 
 
 books he read, not for the sources of his thought, but 
 for the mould of the man himself. 
 
 In the correlative part of a writer's life, composi- 
 tion, the state of Emerson is as plain. He composed 
 out-of-doors in the woods and pastures, where he loved 
 to ramble, and since his early days of self-protective 
 indolence at Cambridge in the life at Divinity Hall 
 he had carefully preserved these country habits. 
 " Wherever I go," he wrote on first settling at Con- 
 cord, "I guard and study my rambling propensities 
 with a care that is ridiculous to people, but to me is 
 the care of my high calling." He was town-bred, and 
 the love of the country came to him truly only in early 
 manhood, but for this reason it had a freshness and 
 wholeness and was self-conscious to a degree that gave 
 it a value somewhat out of the ordinary. He rejoiced 
 in Walden and the adjacent rough fields and meadows 
 as in a forest paradise. His senses opened to it, — 
 " the moist, warm, glittering, budding, and melodious 
 hour," and he came to know the country in every 
 mood of weather, landscape, and horizon, in its great 
 lines and in its detail homely but dear, and abounding 
 in changeful beauty, the harsh New England land. 
 Anemone and chipmunk, titmouse and rhodora, black 
 ice and starlight, he knew and loved them all, and 
 was, almost more than Thoreau, a forest citizen. He 
 was greatly pleased to have Indians and gypsies use 
 his land. He liked to work, too, in his garden and 
 orchard, to prune trees and think about pears and 
 gather brushwood ; but he was inexpert with all tools, 
 and made but an awkward farmer ; gradually his par- 
 ticipation became less active, and there were friendly 
 hands to relieve him of the care while preserving his 
 
88 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 enjoyment. He was less interested in animals, though 
 he could catch a horse with an ear of corn ; and he 
 never had any pets. The daily life of the garden and 
 fields about the house was always a pleasure and re- 
 source to him ; but it was the larger and wilder estate 
 near Walden that was more peculiarly his " garden," 
 where he found the thoughts that he brought home 
 with him. 
 
 His own attitude in this out-of-doors study is well 
 described in his declaration, — "I would not degrade 
 myself by casting about for a thought nor by waiting 
 for one." Receptivity was the prime condition for 
 this mode of thinking; volition would be an imper- 
 tinence; the thoughts came, as lyrics are popularly 
 supposed to come, and arrived in what form and on 
 what topic might please themselves. It was inspira- 
 tion put into practice ; the product was pensees, — 
 thought-crystals, as it were, each formed spontaneously 
 by its own unaided law. Emerson remembered them, 
 turned them over in his mind until perhaps they came 
 again in a more fit and beautiful form of expression, 
 and he preserved them in his journals to write which 
 was his daily task. When there was question of a 
 lecture, he sifted out of these journals thoughts on the 
 selected theme or cognate with it, and casting them 
 into paragraphs made up a whole. Two forms of com- 
 position were involved in the process: the sentence, 
 which has been rightly termed the literary unit of his 
 style; and the sermon, or frame of the discourse, loosely 
 conceived as a series of headings, under each of which 
 there might be an effusion of thought. Emerson's 
 constructive art in prose was limited to this simple 
 combination of the minister's old pulpit sermon and 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 89 
 
 the man-of -letters' pens£e. The essay was an identical 
 form with the lecture, but made up by a selection 
 from old lectures as well as the journals, and repre- 
 sented the originals in a thrice and four times sifted 
 form, the best thought and the best expression; the 
 last result and quintessence of his mind. The seed- 
 field of all, however, was the wild land he wandered 
 over ; and if Alcott thought that Emerson's essays 
 were not properly published till he read them with 
 his own voice, Emerson himself . would not have 
 found the expression adequate till they were heard in 
 the natural scenes which had generated them. His 
 conviction of the union of his thought with nature 
 sounds mystical ; but, like his practice of inspiration, 
 it represents a very real fact in his psychology and in 
 his act of thought; both denote a peculiarity in his 
 mental process. For him, all thought carried its 
 environment with it, as poetic thought carries its 
 imagery, and was equally inseparable therefrom ; and 
 he restricted the original action of his mind as purely 
 as possible to its unconscious operation : these are the 
 practical facts, though in Emerson's mind they had 
 an aura of mysticism. He interpreted this process of 
 spontaneous suggestion in the environment of the wild 
 as a transmutation of nature herself, and believed 
 that the resulting thought, so far as it was pure and 
 unmixed with volition, was one, as he would say, with 
 the harmonies of the stars and the secrets of the deep; 
 he maintained, therefore, jealously his nearness and 
 openness to nature and his waiting mood, and valued, 
 far more than persons or books, this wild-wood cell 
 where his soul found illumination. In the quality of 
 the action, however, by which he thus fed his genius, 
 
90 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 he was not so different from other poets ; for mental 
 processes are much the same, however explanations 
 may vary. What was more peculiar to him was that 
 he made a semi-religious rite of it, and limited him- 
 self to the mood and shut himself up in it as the true 
 path, with unconcern for other ways of reason, as if 
 he had been the founder of a nature-sect in some Ti- 
 betan world. It is useful to observe, too, that just as 
 to his rejection of past learning there corresponded a 
 mental indisposition for scholarship, so in his wait- 
 ing on nature may be discerned the obverse of his per- 
 sonal liking for aimless strolling and forest idleness 
 often characteristic of the poetic temperament; for 
 whatever Emerson was, he was constitutionally. 
 
 This is seen also in his friendships. It is in this part 
 of his life, perhaps, that it is most difficult to show 
 the facts with justice. Emerson himself by his fre- 
 quent lamentation over his social defects, which his 
 son says he exaggerated, has made the way easy to rep- 
 resent him as an unsocial person. He certainly seemed, 
 even to his contemporaries, hedged about with something 
 of saintship, not that he was thought to be at all a sacred 
 person, but his presence diffused a certain grave respect, 
 enforced distance, and imposed itself upon others ; he 
 carried with him by the formality of his manner and 
 his general inheritance the atmosphere of a Puritan 
 minister of the old time. He was physically inacces- 
 sible. "What man was he," says Dr. Holmes, "who 
 would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder ? " 
 No one seems ever to have spoken to him in a natural 
 tone of voice except his brothers. He was never sur- 
 prised in an act of intimacy; no biographer or writer 
 of reminiscences records such a thing. He was, upon 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 91 
 
 the other hand, anxious to communicate himself, and 
 felt grievously his incapacity ; but he could not give 
 himself, he could not even impart himself ; when he 
 attempted it, he says, dumbness and palsy fell upon 
 him. He disliked even to visit, because of his failure 
 as a guest. As to friendship, he conceived of it as a 
 holy state, like matrimony, a function of divine souls ; 
 he derived this view from Plato, and in his writing on 
 friendship he platonizes most : here is the point, per- 
 haps, where he for once depended more on the book 
 than on experience and allowed his thoughts to be 
 dominated by a literary tradition. In practice, he ar- 
 rived at the paradox that a friend is a treasure to be 
 enjoyed preferably in absence. 
 
 There were two obstacles that intervened between 
 him and that free communication and enjoyment in 
 human intercourse which in its affectionate forms 
 becomes friendship. The first was the " cold obstruc- 
 tion " of his own temperament. One extract from his 
 journals, in 1839, sufficiently states his own view of 
 the case, and it is typical of many other of his expres- 
 sions from early youth to maturity of age : — 
 
 " Some people are born public souls, and live with all 
 their doors open to the street. Close beside them we find in 
 contrast the lonely man, with all his doors shut, reticent, 
 thoughtful, shrinking from crowds, afraid to take hold of 
 hands ; thankful for the existence of the other, but incapa- 
 ble of such performance, wondering at its possibility; full 
 of thoughts, but paralyzed and silenced instantly by these 
 boisterous masters ; and, though loving his race, discovering 
 at last that he has no proper sympathy with persons, but 
 only with their genius and aims. He is solitary because he 
 has society in his thought, and, when people come in, they 
 drive away his society and isolate him. We would all be 
 
92 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 public meu, if we could afford it ; I am wholly private ; such 
 is the poverty of my constitution. Heaven ' betrayed me to 
 a book, and wrapped me in a gown.' I have no social talent, 
 no will, and a steady appetite for insights in any or all 
 directions, to balance my manifold imbecilities. 
 
 "... Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I 
 see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me. 
 Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech with 
 such. You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of 
 words ; and the behavior is as awkward and proud. I see 
 the ludicrousness of the plight as well as they. But never 
 having found any remedy, I am very patient of this folly 
 or shame ; patient of my churl's mask, in the belief that this 
 privation has certain rich compensations." 
 
 The second obstacle lay in one of Emerson's most 
 interesting traits, belonging in the sphere of his 
 idiosyncrasy. The gradual fading out of personality 
 as an element in life is one of the most striking 
 incidents in the history of his mind. The phenome- 
 non itself characterizes the intellectual life in any 
 high state of development, and is a part of the en- 
 franchisement of the mind from the senses and the 
 tyranny of all mortal conditions ; but in Emerson it 
 is seen with strange lucidity and a shade of sadness. 
 The sense of the personality of Christ was the first to 
 go ; at a very early age whatever blessing streams from 
 the person of Jesus was dried up in the young minister. 
 The personality of God then passed in turn ; this was 
 a necessity of thought ; philosophy required it. " The 
 soul knows no persons." Finally, personality began to 
 ebb from individuals, for the law held in the human 
 as well as in the supernatural sphere. The death of 
 his brothers, the death of his wife in the brief marriage 
 days of early life, the death of his son, lowered the 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 93 
 
 value of personality by showing its transitoriness. 
 Why does one love his friends ? Is it not for their 
 virtue and moral illumination, for their excellence of 
 being ? This was Emerson's thought. He loved his 
 friends, in the high sense, for what they contained of 
 God, or excellence of being ; and naturally this was 
 a value that diminished on acquaintance, such is hu- 
 manity even in the best and happiest examples. 
 Friendship seemed more and more a thing tangential 
 with life, full of contingency, with benefits very 
 sporadic ; each soul is a necessary solitude unto itself. 
 This philosophical history underlay not only Emerson's 
 doctrine of friendship, but his reflective attitude, as 
 distinguished from practical service, to his friends ; 
 for he was infinitely persistent in believing his own 
 states of mind. 
 
 Emerson, however, was a very kindly man, and his 
 social inaptitude and mental view, though they played 
 their part, did not destroy the pleasures of friendship 
 of which he had as full a share as his temperament 
 allowed, and it was a goodly portion. Of what may 
 be termed honest friendship, kept wholesome by 
 serviceableness in real things, Mr. Abel Adams was 
 the best type. He was the only individual from 
 whom Emerson accepted any financial aid. At one 
 time Mr. Adams, who was his business adviser, had 
 led him to make an unlucky investment in Vermont 
 railroads ; and in the hard times of the Civil War, when 
 Emerson's son was in college, remembering this inci- 
 dent, he asked to be allowed to bear the collegiate 
 expenses, and Emerson after some consideration con- 
 sented. He had no sounder friend. In his own 
 family another natural and simple friendship grew up 
 
94 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 with Miss Elizabeth Hoar, who, having been betrothed 
 to his brother Charles and being treated as a daughter 
 by his mother, became an intimate of the house ; in her 
 society he found the grace of womanly friendship in 
 ways without disturbance to his sensitiveness, and this 
 was one of his domestic treasures, as if in the family 
 circle. It is only on the entrance of literary persons 
 that incompleteness in the relations begins to be felt. 
 The first man of letters, or at least of the literary life, 
 whom Emerson made his friend was Alcott. He over- 
 flowed with admiration for him, and of all men best 
 appreciated his nature and most forgave his ways. He 
 confessed Alcott could not write nor make any useful 
 public expression of himself ; he made him show to the 
 English friends whom he was bringing over a letter in 
 which was plainly set down the statement that the 
 philosopher, whatever value he might have as a guide 
 in theory, was not to be trusted in matters of fact, and 
 in the socialistic experiment at Fruitlands Emerson 
 found vexation, doubtless, as in Alcott' s practical affairs 
 generally ; but he proclaimed the greatness of the man 
 and his value for him unceasingly. He was loyal; he 
 even asked him and his wife to share his house, but 
 Mrs. Alcott sensibly declined ; yet he 1 does not make 
 very plain what it was in Alcott that he prized pre- 
 cisely except that through conversation with him Plato 
 became a reality instead of remaining a beautiful 
 dream. "When I go to talk with Alcott," he says, 
 "it is not so much to get his thoughts as to watch 
 myself under his influence. He excites me, and I 
 think freely." He was generous and even enthusias- 
 tic, as was his habit, in praise ; but perhaps what most 
 fastened his attention was the sage's faculty for sub- 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 95 
 
 limated talk, together with his entire unconcern for 
 practicality. The story of their friendship shows 
 Emerson in unfailingly humane action amid some- 
 what trying circumstances, and this is a more im- 
 portant trait than his intellectual admiration. On 
 the other hand, Alcott noticed the " impersonal or 
 discrete" quality of Emerson's manner, and thought 
 it lessened his charm. Margaret Fuller was another 
 person who awakened his admiration. She was a 
 visitor at his house. She had energy of the heart as 
 well as of the head, and she tried with much despera- 
 tion, it would appear, to win into his intimacy. His 
 responses to her, pleading the barriers of his nature 
 and retiring into dumbness as his assigned state in 
 this world, as well as his remarks about the chills 
 with which her presence at times affected him when 
 she unhappily sought to thaw him, sufficiently disclose 
 the situation. " She ever seems to crave," he says, 
 " something I have not, or have not for her ; " and 
 again, " She freezes me to silence when we promise 
 to come nearest." Ke was brought much into rela- 
 tions with her through their joint interest in TJie Dial, 
 and he was as serviceable to her as his opportunities 
 allowed, as he was to every one ; and he joined in 
 writing her memoir after her death. On her part, 
 finding the impenetrability of the defence, she had 
 long desisted from the attack. 
 
 Emerson was very sensible of the response that the 
 young made to him, and he was much more at ease 
 in meeting them than in his general intercourse with 
 the world. He had a welcome for them always, his 
 quickest sympathies were awakened, and in youth 
 itself he found unfailing charm. He opened to them 
 
96 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 more readily, and with some touch of the intimacy that 
 only his own household knew, which however brief 
 and ordinary and passing, some of them long remem- 
 bered and bore witness to. The account which Mr. 
 Albee gives of his visit there as a schoolboy, a stranger, 
 is an admirable instance of Emerson's way with the 
 young. It is not singular that the two friends who got 
 on best and most humanly with him were young men 
 when he made friends of them. Both Thoreau and El- 
 lery Channing were fifteen years younger than Emerson 
 and in their twenties when the friendship became firm 
 and cordial. They were companions, one or the other 
 of them but not together, of his walks, and both were 
 enthusiasts for nature, with woodcraft and artist-lore, 
 and contributed something to quicken and enrich his 
 own enjoyment. They were both, too, sharers of his 
 primitive tastes and useful in practical country ways. 
 Channing once cut his wood for him, and Thoreau 
 planted his pasture with young trees. There was 
 some comradery in both these friendships, and Emerson 
 came nearer to these two than to any others outside of 
 his household in human ways. Here friendship had 
 another than intellectual or literary ground ; it was 
 more broadly based in a companionship of life nor- 
 mally and happily engaged. Thoreau, indeed, became 
 for two years, when he was twenty-four, an inmate of 
 the house, and was a much prized member of the family 
 in family ways, helpful to all. The recollections of 
 the children show that he was much endeared to them, 
 and until his death he was an unfailing resource in 
 times when his help or care was wanted. The 
 memoirs of the house are wholly honourable to him, 
 and show him in the most humane light that falls any- 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 97 
 
 where upon his life. It is true that there was a bond 
 of intellectual likeness, almost identity, between him 
 and Emerson ; but his individuality is in the bond, too, 
 combative and unconformed, original and hardy, and 
 by it whatever he had received from Emerson was 
 stamped his own ; yet the friendship was not an 
 intellectual one simply or primarily, but was a bond of 
 life. It seems not unlikely that these two young men 
 had a hand in stirring Emerson to join in the Anti- 
 Slavery campaign, in which they both showed young 
 blood ; they certainly sustained him in his woodcraft, 
 which was a large part of his poetic energy ; and in 
 their companionship he was most fortunate. It is no- 
 ticeable that he did not overestimate their literary 
 talent ; he had no illusions about the merit of even his 
 greater contemporaries, and he was not to be deceived 
 by the smaller ones ; just as he wrote to Carlyle that 
 Margaret Fuller had neither beauty nor genius, he 
 looked on Thoreau and Channing with eyes that rather 
 diminished than exaggerated their talents. 
 
 It was in the circle of social acquaintance that Emer- 
 son's coldness was most embarrassing to himself and dis- 
 concerting for others. Hawthorne was at one time his 
 neighbour ; they met occasionally and once took a brief 
 walking tour together, but neither of them had the 
 genial power of human nature, and their contact was 
 only friendly and external. Hawthorne, on his side, 
 left the immortal picture : " It was good to meet him 
 in the wood paths or sometimes in our avenue with 
 that pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his pres- 
 ence like the garment of a shining one." Emerson, 
 on the other side, felt that here was a man greater than 
 his works, which was a common judgment of his with 
 
98 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 regard to men ; he could not read his friend's books, 
 and described them as "too young." With the Cam- 
 bridge men his relations were never close, partly be- 
 cause at Harvard he had been tabooed by the elder 
 generation, and it was only with the younger men 
 there that he came into friendly contact ; among 
 them, as for example Lowell, there was warmth of 
 admiration for Emerson and that love which is min- 
 gled of respect and youthful gratitude ; but the threads 
 of his life, though they crossed with those of his con- 
 temporaries in literature, did so in a purely temporal 
 way and without importance; he had no true touch 
 with Longfellow or Holmes or Lowell any more than 
 with Hawthorne or Whittier, nor did he value their 
 literary performance highly in any case. He lived in 
 a quite different world from them. In his own study 
 he was most disappointing to those who came to sit at 
 the feet of Gamaliel, of whom there were many, for he 
 steadily refused to be an oracle or guide of life, and 
 he was discreet and often non-committal in replying 
 to direct questions on high topics. The experience of 
 Henry James, senior, is an example, the more striking 
 because expressed with some vexation. He attacked 
 Emerson intellectually with much the same youthful 
 vehemence, it would seem, as Margaret Fuller had 
 used emotionally, and met the same disaster of com- 
 plete overthrow. " It turned out, " he says, " that any 
 average old dame in a horse-car would have satisfied 
 my intellectual capacity just as well as Emerson." 
 The antithesis between the personal fascination of 
 Emerson, whether speaking or silent, as a figure, and 
 his intellectual torpor in conversation, seemed very 
 marvellous to Mr. James. There were others who had 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 99 
 
 similarly unhappy fortune in the encounter. The 
 more sensible pilgrims were disconcerted and non- 
 plussed at finding how little there was to receive ; 
 the more lunatic were annoyed or outraged by the in- 
 explicable dryness ; yet all went away conscious of his 
 " vague nobleness and thorough sweetness " to use 
 Miss Martineau's words, and perhaps feeling content 
 with him as a man out of their sphere, but strangely 
 puzzled by finding how completely they had failed of 
 any approach, sympathy, response, contact, or under- 
 standing. This is an extreme statement; but it 
 must have been true of numbers of the train of pil- 
 grims that sought his doors. To himself the variety 
 of their devils seemed legion, and in his own thoughts 
 he was impatient of being confessor to folly and 
 craziness. But he had such a respect for the individ- 
 ual soul, and was so tender of its rights and private 
 intuitions, that he had formed a habit of hospitality 
 of mind and welcome to the most unpromising. It is 
 said that at times even his equanimity gave way and 
 that on rare occasions he gave vent to his indigna- 
 tion and disapproval in plain words. As time 
 went on and the transcendentalists and other reformers 
 became figures of the past, the pilgrims were more 
 amenable ; but in thinking of the " coldness " of 
 Emerson, his self-guard, incommunicability, and im- 
 penetrability, it should be remembered in what a school 
 he was tried. The ideal which he ascribed to " Osman " 
 was his own : " Let it be set down to the praise of 
 Osman that he had a humanity so broad and deep that, 
 though his nature was so subtly fine as to disgust all 
 men with his refinements and spider-spinnings, yet 
 there was never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane 
 
 
100 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 man, some fool with a beard, or a mutilation, or pet 
 madness in his brain, but fled at once to him — that 
 great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the 
 centre of the country. And the madness which he 
 harbored he did not share." 
 
 The reserve of Emerson is to be looked at in the 
 light of this ideal, which he realized in his human re- 
 lations with the truly poor, with the maimed, the de- 
 spised and rejected, the feeble, and the unhappy ; no 
 man did his duty better by them in this world. His 
 habitual demeanour, the tranquillity, the placidity, the 
 unmoved calm of his spirit, was the most medicinal of 
 traits in such an office ; though founded on his natural 
 reserve and sustained by his aristocratic force in which 
 there were large elements of fastidiousness, of silent 
 repulsions, and even a marked strain of haughtiness, 
 yet it must also be thought that education bore a part 
 in building up that absolute self-possession and com- 
 mand, that self -containment, which was as much a 
 thing of choice as of necessity and was the strength of 
 his character ; a thousand influences playing upon him 
 daily for years taught him to refrain. 
 
 There was, of course, as years went by and his fame 
 spread, an increasing stream of those who put in an 
 appearance by letters only, with gratitude or for 
 counsel. To these appeals Emerson was courteously 
 attentive, and in several cases he is known to have taken 
 great pains for these distant and strange correspondents 
 and to have maintained a long interest in them. In gen- 
 eral, he was not a good letter- writer, not interesting and 
 fluent ; his letters to Carlyle, by which his correspon- 
 dence is best known, are composed rather than written ; 
 like most of his important letters, they were drafted 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 101 
 
 and copied. In connection with this rather singular 
 circumstance, however, it should be recalled that 
 Emerson was Dot accustomed to straightaway writing ; 
 he never composed with a running pen; the lecture or 
 essay was a mosaic and composite product, a recombi- 
 nation and not a first creation ; it was in his political 
 addresses that he is most forthright in style. The 
 letters to Carlyle are the memorial of the most illus- 
 trious of his distant friendships, and indeed the only 
 such friendship of importance. It was a very perfect 
 type of Emerson's mode of friendship on both the 
 practical and reflective side, and in the published record 
 of it the two phases are amply illustrated. He was inex- 
 haustible in actual service and gave an attention to the 
 interests of Carlyle in America, both in publication 
 and income, that involved much patient trouble and 
 even sacrifice for himself, and he was also always ready 
 with praise and courage for his friend, with pride in 
 him, and with affectionate solicitude in the things 
 of private life. The two men so profoundly con- 
 trasted were deeply attached each in his own way. As 
 time went on, it was plainly Emerson who came to 
 care less for the expression of friendship, and found 
 that it sufficed him as a silent treasure : he seems less 
 warm in contrast with his friend, and to abate some- 
 what, whereas in the beginning it had been the other 
 way ; and age coming upon both, the letters naturally 
 ceased. The portrait of Carlyle, however, hanging in 
 the study, was perhaps its most prized treasure, and to 
 the end of Emerson's days that face was always, in his 
 last words full of proud affection as his mind was 
 fading, " my man." 
 
 The varied course of these years at home was 
 
102 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 broken by Emerson's second visit to England and 
 France. He bad been invited to lecture in England 
 and after mucb hesitation be decided to go. He 
 sailed on October 5, 1847, and landed at Liverpool. 
 Mr. Alexander Ireland was bis principal adviser and 
 helper, and under bis guidance be lectured in many 
 provincial towns and also in London and Edinburgh. 
 He was well received, drew public attention and inter- 
 ested audiences, and succeeded in tbe same way as in 
 America, but to a greater degree. There was in his 
 hearers the mental astonishment and vague under- 
 standing that he awoke in his own country, but 
 shining through this were the authority of the spirit- 
 ual meaning, the person of Emerson with. its visionary 
 fascination, and the charm of the sentences, each appar- 
 ently so lucid in itself but dazzling the understanding 
 in the mystery of their combination. He spoke natu- 
 rally, without any attempt at effect, just as he stood 
 before the audience in his native angularity and thin- 
 ness, and the truths he read in his clear and nasal 
 voice, without intonation or other elocution than enun- 
 ciation, made the oration. The audiences were at first 
 startled, then pleased, and even became enthusiastic 
 at times, in his reception. He made an excellent 
 impression by his sincerity and elevation, and perhaps 
 by his boldness as well as by the literary strength of 
 his discourse, and he increased his reputation in Eng- 
 land where he had long had readers. He was also 
 much taken out of himself and his solitary ways. He 
 stayed much in private houses and was probably never 
 so mixed with human society in his life. He was re- 
 ceived with endless kindness everywhere. In London 
 Carlyle welcomed him, and with his aid and that of 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 103 
 
 Bancroft and others he saw much, of England and the 
 English, in the literary and aristocratic portions of 
 society as well as in the middle class. He enjoyed the 
 attention shown him, especially as a means of meeting 
 men, which was always his principal desire in travel. 
 His mind was more alert and open than during his 
 former stay abroad, and was thoroughly hospitable. 
 He was, in general, greatly pleased with the English 
 as a nation of strong practicality and infinite resource 
 in material civilization; he made the usual limitations 
 to which his mind was accustomed, which had their 
 ground in his own spirituality and the democratic 
 training of his birth and life; his eyes were not 
 abashed or confused or disturbed by any object of great- 
 ness, the things of trade or rank, or fame or brilliance 
 in reputation, but he was quick to recognize their 
 worth, though his scale was his own ; he imposed his 
 judgment, and it was naturally the old judgment, as 
 for example that there was "no religion" in England, 
 and that men were less than they should be, and that, 
 whatever might be his admiration, he had little sympa- 
 thy or attachment. Carlyle and Emerson met infre- 
 quently, and hot always, it is said, with pleasure; the 
 violence of the one and the ethereality of the other 
 were incongruous ; but they were old friends, who, 
 secure of each other's real respect and affection, 
 agreed to differ, and they made a journey together 
 toward the end. The gentle ways of Leigh Hunt and 
 the refinement of De Quincey pleased Emerson ; but 
 the men of letters in general, like the other men of 
 mind, interested him but did not further attract him. 
 At Oxford he made another young friend, Arthur 
 Clough, who afterward followed him to Concord ; in 
 
104 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 Paris, whither he went for three weeks, the two dined 
 together often, and Clough was to him not unlike the 
 young men he had left at home, of whom Thoreau 
 was then taking care of his household. These months 
 when he was abroad were times of Chartism in England 
 and Revolution in Paris, and he was thus brought near 
 to the social phases of the system in those countries, 
 and this fact affected the character of his remarks upon 
 them. It was, altogether, the most rich experience of 
 society, and the only important one, that he ever had. 
 It must have been much, too, even for such an indi- 
 vidualist as himself, to be so assured of his place in the 
 world by public recognition. In his travelling, how- 
 ever, the old self continually reasserted its instincts 
 and habits ; he felt lost in the confusion and strain of 
 lectures; he missed his family, and longed for home, 
 and was glad when he arrived there toward the end 
 of July, 1848, after so fruitful and happy an ex- 
 cursion. 
 
 The Civil War, when it broke out in April, 1861, 
 found Emerson in the midst of a course of lectures in 
 Boston, and on the next occasion after the fall of Fort 
 Sumter he introduced a lecture in which he congratu- 
 lated the people upon the consolidation of the nation 
 in the cause and eloquently described the fervour of 
 the moment. The war, as it went on, brought to him 
 its privations as to others, lectures becoming practically 
 impossible and books not being salable ; the activity 
 of his practical life was broken ; but upon every proper 
 occasion he took part in the discussion of the topic of 
 the day. In the earlier years he spoke often on Sun- 
 days before the free congregation of Theodore Parker, 
 who had died. With regard to public affairs, he lee- 
 
in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 105 
 
 tured in Washington on Emancipation in February, 
 1862, and saw Lincoln and talked with him on the 
 subject of slavery. He spoke at the meeting in Bos- 
 ton on the issuing of the Proclamation of Emancipa- 
 tion in September of that year, and at the celebration 
 of the day when it went into effect, January 1, 1863, 
 he read his Boston Hymn. He also spoke at Concord 
 on the occasion of Lincoln's death, and took part in 
 the welcome home of the Harvard soldiers on Com- 
 mencement Bay, 1865. Throughout' the war he was 
 deeply moved in his patriotic feelings and rejoiced in 
 it not only as a cause of civilization, but for its rein- 
 vigoration of the spirit of the people. The effect of 
 it upon his own thought was remarkable ; the anti- 
 social and anarchistic sentiments which were to be 
 plentifully found in his writings before this time 
 cease ; and in their place there is a powerful grasp 
 of the social unities embodied in the state as a main 
 source of the blessings of civilization. It is, however, 
 rather in his poetry that the sentiment of the war left 
 its mark. 
 
 Throughout all this period from 1836 to 1865, which 
 was the active portion of his life and included the 
 maturity of his genius, he published books, though at 
 infrequent intervals. Succeeding the volume entitled 
 Nature, the Phi Beta Kappa and Divinity School 
 Addresses had been separately issued. The first se- 
 ries of Essays appeared in 1841, both here and in 
 England ; the second series in 1844, also reprinted 
 there. The first collection of Poems was published 
 in 1847. There followed in turn Miscellanies, 1849, 
 Representative Men, 1850, English Traits, 1856, 
 The Conduct of Life, 1860. The last was the first 
 
106 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap, hi 
 
 book to have a ready sale, twenty-five hundred copies 
 being disposed of in a few days, and marked the 
 establishment of his popular vogue as an author. 
 Up to this time his reputation as a writer had been 
 perhaps equal in England to what it was in his own 
 country, owing to the influential introduction given 
 to him in that country by Carlyle and to the state of 
 liberal opinion there and to its organization ; and his 
 Essays were somewhat known in France, where Qui- 
 net especially had directed attention to him. Outside 
 of books he had published at first in the North Amer- 
 ican Review a few articles ; The Dial, and, much later, 
 Tlie Atlantic Monthly, received many contributions 
 from him, and ther.e had been some other sporadic 
 appearance of his ^papers and poems. He had also 
 joined in the Mertibirs of Margaret Fuller, and had 
 edited Thoreau's remains. Though he published later 
 volumes collected from his lectures, the original work 
 of his life was already completed by this date, and be- 
 longs to the literary period before the war. It is most 
 convenient to view it as a whole. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ESSAYS 
 
 The better mode of approaching Emerson's ideas is 
 to examine them, after his own method, as they arose 
 in his mind, not systematically, but as groups of re- 
 lated ideas about a few centres of thought. It is 
 proper to mention as preliminaries to his thinking the 
 predisposition of his mind to a religious interpretation 
 of life and his preoccupation with morals. These 
 were survivals in him of old religion and of his pro- 
 fessional habit and training, and sprang from a mix- 
 ture of heredity and education. He was by type a 
 New England minister, and he never lost the mould 
 either in personal appearance or in mental behaviour ; 
 all his ideas wear the black coat. He addressed 
 men from a .platform of superiority and spoke with 
 authority ; as a lecturer no less than as a preacher 
 in the Old North Church he was an " ambassador of 
 the Highest," and felt his profession. However he 
 may deprecate and disclaim, and say with Socrates 
 that he does not teach, but if any benefit by him the 
 god teaches them, he can no more lay aside the 
 assured and aggressive attitude of a believer in that 
 which alone is true and which he so declares, than he 
 could lay off the formality of his manners. It is to 
 as little use that he would sometimes take on the 
 countenance of Montaigne and seem a simple in- 
 
 107 
 
T 
 
 108 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 quirer, a man of many moods and committed to none 
 of them; there was not a fibre of scepticism in his 
 whole constitution. Montaigne held the ways of the 
 world and Emerson the ways of the spirit, and each 
 dealt freely with his own ; but in all his doings Em- 
 erson was dominated above his will by a faith so pure, 
 so absolute, so unquestioning that he could hardly 
 divide it from his consciousness of being. He was, 
 too, a man of one idea, the moral sentiment, though 
 the singleness of the idea was compatible in its appli- 
 cation to life with infinite diversity in its phases ; 
 wherever his theme may begin, it becomes religious, 
 he exhorts, and all ends at last in the primacy of 
 morals. The Essays are the best of lay-sermons ; but 
 their laicism is only the king's incognito. He was so 
 much a man of religion that he undervalued literature, 
 science, and art, and their chief examples, because 
 they viewed life from a different point, just as on his 
 first visit to England he thought Landor and Carlyle, 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, failed of the full measure 
 of men because they were not overwhelmingly filled 
 with the moral sentiment and its importance. In 
 both cases the view taken is professional. Literature 
 enters into the Essays as salt and savour ; but their 
 end is not literary. Emerson in the substance of his 
 work belongs with the divine writers, the religious 
 spiritualists, the sacred moralists, the mystic philoso- 
 phers, in whose hands all things turn to religion, to 
 whom all life is religion, and nothing moves in the 
 world except to divine meanings. 
 
 Although Emerson was not careful to coordinate 
 the several parts of his thought, they are not with- 
 out organic relations; and from the beginning, not- 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 109 
 
 withstanding his profession of unconcern for system, 
 he had in mind a vague intention of attempting a 
 statement of his philosophical views with some de- 
 gree of wholeness. The First Philosophy was his 
 name for the theory in its entirety, and he made some 
 trials at writing it down almost at the start; and 
 later he gathered some parts of the doctrine under 
 the title, The Natural History of Intellect; but he 
 never completed either of these schemes. Since the 
 days of Socrates ignorance is as • good a starting- 
 point as any for a philosopher ; and Emerson has one 
 profession of ignorance which is fundamental. "No 
 power of genius,' 7 he writes, "has ever yet had the 
 smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect 
 enigma remains." It is therefore not explicitly a 
 philosophy of the absolute that is offered, though the 
 absolute enters into it as an element. Inside the 
 sphere of ignorance lies existence as it is known to 
 man, and Emerson's thought always works within the 
 limits of human experience. The primary intuition 
 in his philosophy and initial point of all its develop- 
 ment may be stated in the formula, — I am, therefore 
 God is. The soul knows itself as an effect of which 
 the cause is God ; and cause and effect being consub- 
 stantial, and the one, as it were, but the obverse of 
 the other, God and the soul have an identical being. 
 Emerson conceives existence as energy ; uncircum- 
 scribed and formless it is God, conditioned and in the 
 finite it is the soul within and Nature without. It is 
 in all three one divine energy. The soul may be best 
 defined as a particular form of divine energy. Em- 
 erson describes it in terms as " a particle of God," and 
 says that it "becomes God." The identity of God 
 
110 EALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 and the soul in essential being is a fundamental tenet; 
 and if it be his " least-breathed-on thought," it is the 
 most precious of all and the centre of faith. The 
 soul's knowledge of God, however, is not self-know- 
 ledge, but is rather unfolded to human apprehension 
 separately and diversely as knowledge of that energy, 
 not ourselves, which has self -existence for its chief 
 trait and is operant in and upon the soul, but above 
 it. This self-existent energy, on the divine side, is 
 known under the phase of causation, of which the 
 soul is the effect, the phase of the eternal verities, 
 Truth, Beauty, and Virtue clothed with majesty and 
 instant authority over the soul, and the phase of law 
 operating in manifold ways but with perfect sway in 
 all being. In these several ways the soul stands in 
 defined connection with God, and is thought of, not 
 under the aspect of identity with, but as subject to 
 operation from, an energy superior to itself. The 
 mode of operation is termed an influx of deity into 
 the soul. This influx is variable and takes place at 
 moments definitely characterized. First, the moments 
 are memorable, landmarks of the soul, and have a far- 
 reaching and profound influence in the intervals of 
 lower life. Secondly, the soul during them is con- 
 scious of an unusual and immense fulness of life, feels 
 the exercise of its high nature and equal to all being ; 
 its private contritions are abolished, and all that was 
 temporal, carnal, and accidental is burned away in the 
 flame of the experience; it is clothed only incor- 
 ruptibly; it is armed with all power as if issuing 
 from omnipotence ; it truly lives. Thirdly, the soul 
 is touched with a certain mania, under the experience, 
 an enthusiasm, a ravishment, and this is most marked 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 111 
 
 in the supreme cases as known to us by report, such 
 as the trances of Socrates, the union of Plotinus, the 
 conversion of Paul, and similar experiences of Plo- 
 tinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Fox, and Swedenborg. 
 The influx of deity is also variable in amount, and 
 exists in degrees of more or less ; but its characteristic 
 marks are these, memorableness, excess of the sense of 
 life, mania. 
 
 The function of the soul with regard to this divine 
 influx is to receive, to be passive, to give unimpeded 
 way to the currents which stream though it ; any use 
 of volition or choice is an interference and obstruction ; 
 absolute receptivity is the state of excellence ; for this 
 inflowing is the presence of God, is the divine energy 
 active, is the dynamic of the soul. There are all de- 
 grees of it, in power. Those who receive the most are 
 the greatest men ; those who receive and also impart 
 the most are men of genius ; those who obstruct and 
 fail of reception are the wicked, for evil is simply the 
 privation of this presence and power. It comes to all 
 men, in its degree, and constitutes their true life. 
 The relation of men to God, so conceived as the " fast- 
 flowing vigour " or stream of eternal being, is set 
 forth under many images. The soul is always open 
 to God on one side, as earth is open to the infinite of 
 stars. The soul is like a man behind whose head an 
 unseen spirit stands and puts forth its power through 
 him. The soul is borne on divine being as on a stream 
 that enfolds it and animates it and pours it forward 
 through all experience. The soul is embosomed in it 
 as earth in the ether. It is the Over-Soul which thus 
 envelops, penetrates, and works. It is adult in the 
 infant ; it is all in every man ; it is that in which 
 
112 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 men have their common nature ; it is the source of all 
 wisdom and virtue, power and beauty, genius and love. 
 It loves silence and exaltation ; it reveals and thrills ; 
 it descends into men with entire possession. The soul 
 is, indeed, one with this power, and divine ; but the 
 Over-Soul is the boundless surplus of the soul's own 
 nature ; it is the infinite of the soul which is made the 
 element of the soul's being in the finite, where it is not 
 disunited from it but more interlaced. It is not, how- 
 ever, by metaphysical phrase that one best enters into 
 the meaning of Emerson, but by his devotional spirit. 
 What is essential to be understood in these passages is 
 the sense of the divine nature and origin of the soul, 
 the divine providence that attends it, the state of di- 
 vine trust proper to it, the divine exaltation of its 
 high moments increasing in their ascensions, the 
 divine power of genius and love, the divine appease- 
 ments of truth and beauty, the divine consummation 
 of virtue ; and gathering this manifold and infinite 
 divine into one, the Over-Soul, Emerson did but add 
 a new name to the world-names of God. 
 
 If Emerson's metaphysical reminiscences darken 
 counsel in his doctrine of the deity, other obstructive 
 fragments of old philosophy are found embedded in his 
 doctrine of the human soul. The soul is identical in 
 all men. Its essence is divine ; its human constitution 
 arises through that differentiation which is the process 
 of becoming in life. The soul, on the human side, is a 
 bundle of faculties, each of which predicts its element 
 as the fin of the fish predicts water ; it is also a locus 
 or place of images, ideas, and concepts of law, which 
 prophesy their correlatives in the universe. The 
 faculties exist before their operation; the images, 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 113 
 
 ideas, and concepts also exist before their development 
 in consciousness, on the dark film of the soul. The idea 
 of latency controls the entire theory. The soul is an un- 
 developed potentiality in which lies folded the whole. 
 In its essence it is a microcosm of God, for all of God 
 is in its divine substance; in its phenomena it is a mi- 
 crocosm of the world, " the compend of time and the 
 correlative of Nature," or in other words all the facts 
 of history preexist in the mind and all of Nature is 
 already charactered in the brain. It is but to vary 
 the phrase to say that all of humanity exists in every 
 man ; for each soul is not only the equal of every other 
 by virtue of an identical nature, but each soul also 
 contains potentially the entire universe of experience. 
 Life is the unfolding of the universe in it. The state 
 of the soul in life is a flux of experience on a ground 
 of unchangeable reality ; on the one side is the infinite 
 diversity, complexity, differentiation, particularization, 
 specializing of life in its extension, on the other side 
 intensively is the centrality of the soul's indivisible 
 self. The significance of these various ideas becomes 
 plainer by their application in detail to the process of 
 life. It suffices to recognize here the general notions 
 of identity and equality in the souls of all men, of 
 latency of power and of experience in the soul, of the 
 microcosm in several phases, of the flux, and of 
 the wholeness of the soul in itself. 
 
 The means by which the latency of the soul is un- 
 folded is Nature; and here again the miscellaneous 
 eclecticism of Emerson's thought brings heterogeneous 
 elements into the general scheme, and especially 
 Swede uborgian ideas. The relation of the soul to 
 Nature is parallel to its relation to God, in that there 
 
1U RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 is identity between the two and also operation of one 
 upon the other, but the operation is differently con- 
 ceived. It is set forth sometimes as an inflowing of 
 Nature from without upon the soul, sometimes as an 
 outflowing of the soul from within, which is then 
 said to create Nature. To the one corresponds the 
 metaphysical conception of Nature as the direct reali- 
 zation of God in the unconscious, the divine energy 
 known to the soul and acting upon it mediately, or 
 God as it were at one remove ; to the other corresponds 
 the metaphysical conception of Nature as put forth 
 through the soul and existing only in the soul's per- 
 ception or active energy. The simplest procedure, for 
 the exposition of Emerson's thought, is to begin with 
 the former view, under which Nature has an apparently 
 independent being. The constitution of Nature so con- 
 ceived is parallel to the constitution of the soul. The 
 doctrine of the microcosm is the first to emerge. All 
 of Nature exists in every part thereof, and the universe 
 is thus represented in every one of its particles with 
 all its powers ; or, by a variant statement, every part 
 is infinitely related to every other part and by virtue 
 of these relations contains the whole. There is thus 
 the same identity and equality between the parts of 
 Nature as between human souls, and each is a micro- 
 cosm of the universe. The idea of latency reappears 
 in the doctrine of the ascension of forms, that is, the 
 theory that the evolution of Nature proceeds by a pro- 
 gressive metamorphosis of lower into higher forms 
 which are already contained and predicted in the em- 
 bryo. The function of Nature is to unfold the soul. 
 It does this by virtue of the perfect correspondence of 
 Nature to the soul. At the contact of the two the 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 115 
 
 functions of the soul unlock and play each in its appro- 
 priate sphere, and also the images, ideas, and concepts 
 preexisting in the soul arise into consciousness and 
 become knowledge. The mental series exactly tallies 
 with the material series. The correspondence of the 
 material universe with the soul is not, however, limited 
 to a mere identity in the series. Facts are symbols of 
 ideas and laws, wherefore Nature is a vast emblem of 
 truth; this symbolical interpretation of Nature is the 
 larger part of its signification to men, and by it Nature 
 herself, as it were, ascends into mind and exists in a 
 higher sphere than materiality, that is, in the sphere 
 of truth. If anything is dark in Nature, so that the 
 correspondence seems to halt, it is because the faculty 
 which acts in that particular element yet sleeps in 
 man ; for the presence of the soul with Nature is not 
 enough ; it must be an efficient presence, and this effi- 
 ciency is the work of the Over-Soul which has in charge 
 the gradual unfolding of the soul. The becoming of 
 the soul is this process of the energizing of its latent 
 power and knowledge by the agency of Nature accord- 
 ing to the will of the Over-Soul. The soul is not left 
 to its own volition and choice, nor to the casualty of 
 Nature, but is in the hands of Providence. The Over- 
 Soul thus forever screens it from premature ideas, and 
 withdraws the veils only as the soul is prepared for 
 new experience. When by contact with Nature every 
 function of the soul is perfected in action, when the 
 latent consciousness is entirely drawn out and exposed 
 as knowledge, then will Nature be completely compre- 
 hended, and the correspondence will appear, as it is, 
 perfect; the mind and the mind's image will be one, 
 and will include all. 
 
116 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 Emerson brings forward quite as prominently the 
 other point of view under which the soul is said to 
 create Nature. He observes that "the intellectual 
 men do not believe in any essential dependence of 
 the material world on thought and volition." He, 
 however, does not himself elaborate this view, and is 
 apt to retire to the ground of common sense, as if the 
 air were difficult. He emphasizes the view rather in 
 dealing with modifications' and rearrangements of Na- 
 ture, as, for example, in invention, the practical arts, 
 and the changes effected by history ; ships and cities, 
 a military civilization or trade, are thus results of mind 
 and volition. The poet or the artisan, likewise, creates 
 the world he knows by virtue of his selection of the ele- 
 ments to which he attends and of which he builds his 
 consciousness with the stamp of individual choice; 
 this differencing of Nature in our apprehension of it 
 is thus a result of mind. Emerson does not realize 
 the theory much beyond this point, though he adopts 
 and repeats its easy formulas. That thought is prior 
 to fact is a maxim with him ; but as he approaches 
 the point where the elements of Nature are products 
 of mind by perception, and so far may be said to be 
 created in the act of knowing, he limits himself to thin 
 statements of the commonplaces of philosophical ideal- 
 ism, which principle did not have so varied an appli- 
 cation in his handling as his other fragmentary meta- 
 physical knowledge. The phenomenal aspect of Nature 
 did not really interest him philosophically ; the power 
 of religious faith was not here brought into play to 
 stimulate and fortify him. It was only the moral uses 
 of Nature that could hold his attention, and such parts 
 of philosophy as he could relate to these or to religion. 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 117 
 
 What is essential to observe is not the character of his 
 philosophical idealism or the degree of it, metaphysi- 
 cally, but his attachment to it as something that gave 
 room to his sense that the higher meaning even of 
 material things is spiritual, that all men's works in 
 however gross a sphere of the practical are neverthe- 
 less operations of the soul, that the soul is omnipres- 
 ent and omnipotent even in matter. 
 
 These are the centres of thought in Emerson's 
 philosophy. Even so summary and brief an exposi- 
 tion of them suffices, for on the intellectual side his 
 philosophy is little more than outline. In themselves 
 these ideas have small importance, relatively to what 
 is deduced from them. They are for the most part 
 fragments of old thought that have been long in the 
 world, like boulders left by the primeval streams of 
 man's intellect. They have not to Emerson himself 
 the positive value of ascertained truth which makes 
 up the body of men's knowledge; as metaphysics, 
 psychology, science, in the real sense, they are but 
 shreds and patches. Emerson had a certain scorn for 
 truly scientific knowledge akin to his contempt for 
 the process of reasoning, of argument and logic. 
 Science, in his conception of things, lives in an essen- 
 tially low plane of knowledge and becomes valuable 
 only when spiritualized, interpreted in its symbolic 
 senses, raised into the sphere of religion and morals. 
 Gravitation as such is a gross fact, but as the symbol 
 of something identical with it in a higher mode of 
 being in the soul it is a spiritual law. Ideas of 
 physics and the like are, therefore, to him mere raw 
 material, in their state as scientific knowledge, and 
 find their value in an ulterior use as interpreters of 
 
118 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 religion or exponents of ethics; they appeal to the 
 religious nature and there deliver their message. 
 All these centres of thought or ideas that have been 
 described, while they truly give a divine background 
 for the religious sense, find their practical use in the 
 moral support of life rather than in the realm of in- 
 tellectual truth. They are pegs to hang morals on. 
 That is the more general use he makes of them ; for 
 he refrained from much development of the mystical 
 side of the theory as being rather for the private and 
 unspoken experience of every man. Hence, far more 
 important than the ideas by means of which he did his 
 thinking are the primary counsels enunciated by him, v 
 which have a vast sweep in the realm of conduct, and 
 which he attached to these ideas, thus finding an intel- 
 lectual support for his ethical theory. It is in de- 
 veloping these counsels that he makes use of the ideas, 
 and he introduces the ideas essentially as subsidiaries 
 of the moral theme; they are the foundations and 
 supports of the structure ; but his mind does not rest 
 in them intellectually, however it may have done so 
 devotionally ; it passes into the moral sense and there 
 only displays its characteristic force. 
 
 The first of these primary counsels may be termed 
 the doctrine of acquiescence. In its simplest form it 
 embodies the command to submit the soul passively to y 
 the influx of divine energy from God ; but in the ex- 
 position it receives a vast extension and is made to 
 cover well-nigh the whole of life. The Over-Soul is 
 not only a vigour that streams incessantly into the 
 human soul, with higher and lower tides ; it also 
 discharges another office which is best indicated by 
 its other name, the Over- Will. It is providence ; and 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 119 
 
 under this aspect such, is its scope that the human 
 will becomes insignificant and impertinent. "What 
 am I ? What has my will done to make me that I 
 am ? Nothing," saj^s Emerson. " I have been floated 
 into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, 
 by secret currents of might and mind, and my in- 
 genuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not 
 aided, to an appreciable degree." This providence 
 acts most obviously and on the lowest plane by limi- 
 tation fixed in environment and structure, in organi- 
 zation that tyrannizes over character, in the forms 
 of the spine, the bill of the bird, the skull of the 
 snake, in race, climate, sex, temperament, in the laws 
 of specialization of functions, in the use that Nature 
 makes of means. Here, in the grosser part of the 
 field, Emerson presents limitation as an aspect of 
 Nature herself, and calls it Circumstance or Fate. 
 In the other parts he refers the operation to the Over- 
 Will. It is seen in the occurrence of events on the 
 large scale, which are above man's will and thrust 
 upon him; even when he has an apparent share in 
 them, as in history, his cooperation is slight. There 
 is less intention in history than we ascribe to it, and 
 the greatest captains build altars to Fortune. It is 
 seen again in the internal constitution of our facul- 
 ties. The images in the mind have a rank that we did 
 not give them, an order independent of our volition. 
 Thinking itself precedes the age of reflection, and 
 goes on of itself in the infant and child and lays 
 the foundations of conscious intellect. When we dis- 
 cern justice or truth, we do nothing of ourselves but 
 allow a passage to the beam. In the realm of char- 
 acter it is the Over-Soul which publishes our true 
 

 
 120 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 selves to the world, above our consciousness and our 
 will. In works of genius and art it is that which the 
 poet knows not of, and the artist embodies without 
 being aware of it, which is the better part. 
 
 The Over-Soul throws about man these veils of the 
 unconscious and removes them at will. "God de- 
 lights," says Emerson, "to isolate us every day and 
 hide from us the past and the future. ' You will not 
 remember/ he seems to say, 'and you will not ex- 
 pect.' " There is much contingency, we thrive by 
 casualties, and our chief experiences have been casual. 
 The results of life are uncalculated and incalculable. 
 The individual is always mistaken. It is ill to in- 
 dulge much in design. All comes by the grace of 
 God, — writing, doing, having ; and with his " heart set 
 on honesty," he concludes, " I can see nothing at last 
 in success or failure than more or less of vital force 
 supplied from the Eternal/' The great error is to 
 interfere. Prayer, in the ordinary use, is a disease of 
 the will. Prayer that craves a private good, a par- 
 ticular commodity, " is vicious " ; it is " meanness and 
 theft." Any interference of the will with our moral 
 nature vitiates it. There is no merit in striving 
 with temptation. The interference of the intellect is 
 equally superfluous and leads to mistake. Creeds are 
 a disease of the intellect. Thus through the whole 
 field of experience, in fate and history and character 
 and genius, in our faculties and their conduct, and in 
 the fortune of life, so large is the element of the 
 Over- Will and the unconscious that man's part shrinks 
 to the inappreciable. And Emerson concludes in a 
 strain often repeated, of which one example will 
 suffice, and that much abridged: — 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 121 
 
 " We need only obey. Why need you choose so painfully 
 your place, and occupation, and associates, and modes of 
 action and of entertainment? Place yourself in the middle 
 of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom 
 it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to 
 right, and a perfect contentment. If we will not be mar- 
 plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, 
 letters, arts, science, religion of men, would go on far better 
 than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of 
 the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, 
 would organize itself as do now the rose and the air and 
 the sun. I say, do not choose." 
 
 Choice is a partial act. Obey, and let your constitu- 
 tion choose, for that is where the divine currents flow, 
 making you to be what you are, determining the soul 
 as a whole toward its goal. In the constitution of the 
 soul .acquiescence and choice are one, the blending of 
 man's will with the will of God, the rise of spontaneity 
 in the place of human volition. 
 
 So the doctrine changes colour under our hands, and 
 by a kind of metamorphosis out of the soul's acquies- 
 cence springs what is the greatest of all the virtues in 
 Emerson's scale, self-reliance, whose mode of action is 
 by spontaneity ; and, indeed, to a reflective mind there 
 is a hard logic which requires that what is Intuition 
 in knowledge must be Impulse in action. Intuition 
 and Impulse are twins ; they are the Janus faces of 
 one image. Spontaneity is thus a new chord on which 
 Emerson repeats the familiar strain, and remoulds 
 the same ideas that were employed in developing the 
 counsel of acquiescence. He uses the naine, self-re- 
 liance, specifically to insulate the soul, and draws out 
 more particularly the negative powers of the virtue to 
 protect the soul against external influences. It is 
 
 
122 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 from this post of vantage that he attacks tradition, 
 authority, and institutions. He rouses all the native 
 egotism of the individual. All souls are equal one 
 with another ; and this declaration is not a glittering 
 generality, but is most literally taken. It is most 
 strikingly exhibited in his attitude toward great men. 
 What Plato has thought, any soul can think. The 
 slip of a boy in a corner reading Shakespeare, knows 
 that the English king was himself in another form, 
 and has his pleasure in feeling this identity. Any 
 man is as pertinent as Homer or Epaminondas. One 
 should not overestimate the possibilities of Paul and 
 Pericles or underestimate his own, since all are of 
 the same stock. The relation of men virtually is not 
 with other men but with God, who is the source of all 
 truth and power. The soul radiates from God directly ; 
 and hence there is no progress as a line of descent 
 from great men, and the race does not so advance, but 
 character and genius in later times do not excel the 
 types of the antique world ; and hence, too, it is that 
 all great men are seen to be unique, such that none 
 could have had a man for his teacher, but rather is he 
 protected from the over-influence of others and grows 
 up in the shade and obscurity. Each man has some 
 peculiarity in his constitution which makes him a new 
 creature with a value of his own, and this is sacrificed 
 and nullified by deference to the ways and thoughts 
 of others. The equality of the soul is real. A man 
 does not derive truth from Plato ; but from the Over- 
 Soul whence Plato himself received it, he too receives 
 it; for truth is immanent in the mind and thence 
 drawn out : it does not come from without, it is latent. 
 Authority therefore is only given by the inward and 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 123 
 
 private warrant, and cannot possibly belong to any 
 thing external, whether man or creed or institution. 
 
 This doctrine underlies Emerson's theory of history. 
 In his view all history is only the private man's biog- 
 raphy writ large. As the mind in perceiving Nature 
 creates it, so in apprehending history the mind gives 
 it reality ; and as all of Nature exists latently in the 
 soul, so all of history preexists in the mind. Man can 
 live all history in his own person. "I can find," 
 says Emerson, "Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the 
 Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each 
 and all eras in my own mind;" and again, "There 
 is properly no history, only biography ; every mind 
 must know the whole lesson for itself, must go over 
 the whole ground ; what it does not see, what it does 
 not live, it will not know." He conceives of history 
 not as a series of events in past time, but as the 
 knowledge which the individual mind realizes in itself 
 in the present. There is nothing more characteristic 
 of his whole mode of thinking than his abolition of 
 time, — " This wild, savage, and preposterous There or 
 Then." He sees the denial of time, for example, in the 
 quality of classicism, that is, that one man seems to have 
 written all the books ; in the appeal of old truths and 
 ancient works of art continuously valid in the soul, and 
 in the appeal of heroic actions to the moral sense of 
 every generation and race. The present alone is ; 
 here all Nature, all history, all truth are; in other 
 words, the universe is totally comprised in the ex- 
 perience of the individual under the single formula 
 of subjectivity. The insulation of the soul is thus 
 complete. Perfect solitude is its habitat. Yet the 
 illusion of time is so powerful that nothing is more 
 

 
 124 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 important in practice than to guard against it, and 
 especially against those forms of it under which ex- 
 ternal authority encroaches upon the soul's domain by 
 means of the fame of great men, the consent of the 
 old councils, and the powerful institutions of the race. 
 Equally to be rejected are the more tender influences 
 of friends and comrades, of family and all intimate 
 bonds. A man shall preserve his integrity at any 
 cost. He shall be free even of his own past, and re- 
 gard consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds. 
 By virtue of his identity with men he is the equal of 
 all others ; by virtue of his identity with God he has 
 a private and direct access to all truth, beauty, and 
 goodness ; by his constitution all knowledge is latent 
 in his mind, all experience is there preexistent, and 
 if he will but obey his constitution, and look for no 
 support elsewhere, the Over-Soul will providentially 
 develop in him all that is his, and bring to him his 
 own. To believe on insight, which is Intuition, and 
 f o act spontaneously, which is Impulse, constitute 
 ".elf -reliance, in the positive sense ; to reject the past 
 n all its forms, as authority, and maintain toward it 
 a sovereign attitude, is the negative and precautionary 
 side of the virtue. 
 
 Acquiescence, spontaneity, and self-reliance, never- 
 theless, do not exhaust the active virtue of the soul. 
 Action requires another and a crowning grace ; it 
 should have abandonment. Upon the passive or 
 receptive side it has been already observed that the 
 relation with the Over-Soul is characterized in the high 
 examples by mania, — visions, trances, epilepsies ; 
 abandonment, in Emerson's use of the word, signifies 
 a corresponding excitement on the active side of the 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 125 
 
 same relation, — a certain madness or ecstasy in the 
 energy put forth. The theory of ecstasy, or an obliv- 
 ion of ends in the surplusage of overflowing vigor, con- 
 sidered as the method of Nature, has been sufficiently 
 touched on in a preceding chapter. Nature instructs 
 man not only by this general fact, but in detail. She 
 sends no creature, no man, into the world without 
 adding a small excess of his proper quality. No man 
 is quite sane, but each has some determination of blood 
 to the head to hold him to the point which Nature 
 desires. Over-faith, over-importance are necessary to 
 the conduct of reforms. In larger matters every in- 
 tellectual man learns that besides his own and con- 
 scious power he is capable of a new energy by aban- 
 donment to the nature of things, such that then he is 
 " caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is 
 thunder, his thought is law, and his words are uni- 
 versally intelligible as the plants and animals." 
 The poet especially speaks adequately only when he 
 speaks " somewhat wildly." Men avail themselves of 
 such means as they can to add this extraordinary 
 power to their own, and hence love wine, opium, 
 fumes, or false intoxication, and follow gaming or 
 war to ape in some manner the enthusiasm of the 
 heart. "The one thing we seek with insatiable 
 desire," says Emerson, " is to do something without 
 knowing how or why. Nothing great was ever achieved 
 without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful ; 
 it is by abandonment." It is the same on the social 
 scale. The great movements of history have been 
 the enthusiasms of mankind for an idea ; the great 
 religions have been "the ejaculations of a few im- 
 aginative men." 
 
126 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 Ecstasy, therefore, which attends any great dis- 
 closure of religious truth or the flood of ideas in any 
 field, and which in the poet and the saint has its 
 most glowing individual force, is not to be regarded 
 as exceptional and dubious, but as fundamental and 
 one of the higher laws. " I hold," says EmersoD, 
 "that ecstasy will be found normal, or only an 
 example on a higher plane of the same gentle gravita- 
 tion by which stones fall and rivers run." It is to 
 be aimed at in conduct, and is only a name for the 
 excess, or higher degree, of spontaneity and self- 
 reliance and acquiescence, the extreme of those, as in 
 martyrs and conquerors and prophets, and in men 
 who obey an inner impulse absolutely in spite of the 
 oppositions and appearances of things. Ecstasy, or 
 abandonment, is the measure of the vital force of the 
 spirit in men, its self-assertive and self-neglectful 
 power ; and in proportion to its fulness is its scorn of 
 consequences. The largest release of the divine energy 
 is the end. Its sensual form is in the orgiastic sects, 
 the dervish and the maenad ; its spiritual form is in the 
 illuminate of every age and race ; its practical form 
 is in the conquerors who follow their star, leaders of 
 crusades and scourges of God, men raised up to 
 hew the heathen or advance the crescent. In lesser 
 men all those who are drunk with a belief, or absorbed 
 in a faculty, obey it. It is the fatal drop which added 
 to life makes it a cup of intoxication. Such is the 
 weakness of men that few in any age avail themselves 
 of the greatening power of abandonment ; but these 
 are those who accomplish the fates and works of the 
 race, — empires, religions, poems. 
 
 Thus the wisdom of life when summed lies in a 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 127 
 
 complete and enthusiastic surrender to God alone, 
 such that every thought and act shall give free course 
 to the divine, streaming into the soul and energizing 
 there under the control of the Over-Will. It was a 
 happy suggestion of one of Emerson's commentators 
 that what he called self-reliance was God-reliance j for 
 the difficulty of the negation of the egoistic will, which 
 is commonly thought of as the substance of self-reli- 
 ance, is thus avoided. The elimination of the personal 
 will, which Emerson advises, is strongly supported by 
 his doctrine of the indifferency of means to an end. 
 This is a development from the idea of the microcosm. 
 Since the soul contains the whole within itself and 
 moves to its manifestation in knowledge, it is indiffer- 
 ent at what point development begins or in what order 
 the process goes on ; just as in Nature, all of the uni- 
 verse being in each part and related to every other 
 part, it is indifferent whether one learns from this or 
 from that, for finally the whole will appear. The doc- 
 trine of indifferency is given immense extension also 
 by the idea that Nature is a symbolization of truth, 
 and hence any part of Nature can yield up not only 
 natural but moral knowledge and be employed for 
 the interpretation of any portion of the field. " I can 
 symbolize my thought by using the name of any 
 creature, of any fact," says Emerson ; and again, 
 " each new form repeats not only the main character of 
 the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, 
 furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system 
 of every other ; " and, more broadly of human life, 
 "every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a eoni- 
 pend of the world and a correlative of every other. 
 Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its 
 
128 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course, and its 
 end." So the "true doctrine of omnipresence is that 
 God reappears with all his parts in every moss and 
 cobweb," or the " value of the universe continues to 
 throw itself into every point." The universality of the 
 symbolic language thus makes the task of the poet 
 easy. " The poorest experience is rich enough for all 
 the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a 
 knowledge of new facts? Day and night, a house and 
 garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as 
 would all trades and all spectacles." The poet is the 
 true scientist because he uses all facts as signs and 
 " rides on them as the horses of thought." What the 
 poet can do all men can do ; the universal language of 
 Nature is in each word of it a key to all her meanings, 
 and the soul wherever it may be is in possession of it. 
 The situation of the soul is therefore indifferent ; it is 
 sovereign and has the full powers of sovereignty and 
 all the means of knowledge in every place. There is 
 thus no reason for preference ; one position in life is 
 as good as another. The doctrine of the equality of 
 souls is thus supplemented by the doctrine of the 
 equivalence of conditions ; and these two taken in 
 connection with the doctrine that the order of the pro- 
 cess of development is a matter of indifference, make 
 a sufficient ground for the relinquishment by the soul 
 of any volition, properly speaking. The annihilation 
 of the will is brought about by the denial of its 
 function. 
 
 Emerson's name for tnis indifferency in circum- 
 stances is the law of compensation. The world is dual, 
 as is seen in the general scientific fact of polarity ; and 
 every part is dual, since the entire system gets repre- 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 129 
 
 sented in every, particle, so that "there is somewhat 
 that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and 
 night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, 
 in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal 
 tribe." This duality, however, is only an aspect of 
 unity, for the parts are fatally linked, and one cannot 
 be had without the other ; no loss without the gain, no 
 wit without the folly, no crime without the punish- 
 ment. The divergence, the separation, the opposition, 
 are only apparent; life is an integration of the two 
 elements, and the law of compensation lies in the 
 necessity of the integration. Man cannot have a part, 
 but must take the whole. The error of the understand- 
 ing is in thinking that the sweet can be possessed 
 without the bitter, the sensual without the moral, one 
 side of nature without the other side. Our action is 
 overmastered above our will by the law of Nature, 
 which integrates a whole out of the two parts, and this 
 integrating action is Nemesis, a power to add penalty 
 to the wrong-doing and a power to add happiness to 
 the suffering. The law, however, does not apply to 
 the soul's own nature, for in it there is no duality; it 
 is real being and not a part of Nature, and in all its 
 affirmative action it creates, it adds to the world ; 
 virtue, wisdom, are "proper additions of being." 
 There remains, therefore, the obligation to affirm the 
 soul as a power which increases, while the modes of 
 its increase in the special conditions that surround it 
 should be left to the providence that enfolds it and 
 flows into it and determines its process by a higher 
 law, — a law, that is, above man's will. 
 
 The proper action of the soul is further defined by 
 what in the lack of a better name may be styled the 
 
130 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 doctrine of the wholeness. No part of Emerson's 
 theory is more fundamental, and none is more char- 
 acteristic. The soul is not itself a faculty, like the 
 intellect or the will ; but is that which uses these 
 faculties. If it acts partially by one faculty, it is 
 liable to error ; but if it acts with its whole nature, it 
 cannot err. This is another mode of saying that if a 
 man obeys his constitution, he will be in the right. 
 Here is Emerson's only sanction of morality; "the 
 only right is what is after my constitution, the only 
 wrong what is against it." A man cannot violate his 
 own nature, in any case ; but error lies in setting up 
 one part of it by itself. The blindness of the intel- 
 lect, the weakness of the will, begin when each would 
 be something of itself. The same idea is present in 
 the maxim that there is a descent when men leave 
 speaking of the moral nature to urge a particular vir- 
 tue which it enjoins; for the soul lives in the region 
 and source of all virtues, and is above the particular 
 virtues, such as justice and benevolence ; virtue in the 
 abstract is innate and immanent, it is only necessary 
 to speak to the heart, and the man "becomes sud- 
 denly virtuous." In applying the doctrine what 
 emerges is a certain warfare or opposition of the uni- 
 versal and particular in life. The soul is by its nature 
 universal, and is then in the right course when it 
 moves toward the universals, — Virtue, Beauty, Truth ; 
 but in life, putting on limitations, it stands in peril 
 by the fact that it moves to particular ends. 
 
 Following the method of ecstasy, as has been set 
 forth in treating of Nature, the soul like Nature 
 should be indifferent to ends. An end is a finality, a 
 cul-de-sac of the soul, and once arrived there the soul 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 131 
 
 so far perishes, since all power ceases in the moment 
 of repose. Finalities are therefore to be avoided. 
 Specialization of all kinds is a sort of finality. The 
 man, as was set forth in the Phi Beta Kappa Address, 
 by becoming a particular sort of man, a mechanic, a 
 politician, a doctor, ends in so dwarfing his nature 
 that he becomes as it were a tool ; he is no longer a 
 complete man, but partial and ever growing less. It 
 is the same with reforms and all particularities of 
 method ; it is better not to commit oneself to agencies, 
 but to begin higher up at the source of reform by be- 
 ing oneself a man of moral power. It is the same 
 with books : one should not rest in them, but out- 
 grow them, and leave them behind. It is the same 
 with all works of art : the best pictures soon tell all 
 their secret, and when you have seen one well, you 
 must take your leave of it. It is the same with per- 
 sons: our affections are tents of a night, and the heart 
 rises through them to impersonal loves. Performance 
 and individual relations, in other words, contain final- 
 ity ; and if the mind rests in achievement of its own, 
 or narrows its energies toward achievement, it becomes 
 confined and partial ; or if it rests in the achievement 
 of others, as books or works of art, it limits itself in 
 a similar way and becomes bound. Life is a continual 
 freeing of the soul, the summing of a total power. 
 We value total qualities as we grow older, character 
 above performance ; and we are disappointed in men, 
 especially men of genius, because their works are not 
 a symphony of all their powers, but the product of 
 some overgrown talent. 
 
 The quality of life is not finality, but to be forever 
 initial. All the virtues are initial, all thought is 
 
132 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 initial; even art, so far as it has value, is initial by 
 means of the universalizing power it contains. Hence 
 it is not ends that count, not what is accomplished ; 
 but the value of action lies wholly in the tendency 
 shown, the direction given, the increase of power 
 brought about, the exercise of the soul in its whole 
 nature and toward the sphere of the universal. That 
 sphere is very close. "It seems not worth while," 
 says Emerson, " to execute with too much pains some 
 one intellectual or sesthetical or civil feat, when pres- 
 ently the dream will scatter and we shall burst into 
 universal power. " It is our servitude to particulars 
 that betrays us into foolish expectations of immediate 
 changes in the world, of regeneration worked by loco- 
 motives or balloons, by enactments of law, mechanical 
 social devices, or electromagnetism. This "hankering 
 after an overt practical effect" is an "apostasy." "I 
 am very content with knowing, if only I could know." 
 One should not be cowed by the name of Action, as 
 if the mind needed " an outside badge," a prayer- 
 meeting, a great donation or a high office, "to testify 
 it is somewhat." Action, in other words, has too 
 much of the particular in its nature, and enslaves. 
 To escape the particular without, and the correspond- 
 ing specialization and limitation of the soul within, 
 is the path of wisdom. Facts, ideas, persons, as par- 
 ticulars, are a clog and hindrance ; they are serviceable 
 only as they cease to be final and become initial ; when 
 facts give up their symbolic meaning and the scientist 
 becomes the poet, when ideas lead upward from phys- 
 ical to moral laws, when persons release our love till 
 it leaves them and is changed into worship of the 
 highest, when books and works of art and things of 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 133 
 
 beauty enfranchise us from themselves into the uni- 
 versal world, then they perform true service. 
 
 In the flux of the world, where all is movement and 
 transition, to stand still is the one peril ; and it is in 
 these particulars that fixation has its seat and throne. 
 Such fixation resides in all creeds, in the person of 
 Christ, for example, in the masterhood of Aristotle, in 
 the dominion of the church ; or in pictures and statues 
 that make an academic tradition ; or in science which 
 is content to be only classified knowledge of material 
 things ; or in social reforms embodied in institutions 
 and rules ; or in the persons of our friends to whom 
 we are humanly attached for themselves. But move- 
 ment is the law of life, to go on, to change, to ascend. 
 The ideal aim is to preserve the wholeness of the soul 
 from this dispersion, and its energy from this arrest in 
 particulars ; to value tendency above accomplishment, 
 power above results, being above doing ; and so to 
 seek after and live in the universal more and more, 
 where alone is the infinite into which the soul 
 must itself unfold. What is primary in the doc- 
 trine of the wholeness is the infinite nature of the 
 soul, its innate opposition to finite ends and finite 
 things, and the necessity it is under to keep its effort 
 single and its total being directed away from things 
 finite toward the universal ; or if it must engage itself 
 with them, to pass through them as temporalities. 
 
 Such, then, being the nature of action in its broad 
 outlines, what is experience ? It is a swift succession 
 in which there is an evanescence and lubricity of all 
 objects, which is " the most unhandsome part of our 
 condition." It is a series of illusions, governed much 
 by temperament, as to their character in each indi- 
 
134 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 vidual, and if deceptive, yet educative. It is a move- 
 ment through moments and surfaces, wherefore it is 
 wisdom to make the most of every moment, to accept 
 the condition temporarily existing, and to live always 
 with respect to the present. In this general flux of 
 all things and procession of the moods of the soul, 
 the reality is the unity within, the soul, which surfers 
 no co-life of anything else with itself but escapes from 
 all partiality, even from personal love and friendship 
 and returns to the universal and impersonal, to 
 the contemplation and the energy of God. The test 
 of true living is always on that side of the soul which 
 is turned toward the universal, not on that which looks 
 to the finite, and it contains a mystical element, a sense 
 of revelation and of privacy with God. With regard 
 to the great intuitions, Emerson describes the test 
 thus : " When good is near you, when you have life in 
 yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way ; 
 you shall not discern the footprints of any other ; 
 you shall not see the face of man ; you shall not hear 
 any name ; the way, the thought, the good, shall be 
 wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example 
 and experience." With respect to thought, he uses 
 slightly different phrases: "We do not determine 
 what we will think. We only open our senses, clear 
 away, as we can, all obstructions from the fact, and 
 suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over 
 our thoughts ; we are the prisoners of ideas. They 
 catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully 
 engage us that we take no heed for the morrow, gaze 
 like children without an effort to make them our own. 
 By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us 
 where we have been, what we have seen, and repeat 
 
it.] THE ESSAYS 135 
 
 as truly as we can what we have beheld. As far as 
 we can recall these ecstasies, we carry away in the 
 ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all 
 the ages confirm it. It is called Truth." Or in yet 
 another mode : " When I converse with a profound 
 mind, or if at any time being alone I have good 
 thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as 
 when being thirsty I drink water, or go to the fire 
 being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my 
 vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By 
 persisting to read or to think, this region gives fur- 
 ther sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sud- 
 den discoveries of its profound beauty and repose. . . . 
 But every insight from this realm of thought is felt 
 as initial and promises a sequel. I do not make it ; 
 I arrive there, and behold what was there already. 
 I make ! no ! I clap my hands with infinite joy and 
 amazement before the first opening of this august 
 magnificence, old with the love and homage of in- 
 numerable ages, young with the life of life, the sun- 
 bright Mecca of the desert. " 
 
 The act of. intending the mind, of persisting in the 
 contemplation, of setting siege as it were to the di- 
 vine, is the method belonging to this knowledge. The 
 issue of such experience is into the universal. "I 
 am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the 
 imperfect, adore my own Perfect, I am somehow re- 
 ceptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook 
 the sun and the stars, and feel them to be the fair ac- 
 cidents and effects which change and pass. More and 
 more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me. . . . 
 So come I to live in thoughts and act with energies 
 which are immortal." An unspeakable trust is begot- 
 
136 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 ten ; the soul is sure that its welfare is dear to the heart 
 of being ; that it cannot escape from good ; that every- 
 thing which belongs to it — wisdom, friends, events — 
 shall come home to it by open or winding passages. 
 The soul rises to the last knowledge, that of the eter- 
 nal One. " This deep power in which we exist, and 
 whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self- 
 sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of see- 
 ing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, are 
 one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the 
 moon, the animal, the tree ; but the whole, of which 
 these are the shining parts, is the soul." 
 
 The soul, therefore, through Nature, the instrument 
 of its evolution, is really self-evolved, and so intimate 
 is this union with Nature in the operation that the 
 soul is hardly to be distinguished in its energy from 
 the energy of Nature. The passage which best ex- 
 presses this holds in fusion many ideas that have 
 been separated in this exposition, and well illustrates 
 the habitual presence of Emerson's whole mind in all 
 he wrote : — 
 
 " Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a 
 thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is 
 mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escap- 
 ing again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue 
 and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, 
 whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man 
 crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. 
 That power which does not respect quantity, which makes 
 the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its 
 smile to the morning and distils its essence into every drop 
 of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object ; for 
 wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured 
 into us as blood ; it convulsed us as pain ; it slid into us as 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 137 
 
 pleasure ; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days or in days 
 of cheerful labor ; we did not guess its essence until after 
 a long time." 
 
 This, if one were to give it a name, is a kind of psychic 
 animism. 
 
 Indeed, it is rather in his theory of Nature than in 
 his theory of God that Emerson astonishes and per- 
 plexes the mind. The language and moods of pan- 
 theism have been long familiar to men ; the eulogy 
 of the soul, the mystery of its states, its exaltations, 
 are a twice-told tale in all religious writings ; but in 
 the theory of Nature, as set forth by Emerson, there 
 is something less ordinary, though not without copious 
 illustrations in mystical writers. It is not that Nature 
 is presented subjectively as a modification of human 
 consciousness, in the formulas of philosophical ideal- 
 ism ; but that, within the limits of subjectivity, Nature 
 is again as it were taken out of her proper sphere, and 
 by the principle of symbolization her phenomenal 
 facts are changed into truths, her phenomenal laws 
 are transmuted into laws of morals, and her phenom- 
 enal operation is held up as a higher instance of the 
 working of divine energy than even the life of the 
 soul as it is lived by men. Nature in her physical or 
 sensational sphere is abolished in order to become a 
 thing of intellectual and moral values, for the benefit 
 of the soul ; science exists for religion and morality ; 
 but at the same time Nature in her own phenomenal 
 being is represented as a more perfect example of 
 the divine law than is the soul's life in the world. 
 Nature is perfect and is set up as the standard ; or, 
 in Emerson's words, " Man is fallen ; nature is erect 
 and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the 
 
138 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man." 
 This is the theory as to Nature in general ; but in 
 every part of Nature there is the divine type which 
 the soul should repeat, if it were to lead the true life. 
 The passage which exemplifies this is that of the rose. 
 " These roses under my window make no reference to 
 former roses or to better ones ; they are for what they 
 are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time 
 to them. There is simply. the rose; it is perfect in 
 every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has 
 burst, its whole life acts ; in the full-blown flower 
 there is no more ; in the leafless root there is no less. 
 Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all 
 moments alike. But man postpones or remembers ; 
 he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye 
 laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that sur- 
 round him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. 
 He cannot be happy and strong until he, too, lives with 
 nature, in the present, above time." This, the rose, 
 is the ideal of life. The same doctrine is found in 
 the apothegm, — " The rich mind lies in the sun and 
 sleeps and is nature." 
 
 With such an attitude toward Nature, it is inevi- 
 table that the theory of Emerson should sometimes 
 seem on the point of breaking its own shell. It has 
 been observed that in unfolding ecstasy as the method 
 of Nature he found that man could not be regarded as 
 the final end of Nature, since man appears too insig- 
 nificant a result for such a vast preparation of celestial 
 worlds and epochs as the universe exhibits. It be- 
 longs with this that Nature as it exists in other intelli- 
 gences, such as the rat and the lizard, or in other lower 
 forms such as the fungus and the lichen, should seem 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 139 
 
 to Emerson a terra incognita. " What do I know sym- 
 pathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of 
 life ? " History in taking account only of man writes 
 narrow annals. "I hold our actual knowledge very 
 cheap," says Emerson. It is but a step, under such a 
 system of thought and in such a mood, with such a 
 stripping from life of its human values accumulated 
 in time and such a return to simplicity as it is in 
 natural facts, for Emerson to add "the path of science 
 and of letters is not the way into nature " ; but rather 
 " the idiot, the Indian, the child, the unschooled 
 farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature 
 is to be read than the dissector or the antiquary." 
 To the type of the rose as the ideal of life, the type of 
 the Indian as the method of knowledge, is complemen- 
 tary. 
 
 Besides the central ideas and primary counsels that 
 make up the body of Emerson's thought, his general 
 philosophy should be viewed under a third aspect, 
 namely, its bearings on the actual affairs of men in the 
 world. The Essays are stored with prudential wis- 
 dom ; his mjnd ranged widely through the things of 
 the common life, and for this work he was well pre- 
 pared by good intentions, ripe judgment, and moral 
 sagacity ; moreover, as he grew older, he gave increas- 
 ing expression to his practical sense and brought 
 the speculative grounds of his views less prominently 
 forward ; spiritual philosophy, though he did not hold 
 to it less strongly, gave place in his later writings to 
 the conduct of life in its details. Though he was an 
 optimist, the view he took of the actual condition of 
 society and of the individuals who compose it was at no 
 time high. He was not at all blind to the evils that 
 
140 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 infest the world. Every man, he thinks, looks upon 
 his actual state " with a degree of melancholy," and 
 society is invaded by it secretly and silently ; life wears 
 a mean appearance and is full of things ignoble and 
 trivial. The key to every age is imbecility, a favourite 
 word with him to characterize society and individuals. 
 The " fool-part " of mankind is very large, the male- 
 factors much in the majority. History has been mean ; 
 our nations have been mohs; we have never seen a 
 man. Such, nearly in his own words, is the general 
 view. In detail, the way of providence is rude, as 
 seen in Nature ; it has a " wild, rough, incalculable 
 road to its end," and it is of no use "to dress up 
 that terrible benefactor in a clean shirt and white neck- 
 cloth of a student of divinity." There is the snake, the 
 spider, the tiger, other "leapers and bloody jumpers, 
 the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the 
 anaconda," and man, too, lives by like habits. There 
 are earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, the massacre by 
 disease, by plague and climate, parasites, and every where 
 jaws, — " hints of ferocity in the interiors of Nature." 
 In society, the fate of men has never been more calmly 
 stated than in the following words : " The German and 
 Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano 
 in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic and 
 carted over America to ditch and to drudge, and then to 
 lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on 
 the prairie." 
 
 The state of religion naturally holds a foremost 
 place in his survey. " I do not find the religions of 
 men at this moment very creditable to them." They 
 are childish, insignificant, unmanly ; know-nothing 
 churches that proscribe intellect, scortatory, slave-hold- 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 141 
 
 ing, and slave-trading religions, idolatries. " In our 
 large cities the population is godless, materialized. . . . 
 There is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in ma- 
 chinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine 
 wheels, sewing machines, and in public opinion, but 
 not in divine causes. ... In creeds never was such 
 levity ; witness the heathenism in Christianity, the peri- 
 odic ' revivals,' the millennium mathematics, the peacock 
 ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maunder- 
 ing of Mormons, the deliration of rappings, the rat and 
 mouse revelations, thumps in table-drawers, and black 
 art." It is the same with trade. " The ways of trade 
 are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple 
 to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud." 
 The youth is unfitted for them by genius and virtue, 
 and if he would succeed must forget the dreams of 
 his boyhood and the prayers of his childhood, and take 
 on the harness of routine and obsequiousness. We 
 eat, drink, and wear perjury and fraud, and all society 
 is compromised by purchase and consumption, so that 
 the sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual ; 
 every one is privy and an accomplice. All accumulated 
 wealth is tainted, and it might be honester to renounce 
 it and go back to the soil. The soil itself is engaged 
 in the same vice ; " of course, whilst another man has 
 no land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once 
 vitiated." 
 
 The state of politics wears a like complexion. Ameri- 
 can radicalism is destructive and aimless ; the conserv- 
 ative party is merely defensive of property while " it 
 indicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands 
 no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not 
 build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, 
 
142 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor eman- 
 cipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Ind- 
 ian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in 
 power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, 
 art, or humanity at all commensurate with the resources 
 of the nation." Official government falls into gradual 
 contempt, and there is " an increasing disposition of 
 private adventurers to assume its fallen functions." 
 The contemporary socialistic movement proceeded from 
 a feeling that government had abdicated its true offices, 
 that " in the scramble for the public purse the main du- 
 ties of government were omitted, — the duty to]instruct 
 the ignorant, to supply the poor with work, and with 
 good guidance." Such paternalism is a main function 
 of the state. The government must educate the poor 
 man. Every child must have a just chance for his 
 bread. "A man has a right to be employed, to be 
 trusted, to be loved, to be revered." It is not that 
 Emerson has any regard for the masses, in the 
 ordinary sense : " Leave this hypocritical prating 
 about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, 
 pernicious in their demands and influence, and 
 need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish 
 not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, 
 divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of 
 them. The worst of charity is that the lives you are 
 asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses ! 
 the calamity is the masses." He rather desires a re- 
 striction of the population by government, were that 
 practicable. Individualism, however, is the principle 
 that most conquers in his theory, by virtue of which 
 he is brought into strong opposition against legisla- 
 tion, governmental reform, and all varieties of socialism. 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 143 
 
 " The less government we have the better," he says ; 
 and again, " the basis of political economy is non-inter- 
 ference. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap 
 the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no boun- 
 ties ; make equal laws ; secure life and property, and 
 you need not give alms. ... In a free and just 
 commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and im- 
 becile to the industrious, brave, and persevering." As 
 to property, there need never be any fear for it. Prop- 
 erty is a main end of government and follows character; 
 it is power in the hands of the powerful who therefore 
 have it, and will make itself count in any system of 
 government, for it cannot be bound ; but so far as there 
 is any question of property, let amelioration in its 
 laws " proceed from the concession of the rich, not 
 from the grasping of the poor." Eeforms by special 
 instrumentalities are a chimera. " The Eeform of re- 
 forms must be accomplished without means." All 
 particular remedies are " a buzz in the ear." Socialism, 
 in particular, looks to an outward union, whereas the 
 only useful union is purely inward, a likeness of nature 
 freely exercised individually and not by corporate 
 means ; " the union is only perfect when all the uniters 
 are isolated." Eeform in any case, and especially 
 legislative reform, is nullified by the law of things 
 above our will. We devise protective measures, but 
 the principle of population reduces wages to the lowest 
 scale consistent with life ; our charity increases pau- 
 perism ; our paper currency and credits issue in bank- 
 ruptcy. It is better to limit government to the least. 
 It does its best work in assuring an open career and 
 equal opportunity for the poor, and in guarding against 
 whatever makes for inequality in the conditions of 
 
144 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 the social strife, whether by wealth or privilege in any 
 form. 
 
 To establish the principle of individualism and 
 secure the freest field for its operation is the sum and 
 substance of Emerson's statecraft. He admits of pa- 
 ternalism for the sake of the poor and to provide such 
 social goods as are beyond the scope of private means 
 only. He is very tender of the poor, and surrounds 
 their state with dignity and a certain idolatry. The 
 whole interest of history, he says, lies in the fortunes 
 of the poor, in such persons as have extricated them- 
 selves from the jaws of need by superior wit and might. 
 The first-class minds have known the poor man's 
 estate, the feeling and mortification of the poor man ; 
 such were Socrates, Alfred, Shakespeare, Cervantes, 
 Franklin, and the highest type of man is he who 
 knows the huts where poor men live and the chores 
 they do. The wise workman will not regret the 
 poverty that brought out his working talents, and the 
 future of the world will be best served by the victories 
 of peace which he wins, relying on good work rather 
 than on cunning tariffs to succeed in the competition of 
 the nations. Government so far as it helps in this 
 peaceful progress, in this open career and free oppor- 
 tunity for men and nations, is useful. But govern- 
 ment as it exists is a thing of little respect. It rests 
 on force, but the ordering principle of the world should 
 be love. " We live, " he says, " in a very low state of 
 the world." There is nowhere a sufficient belief in 
 the moral sentiment to persuade men " that society can 
 be maintained without artificial restraint as well as 
 the solar system" ; no man has ever endeavoured 
 to renovate the state on this principle. "I do 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 145 
 
 not call to mind," says Emerson, "a single human 
 being who has steadily denied the authority of the 
 laws on the simple ground of his own moral nature." 
 Emerson is not tender of the laws. Good men should 
 not obey the laws too well. " The highest virtue," he 
 says, " is always against the law." 
 
 It is plain that, as for him the true church is in- 
 dividual, each man by himself in union with the Over- 
 Soul, erect and sovereign over the faith, so the ideal 
 state is individual, each man by himself in obedience 
 to the moral sentiment within him, erect and sovereign 
 over his own actions. It is in this spirit that he 
 describes the wise man, he who " makes the state un- 
 necessary." " The wise man is the state. He needs 
 no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well ; no 
 bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him ; no vant- 
 age-ground, no favourable circumstances. He needs no 
 library, for he has not done thinking ; no church, for he 
 is a prophet ; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver ; 
 no money, for he is value ; no road, for he is at home 
 wherever he is ; no experience, for the life of the 
 creator shoots through him and looks from his eyes. 
 He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell 
 to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him 
 needs not husband and educate a few, to share with 
 him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is 
 angelic ; his memory is myrrh to them ; his presence 
 frankincense and flowers." And again he develops the 
 same ideal in a passage yet more subtly touched with 
 the intoxication that he loved, and draws the portrait 
 only to lament that there is no original : " Of a purely 
 spiritual life history has afforded no example. I 
 mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely 
 
146 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 on his character, and eaten angels' food ; who, trusting 
 to his sentiments, found life made of miracles ; who, 
 working for universal aims, found himself fed he 
 knew not how ; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed he 
 knew not how ; and yet it was done by his own hands. 
 Only in the instinct of the lower animals we find the 
 suggestion of the methods of it, and something higher 
 than our understanding. .The squirrel hoards nuts, 
 and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what 
 they do, and they are thus provided for without self- 
 ishness or disgrace/' 
 
 Emerson's optimism in the practical field is restricted 
 to the tendency of things, to that ascension that we 
 know as evolution, which is a law of the universe. 
 The organized world, he thinks, and the life lived in it, 
 with the presence of ferocity in Nature and imbecility 
 in man, is the best that is possible at the moment, 
 and the evil elements are clogs of lower organization 
 from which life is relieved in a change to higher types 
 and conditions. This state of the world is at all 
 times a melancholy one. On the other hand he can 
 see no progress, due to human initiative, in society ; he 
 repeatedly affirms the view that social evolution is a 
 change and not an advance ; and he continually la- 
 ments the fact that Nature is denied her true heir, 
 that no complete man is or has ever been. He finds 
 a philosophic optimism in the doctrine that all ine- 
 qualities of social condition disappear in the nature of 
 the soul. The passage is an interesting one : — 
 
 " In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the 
 inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature 
 seems to be the distinction of More and Less. How can 
 Less not feel the pain ; how not feel indignation or malevo- 
 
 
iv.]" THE ESSAYS 147 
 
 lence toward More ? Look at those who have less faculty 
 and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. 
 He almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. 
 What should they do ? It seems a great injustice. But see 
 the facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities vanish. 
 Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. 
 The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of 
 His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and 
 my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by 
 great neighbors, I can yet love ; I can still receive ; and he 
 that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. There- 
 by I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, 
 acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I 
 so admired and envied is my own." 
 
 Mr. John Morley, commenting on the passage, says, — 
 " Surely words, words, words ! " 
 
 Optimism of such a stripe, in connection with the 
 general and vigorous impeachment of all government, 
 society, and history which Emerson made, is not what 
 is commonly meant by that term. It is to be borne in 
 mind, nevertheless, in reckoning with his criticism of 
 the world, that he lived in a time when the attack upon 
 the state as defective on moral grounds was violently 
 made by the best men, owing to slavery, and also that 
 he had felt in his own person very keenly the ostracism 
 and scorn of the religious and cultivated classes, and 
 this gives edge to his retort very often in dealing with 
 both church and state and all the subject of the value 
 of the educated, protected, and conservative class. It 
 must also be remembered that through the experience 
 of the Civil War he came into a firmer grasp of the 
 efficiency of organized society and the worth of its 
 labours. But as in religion he retained to the end his 
 primary intuitional faith, so in politics he held to the 
 cardinal principles of individualism ; personal freedom 
 
148 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 was his idea in both, and the one leads in this phi- 
 losophy to the denial of any outward church, and the 
 other to the denial of any external government. With 
 such an ideal and such tendencies, it was impossible for 
 Emerson to take an optimistic view of social condi- 
 tions as they exist, nor did he do so ; his optimism was a 
 hope of the future, so far as it had any practical form, 
 and was confined to his faith in America, in the gospel 
 of nature, in the ascending life of the soul and in the 
 divine energy ; of their final victory he felt assured ; 
 but no fair reading of the text can present Emerson as 
 a practical optimist in his view of things as they are. 
 So far is that from being the case that he is more 
 justly to be set down as a revolutionary without the 
 quality of action. 
 
 In its application to individual life, Emerson's 
 doctrine gives results that are, perhaps, more indebted 
 to his sagacity than to his philosophic views, though the 
 latter are never far off. It is obvious in these essays 
 that he is fascinated by the idea of power. He respects 
 the strong, the successful, and affirmative natures, those 
 who take the world as they find it and make it obey 
 their will. He has the liking for rude natures that 
 sometimes characterizes the refined and retired man 
 who feels the attraction of opposites. He acknow- 
 ledges a leaning to the most forcible rather than the 
 most civil. " These Hoosiers and Suckers are really 
 better than the snivelling opposition. " He approves 
 the common opinion that " a little wickedness is good 
 to make muscle." Virile natures must have some in- 
 fusion of riot and adventure, some energy of earth in 
 them ; they do not come out of Sunday schools ; they 
 do not eat nuts. They have that genuineness and real- 
 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 149 
 
 ity which belong to primitive things, to actuality and 
 decision. Similarly, Emerson indulges the strong in 
 its great types, such as Napoleon, who interested him, 
 it would seem, more than any other man in history. 
 Power he defines as " a sharing of the nature of the 
 world " ; its secret is to be able to bring to bear in your 
 stroke the whole force of things, an obedience to law in 
 order to use it ; and its place, where, as it were, power 
 is funded, is character. He defines character as " the 
 moral order seen through the medium of an individ- 
 ual nature." So heroism in its turn is " an obedience 
 to a secret impulse of an individual's character." He 
 values aristocracy and property as effects and cer- 
 tificates of power of character, and gives them an im- 
 portant place in life when they rightfully stand for 
 such power; success is but another name for the same 
 thing. 
 
 Emerson in no way withdrew from life. He bids one 
 accept the conditions, play the game, take the stakes ; 
 in fact, his prudential wisdom is mainly directed to 
 the winning of success, with a caution that the world 
 is not to be conformed to, but braved and made to 
 obey the individual. In working out his counsels as 
 to wealth and economy, heroism and character, and 
 like subjects, he displays ripe judgment and often has 
 a Baconian turn. In the cognate subjects of educa- 
 tion, culture, behaviour, and manners he shows the same 
 qualities. He thinks little of the education, less of 
 the educated class of the day; he does not favour 
 travel in general ; he emphasizes the element of kind- 
 liness in society and praises companionableness. For 
 the most part in these practical discourses he deals with 
 minor morals and mundane phases of life ; but in the 
 
150 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 treatment there is always some touch that seems to 
 lift everyday counsels into a higher sphere, to give 
 them purity and light. He passes them through all the 
 planes of his thought, and character or heroism glows 
 red or blue as he flashes one or the other prismatic 
 ray of his transcendentalism through them, and this 
 makes his writing on these topics differ from all other 
 men's. Transcendentalism appears very strongly in 
 the discussion of beauty and art. In no part of his 
 writings does he show more impatience with perform- 
 ance, with the result; as when he declares all pictures 
 and statues to be " cripples and monsters," and adds, — 
 " I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain 
 appearance of paltriness, as of toys and the trumpery 
 of a theatre, in sculpture." He plainly found more 
 satisfaction in natural landscape than in any painting, 
 and in the postures of life than in any statue. He 
 admits art because he perceives its relation to the uni- 
 versal, but the fixity of art troubles and baulks him ; 
 he finds the quality of beauty to lie in its flowing 
 nature, and the perfection of art to be in its represent- 
 ing " a transition from that which is representable 
 to the senses to that which is not." 
 
 If his analysis and praise of art seem to some lim- 
 ited, others will find the transcendentalism of the essays 
 on Love and Friendship a difficult matter, so far at least 
 as he brings forward the one ungracious doctrine that 
 his works contain, the idea that the soul should not en- 
 gage itself with persons except as a means to a life with- 
 out persons. The principle he affirms is of Platonic 
 origin, but Plato did not attach to it the denial of the 
 affections. Emerson adheres to the essential solitude 
 of the soul and to the ideal of an impersonal love of 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 151 
 
 the great abstractions — Virtue, Truth, and Beauty — 
 as the highest form under which God can be contem- 
 plated. He holds that a higher love destroys a lower 
 love; no bond can keep the heart faithful to the 
 lower after the call of the higher. We thus outgrow 
 our friends, and abandon them. He maintains that 
 "love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness 
 from other men " ; that " friends such- as we desire 
 are dreams and fables " ; that, like books, " I would 
 have them where I can find them, but I seldom use 
 them " ; that friends " descend to meet " ; that one 
 should love his superiors and cannot love his infe- 
 riors ; and that the use of friends is to assist us through 
 love of the perfection of being in them to love of im- 
 personal being, so that when we have found their 
 limitations and therefore cease to be interested in them, 
 we are emancipated from the temporary personal attach- 
 ment and become free and alone in the love of God. 
 In these two essays the divine ichor seems to take the 
 place of man's blood; yet both are remarkable for 
 their tenderness and a certain purity of high feeling 
 and proud and reverent honour done to human nature, 
 and are characterized by a singular nobility in their 
 detached thoughts. 
 
 To complete the general view of Emerson's philoso- 
 phy, it is necessary to take notice of what he elimi- 
 nated. The most important of the eliminations was 
 what he designated as Hebraism ; that is, religious 
 truth of former times arrested and fixed in sacred 
 symbols, in creeds and persons ; and, in particular, the 
 authority of Christ, the Apostles and saints. The 
 entire Christian mythos, including the conception of 
 God and the dogma of the church with all its rites 
 
152 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 and discipline, was rejected as belonging to the 
 past, dead in spirit, and now an obstacle to the direct 
 and infinite life of the soul with the divine. Emer- 
 son also discarded what he designated as Gothi- 
 cism ; that is, the doctrine of suffering as a religious 
 element, whether as sacrifice or as divine vengeance 
 on the soul after death. He eliminated, again, the 
 idea of sin, or evil. Under his affirmations of the 
 universal operation of the divine in the soul and in 
 Nature there was no room for evil in the universe; 
 it could be only the privation of good, and negative. 
 It is true that Emerson saw the scourges of life, both 
 natural and moral ; but he interpreted them as means 
 of good in one or another way, and as transition states 
 in an ascending series, which perished each in the 
 birth of the next higher. Barbarism is largely a 
 matter of perspective; and as we now describe past 
 usages as barbarous, so future ages will term our 
 own manners and customs and ideas. It is because 
 of his attitude toward evil that Emerson is called an 
 optimist. He was shut in a theory which allowed no 
 other course, and he was not interested in the subject 
 itself. In practical moral life he declared against 
 penitence and remorse ; one should forget the sin 
 committed and not waste time and force over the 
 dead past; nature was unrepentant, and so should 
 man be. He eliminated also prayer; but when a man 
 of so spiritual and devout a nature omits prayer from 
 life, it is because he has found some other attitude 
 more consonant with his soul, and in Emerson's case 
 it was an attitude of complete trust in the divine 
 and adoration of its presence. The fact remains that 
 prayer as an appeal makes no part of life as he con- 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 153 
 
 ceived it, or of man's attitude to God. Lastly he 
 eliminated immortality. He does, indeed, discuss 
 somewhat academically the question of conscious ex- 
 istence after death, but his heart is little in it. To 
 him the impersonal and unconscious in the universe 
 was far more than the personal and intelligent, for 
 these last pertain only to life and even there they are 
 only for man. The character of man's being after 
 death was of as little interest as that of his being 
 before birth. The obsession of Emerson's mind with 
 the idea of the presentness of life at every moment — 
 which was only the finite form and equivalent of the 
 idea of its eternal being — the conception, that is, of 
 the soul as " above time " in its essence, even in its 
 mortal state, was so great as to leave no room for 
 the idea of immortality or the prolongation of person- 
 ality beyond the change of death. These eliminations 
 of the Christian mythos in all its defined forms, and 
 of sin, prayer, and immortality, set Emerson apart 
 from Christian writers. It may be that to some, and 
 possibly to an increasing number, his ideas with re- 
 gard to sin, prayer, and immortality may seem to 
 belong to a higher state of moral being and spiritual- 
 minded ness than the traditionary beliefs ; if it be so, 
 he would still be related to Christianity only as Stoi- 
 cism was to popular pagan religion. 
 
 What emerges from these doctrines of identity, 
 blending God, Nature, and the soul, and of equiva- 
 lences making the whole equal to every particle and 
 every particle to the whole, and of the universals, 
 Virtue, Truth, and Beauty, with the great counsels 
 of Intuition and Impulse as the rule of life, is after 
 all the simple infinity of the soul. That is the text, 
 
154 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 and the rest is comment. The life of the soul as 
 known to us is indeed but an infinitesimal arc ; but it is 
 enough to show us the infinity of the curve. The soul 
 does not exist by doing nor rest in attainment, but lives 
 by being ; so to be is the prerequisite of either so to do 
 or so to know. The soul seeks its end in an infinity of 
 pure power. Miracle is the base of the whole scheme; 
 it rests on miracle. Nature is the hieroglyphic of God, 
 and the soul is the palimpsest of God ; and one writ- 
 ing translates the other, and the meaning is God. The 
 idea of law, as it is modernly conceived in science, gives 
 the conception of necessity to the operation of the 
 divine energy, and pervades the whole of the thought 
 under the non-scientific disguise of religion and mo- 
 rality. Emerson's doctrines of optimism, acquiescence, 
 impulse, evolution, are all held within the limits of, 
 and largely result from, this primary conception of a 
 supreme and necessary order above man's will. The 
 idea of the divine energy, as in all pantheistic systems, 
 necessarily empties life of human energy, or tends 
 to do so; and hence the misprision of the will, the 
 intellect and the affections, of science and art, of 
 literature and institutions, is an integral part and not 
 merely a corollary or incident of the doctrine. Viewed 
 more nearly, the doctrine denies the church and the 
 state, and sets up the sovereignty of the individual soul 
 in all things of belief and conduct as a court without 
 appeal, self-sufficing and self-executing. Its general 
 tendency is destructive, and in its affirmations it often 
 leads to dubious ground ; anarchy, theosophy, and 
 Christian Science find many comforting texts scattered 
 through these works, and minds not held in restraint 
 by such a constitution as Emerson had may find strange 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 155 
 
 uses for his thought ; for Emerson's constitution acted 
 as a safety valve for what was dubious in the doctrine. 
 The doctrine, it must be allowed, is anti-Christian, 
 anti-scientific, and anti-social ; but in many instances 
 these have been historically traits of religious doctrine. 
 Christianity was itself against pagan gods and Hebrew 
 formalism, broke the career of the human reason, and 
 gave a blow to its scientific development from which 
 civilization recovered only after centuries and with 
 difficulty ; and it also contained a challenge to the 
 kingdom of this world which though turned aside 
 still persists in its theory and gave justification to 
 Emerson's taunt, — " every Stoic was a Stoic, but in 
 Christendom where is the Christian?" From every 
 point of view it is a religious doctrine that Emerson 
 elaborated, and he so maintained it. Platonism lies 
 back of its divine metaphysics ; Montaigne offered a 
 model for its free inquiries and its personal base ; 
 Plutarch and Bacon are back of its practical and moral 
 human nature. The general view discloses otherwise 
 its heterogeneous and eclectic composition intellectu- 
 ally, and its imperfect culture ; but if Emerson read 
 few books, he remains an example of how a few great 
 books can be read to great ends. 
 
 If it be asked as to the truth of the doctrine, the 
 wiser course is to allow their will to the disciples of 
 Emerson and those who loved and honoured him and 
 heard him gladly in their life, and who troubled them- 
 selves little as to his ideas but bathed their spirits in 
 his influence. Truth, too, in religion, has never been 
 essential, in the sense of ascertained knowledge, but 
 large mixtures of known error have been quite consist- 
 ent with great serviceableness. The doctrine, what- 
 
156 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 ever be its truth, has high moral qualities. It is very- 
 free, and gives the mind leave to knock off all shackles 
 of tradition and authority, and sets an example in so 
 doing. It is very brave, and enjoins upon the soul all 
 the perils of non-conformity and loneliness with only 
 itself for counsellor and friend, for comfort and succour. 
 It is very inspiring, and in hearts of a natural courage 
 and vitality it rouses all their force and looses all their 
 heat by giving rein to enthusiasm. It is thus a power- 
 ful dissolvent, and a mighty stimulant. It is the ally 
 of all revolution. By these qualities it has worked 
 upon men in a time adapted to such counsels and in a 
 country to whose instincts of freedom and power, of 
 individualism and construction, of democracy and prog- 
 ress, it strongly appeals, being indeed one with these 
 instincts and the product of them. It is true that its 
 ideal man, in whom only the doctrine would be con- 
 summated, nowhere appears and may never appear; 
 but the American ideal of manhood is stamped with 
 these qualities of freedom, bravery, and self-sover- 
 eignty, in which the power, as distinguished from the 
 tenets, of the doctrine consists. The teaching of Em- 
 erson is formative of great qualities in the nation, 
 combining with ten thousand other influences that 
 there work for a conscious ideal of manhood. It must 
 be added, too, that Emerson himself lived by this doc- 
 trine ; nothing is more evident than that it is the truth, 
 to use his phrase, according to his constitution; and 
 in it he stamped an image of himself that is better 
 than biography, better even than autobiography — it 
 is the man. And here again by the features of this 
 doctrine, its mingling of physics and being, its divorce 
 from Christian my thology, its freedom from past civili- 
 
iv.] THE ESSAYS 157 
 
 zation, its priority to science and logic, its truly primi- 
 tive method of thought in conducting the mind still 
 untrained and still grasping knowledge imperfectly, one 
 is reminded of the early sages of Greece, such men as 
 Empedocles at Acragas. In the uneven development 
 of the human mind, in its brief progress and casual 
 fortunes, it must happen that analogous types should 
 be repeated in far different ages and races ; and the 
 position that Emerson occupied was not essentially so 
 different from that of the Ionian sage. Emerson was 
 a self-isolated thinker, and intellectually the creature 
 of his religious moods. The Essays are not a book 
 of knowledge, of science, of reason, of civilization in 
 orderly development through the institutional life of 
 man and the slow ascertainment of truth by the hard 
 joint labour of many minds ; they are a book of religion. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE POEMS 
 
 Emerson, as has been said, was fundamentally a 
 poet with an imperfect faculty of expression. By no 
 means a perfect master of prose, he was much less a 
 master of the instrument of verse; yet the same quali- 
 ties appear in his work of both kinds, and as the ex- 
 cellence of his prose lies in the perfect turn of short 
 sentences and in brief passages of eloquence, so the 
 excellence of his verse lies in couplets and quatrains 
 and brief passages of description or feeling. He owes 
 much in both kinds to his quotability, or the power 
 with which his thought in its best and most condensed 
 expression sinks into the mind and haunts the mem- 
 ory. He was indifferent to the technical part of verse, 
 but this was because of an incapacity or lack of gift 
 for it ; he was not careless, and his verse was brooded 
 over, turned in his mind and rewrought in his study, 
 and what he published was generally the last and long 
 deferred result of such power of expression as he was 
 capable of ; he was inartistic by necessity. He had 
 no constructive, but only an ejaculatory, genius ; and 
 all that belongs to construction and depends upon it, 
 such as dramatic power, for example, he was deficient in. 
 His verse on the prosaic level of simple observation is 
 descriptive, and becomes lyrical when melted by ten- 
 derness of feeling or set aglow by patriotic fervour or 
 
 158 
 
chap, v.] THE POEMS 159 
 
 fired and expanded by a philosophical thought. The 
 movement is, on the lowest plane, often Vvbrdswor- 
 thian, and in the lesser odes has the fall and termi- 
 nal slides of the eighteenth century, and at the highest 
 is apt to be of the sort that is best called runic. The 
 technical quality of it is immaterial, and should be 
 neglected and forgotten, so far as possible ; its value 
 lies in its original power of genius and owes little to 
 the forms. The matter itself is often dark and even 
 unintelligible without a previous understanding of the 
 thought which is the key to the meaning ; and this key 
 must be sought in the Essays. 
 
 The Poems are a more brief and condensed form of 
 the Essays, in many respects a far finer form, and for 
 that reason they appeal less broadly to men. The 
 thought gains in brilliancy and external beauty by 
 being given under the forms of imagination ; and be- 
 sides this it is mixed in the poems with Emerson's 
 personality in a more intimate and familiar way, and 
 is blended with his daily life and human concerns. 
 The Poems are autobiography in a very strict sense. 
 Here, in verse, Emerson was most free ; he did not 
 consult his audience at all, as in prose he was more or 
 less bound to do, and he was really not aware of any 
 audience, but wrote purely to please himself. He was 
 the very type of a private man at heart, and always 
 mixed with the world under protest and by the strict 
 compulsion of life. He would have preferred to re- 
 main in his garden and the adjoining fields and woods, 
 to live with nature and to the soul, and let the world 
 go by. He managed his life so as to command much 
 leisure of this sort, to be a vagabond of the day with 
 the plants and birds, the woods and quiet streams, the 
 
160 KALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 sky and the distant mountain, and to come home laden 
 with natural thoughts as a bee with honey, or laden 
 only with the peace of his own soul. He spent much 
 time in this loitering and revery and apparent empti- 
 ness of mind, happy with the heat and the quiet and 
 the bloom of things, or pleased with the snowy silence 
 under the winter pines ; and the Poems are the fruit 
 of this long leisure, slowly matured from the sponta- 
 neous germs but tended with all a poet's love for his 
 own. As has been noticed he had formed an ideal 
 poet, who stood for this poet in him, another and 
 higher self, and named him Osman, and quoted from 
 him in his prose ; but in his verse he was that poet, 
 and gave him other names there ; and this self, secret 
 and private and most dear to him, whose life was that 
 of the roamer of nature, is the bard who uses the 
 wind, the pine tree, and Monadnock, snowstorm and 
 seashore, the chemic heat and the solar blaze, as the 
 strings of his lyre. 
 
 He was a poet of both the soul and Nature, but in 
 his verse Nature enters more largely and for its own 
 sake. Even in his prose no passages are more felici- 
 tous or more sweetly abide in the memory than his 
 incidental description of landscape or the weather. 
 The weather was always interesting to him, and some 
 of his happiest lines contain no more than the qualities 
 of the atmosphere. His senses were deeply engaged 
 with the visible and audible world. He was a minute 
 observer, and loved Nature in detail, one might almost 
 say without selection at all. The " turtle proud with his 
 golden spots " is as dear as a nightingale to him. This 
 gives that homely quality to his local description which 
 is a large part of its power to please and to cling to the 
 
v.] THE POEMS 161 
 
 mind. In marking the traits of the spring he notices 
 the footprint left in thawing ground and the loosened 
 pebble that " asks of the urchin to be tost" ; and in the 
 lament for the death of his little boy he recalls the 
 painted sled, the " ominous hole he dug in the sand/"' 
 the poultry yard, the shed, the wicker wagon frame that 
 needed mending ; by such everyday and prosaic detail 
 he arrives at a truth of rendering that is invaluable 
 to him in describing the New England scene. This 
 quality tells, especially, in all that portion of his verse 
 which is in low relief, and in the simplest and easily 
 intelligible poems such as the fable of the squirrel and 
 the anecdote of the titmouse ; and by it he is quite the 
 equal of Whittier for local colour and of Thomson for 
 general truth to the actual features of a near scene. 
 In this sort of description he keeps near the ground 
 and loves veracity and enjoys the thing he sees, and 
 imagination seldom enters to touch or transform the ob- 
 ject of sense ; but if it does so enter, it appears in an 
 original and surprising way, of which there is no better 
 instance than the following transformation of the phe- 
 nomenon of the gradual lengthening of the days as 
 spring comes on : — 
 
 " I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth, 
 Stepping daily onward north 
 To greet staid ancient cavaliers 
 Filing single in stately train. 
 And who, and who are the travellers ? 
 They were Night and Day, and Day and Night, 
 Pilgrims wight with step forthright. 
 I saw the Days deformed and low, 
 Short and bent by cold and snow ; 
 The merry Spring threw wreaths on them, 
 Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell ; 
 
 M 
 
162 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 Many a flower and many a gem, 
 
 They were refreshed by the smell, 
 
 They shook the snow from hats and shoon, 
 
 They put their April raiment on ; 
 
 And those eternal forms, 
 
 Unhurt by a thousand storms, 
 
 Shot up to the height of the sky again, 
 
 And danced as merrily as young men." 
 
 Imagination with Emerson usually is set in motion 
 by some philosophic thought or by the presence of 
 something elemental in the scene. His mind ex- 
 pands with the greatness of what is before him, and 
 reaches a loftier height even when he is still in the 
 region of description, as, for example, in the Snow 
 Storm, equally admirable as a picture of human home 
 and of the wild grandeur of Nature ; but the best 
 instance of imaginative description on a grand scale 
 is the Sea Shore, in which a noble eloquence, which 
 was born in prose and is more often to be found there 
 as it might be in Hooker or More, has taken eagle's 
 wings to itself and soars with swift circles each higher 
 by a flight. It is a sublime passage, and has scrip- 
 tural quality, and the English poems that can be so 
 described are numbered on the fingers of one hand; 
 it is so biblical that it seems more like prose than 
 verse. To give a loose to his genius in this way 
 Emerson requires the amplest sphere, the scenery of 
 space, and the stage of long-lapsing time. A good 
 example in the purely physical sphere is the image 
 of the earth swimming in space, of which he was 
 fond: — 
 
 "this round, sky-cleaving boat 
 Which never strains its rocky beams ; 
 Whose timbers, as they silent float, 
 Alps and Caucasus uprear, 
 
v.] THE POEMS 163 
 
 And the long Alleghanies here, 
 And all town-sprinkled lands that be, 
 Sailing through stars with all their history." 
 
 Nature as an element, however, is more apt to take 
 on the atomic form in this verse and to be chemistr}^ 
 Emerson always thinks of the process of Nature as a 
 dance of atoms, and he reduces to the same image all 
 her matings and pairings, her correspondences and flow 
 under every aspect, and sees the sphere in all its parts 
 as rhythmical movement, and tune, and rhyme, as if 
 the stars still sang together as at creation and the 
 life of the universe were a Bacchic dance. He con- 
 ceives the energy of Nature as a Dionysiac force, 
 with overflow and intoxication in it, and his imagina- 
 tive symbols for it are all of this order. This incor- 
 poration of the atomic theory in his thought of the 
 world, and also the large prominence he gives to the 
 idea of evolution in general, and his use of scientific 
 terms of detail, give to his poetry a characteristic tone 
 and colour sympathetic with the age. Science, indeed, 
 may be said to enter into the surfaces and imagery of 
 his poetry as an integral part ; few poets have used it 
 so much or so organically in their verse, or so coloured 
 their minds with it ; but it is the spectacle and not the 
 reason of science which is thus used. The mazy dance 
 and Bacchanalia of Nature, however, do not yield to the 
 verse such elements of beauty and charm as are found 
 in her ordinary aspect of " the painted vicissitude " of 
 the soul. The scenes of pastoral interwoven in Wood- 
 Notes and May-Day have both poetical sweetness and 
 the wild flavour of Indian temperament that befits 
 them in fresh American verse still near to the forest 
 primeval. A grave classic beauty belongs to some of 
 
164 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 the single images flashed suddenly out, such as that 
 supreme one, — 
 
 " tenderly the haughty day 
 Fills his blue urn with fire." 
 
 At the other extreme is Hamatreya, in which the 
 melancholy of the Earth-might and the shadow of the 
 grave over life is caught in the old race mood of our 
 blood ; no poem is more purely Saxon in feeling and in 
 the fall of the short runic lines; they might have 
 been written in the eighth century, so true they ring. 
 Occasionally Nature is used as a pure symbol, of 
 which the happiest instance is Two Rivers, admirable 
 for the harmonizing of the unseen river of the eye 
 with the river of the senses, so that the stream of 
 eternity seems but the immortalization of the stream 
 of the meadows, and to flow as it were out of it. The 
 best are those in which the subject is confined to 
 simple Nature and the thought flowing out of it 
 simply, of which the type is The Rhodora. 
 
 In a second group stand the poems of feeling both 
 personal and patriotic. The first section of these 
 consists of the love poems, simple and sweet and 
 quite natural, such as To Ellen in the South, the 
 poems that have for their motive Emerson's personal 
 habits and ways, such as My Garden, Good-by, Tlie 
 Apology, with which may be classed also Terminus, 
 and lastly the poems of lament for his son and his 
 brothers. These are all plain reading, and in the 
 poems of bereavement there is the greatest intimacy 
 that he ever allowed his readers with his private life. 
 He was fond of children, in a gentle and fatherly way ; 
 but the quality of his fondness would not be known 
 
v.] THE POEMS 165 
 
 without the Tlirenody, in which the home-life of the 
 boy, the child in the house, is so pathetically set forth 
 with sad insistence on little things and the day's 
 common history, while the father's grief and question 
 are so tenderly expressed. In the second part the poem 
 becomes philosophical, and has the interest of showing 
 what comfort Emerson found in his divine theory 
 before the actual presence and under the pressure 
 of the sharpest trial of impersonal religion, and in 
 what spirit he met it and was freed from it. Of the 
 passages that refer to his brothers, TJie Dirge is the poem 
 by which they are remembered, and among English 
 household poems it excels in reality of affection, in 
 domestic beauty, and in simpleness ; it has the tones of 
 his voice in it. The patriotic poems have enthusiasm 
 in a high degree and are especially rich in great single 
 lines and apothegms, like nuggets, which have been 
 caught up by the people and will long be memorable. 
 The dicta belong to the old spirit of the plain democ- 
 racy of New England, they still feel the ardour of the 
 Revolution, and most of them fall within the sphere 
 of the rights of man ; these poems, nevertheless, are 
 local rather than national, and are the fruit of Concord 
 and Boston, whose memories and ideals they apply to 
 the times and questions of the Civil War. They are 
 entirely intelligible in themselves and require no 
 comment. With them belongs the hymn which has 
 been adopted into church services and expresses the 
 old New England feeling for the congregational meet- 
 ing-house with words in which all, without distinction 
 of sect or creed, can join. 
 
 The philosophical section of Emerson's poems is the 
 larger and the characteristic part, though it is that 
 
166 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 which, offers the greatest obstruction to his general 
 acceptance ; both the matter and the mode are too 
 lofty for the ordinary reader, but to him who finds in 
 them an appeal they yield a nobility and beauty and a 
 certain glory, as of the largeness and brightness of 
 Nature herself, such as he will not find elsewhere. 
 The poems which are most exclusively philosophical 
 and bare in sentiment, such as the lines often prefixed 
 to particular essays and designated Elements, are the 
 least interesting ; next to these are the poems each of 
 which is devoted to some one idea of his philosophy such 
 as Xenophanes, Guy, Astrcea, To Rhea, Initial, Daemonic, 
 and Celestial Love, and a few others, which are intelli- 
 gible only by the key of the Essays and are seldom 
 poetically successful. The philosophy becomes poeti- 
 cal in proportion as personality and the actual scene 
 of Nature enter into it as imagery and solving powers, 
 and as the ideas are stated less in an intellectual and 
 definite, more in a living and suggestive way. The 
 element of autobiography, especially, adds force and 
 interest. Of the poems where Emerson is himself 
 most present, the Ode to Beauty is among the first, and 
 best presents him as a lover of beauty with a truth 
 that makes the phrase apply to him as rightfully as to 
 Keats, however less rich was his sense of beauty and 
 however poor he was in the passion for beauty. Give 
 all to Love is a companion piece and full of individual- 
 ity. The most interesting and characteristic in their 
 peculiarity are the two in which he elaborates by 
 imagery his doctrine of experience, of the thirst for 
 all natures that he may pass through them as if in an 
 Indian transmigration, and draw from Nature the whole 
 of her being and the meaning of all life, becoming one 
 
v.] THE POEMS 167 
 
 with the infinite diversity of all, — Mithridates and 
 Bacchus, The last is, perhaps, his most original poem, 
 and is a marvellous parable of the wine of being, 
 equal in universality to the stream of the Two Rivers 
 and far excelling the latter in imaginative grasp and 
 compass ; it is distinguished, too, for its enthusiasm, 
 an example of the " mania" that Emerson counselled as 
 the mood of life, and showing an unsuspected power of 
 abandonment in himself. 
 
 This doctrine of experience, it should be observed, 
 here definitely includes all sorts of experience, and with 
 it should be joined the idea that evil itself is a dis- 
 cipline in good and can work no final harm, — one of 
 the most difficult of doctrines for Emerson's disciples. 
 This is the "knowledge" of Uriel. Uriel was a name 
 for himself, and the fable of the poem refers to the 
 time of his Divinity School Address. The special ex- 
 pression is in the quatrain : — 
 
 " Line in nature is not found ; 
 Unit and universe are round ; 
 In vain produced, all rays return ; 
 Evil will bless, and ice will burn." 
 
 It is echoed in The Park : — 
 
 " Yet spake yon purple mountain, 
 Yet said yon ancient wood, 
 That Night or Day, that Love or Crime, 
 Leads all souls to the Good." 
 
 It rests on the basis of the philosophy of Identity, 
 of which Bramah is the poetical text, a poem rightly 
 selected by the popular instinct as the quintessence of 
 Emerson, that which is most peculiarly his own. In 
 that cryptic expression, as in a divine cypher, he has 
 
168 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 condensed all he knows ; the rest of his writings are 
 only its laborious commentary and explanation. 
 
 Most personal, too, are the admirable poems on the 
 poet and his art, Merlin and Saadi, both other names 
 for himself. Such a theory of life as he held more 
 appropriately finds a career in poetical inspiration and 
 enthusiasm than elsewhere, and seems more true there. 
 In both these poems he repeats the counsels of freedom, 
 self-reliance, privacy, spontaneity, joyfulness, surprise, 
 and ease, and the blessedness of poverty, which are 
 found scattered less effectively throughout his works. 
 In one the Saxon strength, in the other the Oriental 
 colour, bring into play the two most effective literary 
 traditions to which he was under obligation, and afford 
 that distance of artistic atmosphere which is so often 
 an element in romantic charm ; Hafiz is in his poetry 
 what Plotinus is in his prose, a far horizon line, which 
 helps to give that suggestion of eternity in his thought, 
 of universality in his truth, which characterize his 
 writing. He seems always to use the iron pen. In 
 Saadi he wears the Persian poet's guise, and in Merlin 
 the old harper's, and imposes the illusion on the mind 
 as when he makes the pine wood and Monadnock speak ; 
 and it is always the same voice. He knew as little of 
 Persian as he knew of Buddhism ; but his half know- 
 ledge gave to literature Saadi in one case and Bramah 
 in the other, and this is more than the learning of all 
 others has yet accomplished for poetry. In the ideal of 
 the poet here set forth his personal expression of phi- 
 losophy had its most individual form, was most blended 
 with himself; in two other poems, TJie Problem and 
 Each and All, which contain much personality also, 
 the philosophy is rendered in purely poetical ways. 
 
v.] THE POEMS 169 
 
 The last group is composed of those poems in which 
 the philosophy is put forth in a universal statement of 
 large comprehension. The leading thought is here of 
 the opposition of Nature and man, of the inadequacy 
 of the creature of the Universe. Nature is represented 
 as the Great Mother and man as her child. The 
 burden of the verse is that man is a weakling. His 
 state is accounted for by his division from Nature. 
 One easily recognizes the doctrine as a phase of the 
 general social theory of the eighteenth century most 
 associated with the name of Rousseau. But to 
 Emerson this is his substitute for sin and the Fall of 
 Man; it is not that man has fallen off from God, 
 but from Nature. There is a passage in Wood-Notes 
 which states the sense clearly : — 
 
 "But thou, poor child ! unbound, unrhymed, 
 Whence earnest thou, misplaced, mistimed, 
 Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded ? 
 Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded ? 
 Who thee divorced, deceived, and left ? 
 Thee of thy faith who hath bereft, 
 And torn the ensigns from thy brow, 
 And sunk the immortal eye so low ? 
 Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender, 
 Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender 
 For royal man ; — they thee confess 
 An exile from the wilderness, — 
 The hills where health with health agrees, 
 And the wise soul expels disease. . . . 
 There lives no man of Nature's worth 
 In the circle of the earth ; 
 And to thine eye the vast skies fall, 
 Dire and satirical, 
 On clucking hens and prating fools, 
 On thieves, on drudges, and on dolls. 
 And thou shalt say to the Most High, 
 ' Godhead ! all this astronomy, 
 
170 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 And fate and practice and invention, 
 Strong art and beautiful pretension, 
 This radiant pomp of sun and star, 
 Throes that were, and worlds that are, 
 Behold ! were in vain and in vain ; — 
 It cannot be, — I will look again. 
 Surely now will the curtain rise, 
 And earth's fit tenant me surprise ; — 
 But the curtain doth not rise, 
 And Nature has miscarried wholly 
 Into failure, into folly. " 
 
 There is a passage to the same effect in Blight. Out 
 of this view arises the capital idea of Emerson's poetry, 
 the promise of the coming of the ideal man, who shall 
 achieve the reconcilement and be himself equal to 
 Nature, the purified and perfect soul. It is clearly 
 a Messianic idea. The most noble expression of it is 
 in the Song of Nature, and the passage though long is 
 necessary to exhibit the idea properly : — 
 
 " But he, the man-child glorious, — 
 Where tarries he the while ? 
 The rainbow shines his harbinger, 
 The sunset gleams his smile. 
 
 11 My boreal lights leap upward, 
 Forthright my planets roll, 
 And still the man-child is not born, 
 The summit of the whole. 
 
 " Must time and tide forever run ? 
 Will never my winds go sleep in the west ? 
 Will never my wheels which whirl the sun 
 And satellites have rest ? 
 
 "Too much of donning and doffing, 
 Too slow the rainbow fades, 
 I weary of my robe of snow, 
 My leaves and my cascades ; 
 
v.] THE POEMS 171 
 
 " I tire of globes and races, 
 Too long the game is played ; 
 What without him is summer's pomp, 
 Or winter's frozen shade ? 
 
 " I travail in pain for him, 
 My creatures travail and wait ; 
 His couriers come by squadrons. 
 He comes not to the gate. 
 
 " Twice I have moulded an image, 
 And thrice outstretched my hand, 
 Made one of day and one of night 
 And one of the salt sea-sand. 
 
 ** One in a Judsean manger, 
 And one by Avon stream, 
 One over against the mouths of Nile, 
 And one in the Academe. 
 
 "I moulded kings and saviours, 
 And bards o'er kings to rule'; — 
 But fell the starry influence short, 
 The cup was never full. 
 
 " Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more, 
 And mix the bowl again ; 
 , Seethe, Fate ! the ancient elements, 
 Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace and pain. 
 
 " Let war and trade and creeds and song 
 Blend, ripen race on race, 
 The sunburnt world a man shall breed 
 Of all the zones and countless days." 
 
 The same idea is substantially contained in The 
 Sphinx, in which the portrait of man as he is bears 
 the same lineaments, and the deliverance is repre- 
 sented as the poet's solving of the riddle of Nature by- 
 guessing one of her meanings, according to the doc- 
 trine of the microcosm which is so constant in the 
 
172 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 Essays. The poem, which is less difficult than it ap- 
 pears, contains many of Emerson's characteristic say- 
 ings, and what may be regarded as the most condensed 
 of his great affirmations, comprehending like Bramah 
 his whole mind — 
 
 "Ask on, thou clothed eternity. 
 Time is the false reply." 
 
 The Poems contain so many thoughts by the way, 
 so many scattered beauties and felicities, that any 
 general view is inadequate to indicate fully their 
 value. There is wealth of detail. No expression of 
 the subjectivity of Nature equals for refinement and 
 sublimation the lines in Monadnock : — 
 
 "And that these gray crags 
 Not on crags are hung, 
 But beads are of a rosary 
 On prayer and music strung." 
 
 The moral dicta, too, that strew the pages, are 
 among the most prized of his lines, and some have 
 passed into undying permanence ; of them perhaps the 
 greatest is the quatrain on duty, " So nigh is gran- 
 deur to our dust/' and the one on sacrifice : — 
 
 " 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, 
 When for the truth he ought to die." 
 
 And in closing the little volume one remembers, too, 
 whole poems left neglected in this sketch ; but among 
 the best, Hermione, The Romany Girl, Days, The Bay's 
 Mations, Forerunners, each of which has a unique 
 and memorable quality and sets forth some view of his 
 philosophy in a characteristic way and poetically. 
 Emerson's poetry does not make a wide appeal ; it 
 
v.] THE POEMS 173 
 
 has been for a select audience, and perhaps it may al- 
 ways be so; yet to some minds it seems of a higher 
 value than his prose. He was more free, more com- 
 pletely enfranchised, in poetry. He was farther away 
 from his books, from which, however afterward cer- 
 tified by intuitions, he did in fact derive his ideas. 
 The ideas are old ; nothing is fresh there except the 
 play of his mind about the ideas. Indeed, it is an ob- 
 vious observation that one difficulty about intuition as 
 expounded by Emerson is that it gives out no new ideas, 
 but only rubs up old ones and makes them shine in a 
 way which after all is still familiar. Emerson is far- 
 ther away from his origins of thought when he goes 
 into the woods. He is also a more natural man there, 
 and leaves the minister, too, well behind him. There 
 are many of the poems in which there is no touch of 
 clergy. The poems began, too, at the moment of his 
 first liberation. He had written verse before, and 
 from boyhood had always practised it ; but the lines 
 were practically without merit and of no worth to the 
 world. When he was thirty -three years old, at the time 
 he left the. church, his mind, which up to that moment 
 had been slow in unfolding, suddenly matured ; in the 
 ten years following he did all his thinking, and it may 
 be fairly said that he had no new ideas after he was 
 forty years old ; from then on he repeated and rear- 
 ranged the old. There were favourable circumstances 
 for development in the beginning of this period. The 
 taking such a step, decisive and important as it was, 
 gave of itself a certain maturity of character ; the 
 renewed health with which he returned from abroad 
 was a great gain in conditions ; the need he was under 
 to justify the step by work outside the church, and 
 
174 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 the sense he had — and it was great — of the dispar- 
 agement of his talents and labours, the ostracism of 
 the University and the unfriendliness of the respect- 
 able and educated class in the community about him, 
 the feeling of being set aside — all this combined to 
 stir the energy of his mind to the utmost. He did his 
 best writing, Nature, then, and his earlier Addresses 
 are in some ways much superior to the Essays in style ; 
 they are more fluid, and if more contemporary, they 
 are better adapted to readers. 
 
 It was natural that his poetic instinct should share 
 this general quickening of his powers and higher level 
 of attainment. One circumstance especially favoured 
 its development : he was now for the first time in a 
 home of his own in the country, with leisure in many 
 hours at least, and filled with what was to him the new 
 delight of real acquaintance with nature in the fields 
 and woods. His poetry suddenly changed its quality 
 and became quite another thing from what it had 
 been; and concurrently with his development of thought 
 on the side of prose, in the same ten years he composed 
 this group of poems, giving a very different expression 
 to the same ideas and blending with them his own 
 life in nature. In this poetic outlet of his genius he 
 found a new liberty ; in his prose he was still much 
 engaged to his past, and always dragged the chain of 
 "the moral sentiment"; here he was free, and his na- 
 ture disclosed unsuspected and fundamental vigours, 
 and at times even what he would have called daemonic 
 power. There is a vehemence, a passion of life, in 
 Bacchus that no prose could have clothed. The whole 
 world takes on novelty in the verse ; on all natural ob- 
 jects there is a lustre as if they were fresh bathed 
 
v.] THE POEMS 175 
 
 with dew and morning, and there is strange colouring 
 in all; not that he is a colour poet; he does not enamel 
 his lines as the grass is enamelled with wild flowers ; 
 but the verse is pervaded with the indescribable col- 
 ouring of mountain sides, and the browns and greens 
 of wide country prospects. This lustre of nature is 
 one of his prime and characteristic traits. There is, 
 too, a singular nakedness of outline as of things seen 
 in the clarity of New England air. His philosophy 
 even helps him to melt and fuse the scene at other 
 times, and gives impressionist effects, transparencies 
 of nature, unknown aspects, the stream of the flowing 
 azure, the drift of elemental heat over waking lands, 
 the insubstantial and dreaming mountain mass: all 
 this is natural impressionism in the service of philoso- 
 phy. His persons, too, are mythic and heroic, and 
 the very names yield up poetry, — Merlin, Xenophanes, 
 Bacchus, Uriel, Saadi, Merops, Bramah. The Poems 
 are full of surprise, also ; many are original and unique 
 in their originality, so that there is no other poem 
 of that sort in the world. In the Poems, as a whole, 
 there are these great and significant qualities, where the 
 theme is most impersonal and abstract ; and, besides, 
 about this strange and various rendering of nature, there 
 are in the margin, as it were, scenes of human life and 
 common days exquisitely plain, tender, and truthful. 
 The range is wide, the moods are many ; Saxon and 
 Arab blend, the chant of the hammer here, and there 
 the Persia of the mind; here poems that are atmos- 
 pheric in lustre and purity, and again poems that 
 contain the sum of human destiny, — Bramah, the 
 Messianic child of Nature, the Sphinx. 
 
 It is futile to make deductions and notice that with 
 
176 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 all this fine quality there is defect of art and defect of 
 taste, the harshness and roughness of the New Eng- 
 land land itself, and downright commonplace and dog- 
 gerel ; for it is not with deductions that the poems 
 please, they either please so that the defects are for- 
 gotten, or they please not at all. If one is in an 
 artistic mood and cannot lay it off, these poems shall 
 seem impossible, — ding-dong and huddle and muddle, 
 a blend of the nebulous and the opaque, sweet bells 
 jangled out of tune and harsh; but if he follows one 
 of Emerson' s wisest counsels, and remembers that to 
 fail in appreciation of another is only to surrender 
 to one's own limitations and put a term to one's own 
 power, then another hour will come when all that seems 
 grotesque and so unequal shall take on again majesty 
 and mystery and brightness, the fascination of a new, 
 strange, and marvellous world, the glow, the charm ; 
 and the reader shall, like — 
 
 ' ' The lone seaman all the night 
 Sail astonished amid stars." 
 
 Such are the two moods in which Emerson is read, 
 but there is no mixing of the two. There is some- 
 thing of the same doubleness of impression in the 
 Essays, but it is there much less radical. And since the 
 appreciation of Emerson is largely one of temperament, 
 if I may speak personally as perhaps I ought, I own 
 that I have little intellectual sympathy with him in 
 any way ; but I feel in his work the presence of a great 
 mind. His is the only great mind that America has 
 produced in literature. His page is as fresh in Japan 
 and by the Ganges as in Boston ; and it may well be 
 that in the blending of the East and West that must 
 
v.] THE POEMS 177 
 
 finally come in civilization, the limitations that awaken 
 distrust in the Occidental mind may be advantages 
 when he is approached from the Oriental slope of 
 thought, and his works may prove one of the reconciling 
 influences of that larger world. His material is per- 
 manent; there will always be men in his stage of men- 
 tal culture or, at least, of his religious development ; 
 his literary merit is sufficient to secure long life to his 
 writings. For these reasons his fame seems perma- 
 nent, and with it his broad contact with the minds of 
 men. However unconvincing he may be in detail, or 
 in his general theory and much of his theoretic counsel, 
 he convinces men of his greatness. One has often in 
 reading him that feeling of eternity in the thought 
 which is the sign royal of greatness. It is in his 
 poems that I feel it most, and find there the flower of 
 his mind. 
 
 N 
 
CHAPTEK VI 
 
 TERMINUS 
 
 Soon after the Civil War the vital energy of Emer- 
 son began to decline. He was now established in his 
 fame. The dubiousness with which he had long been 
 regarded, the disparagement of him, had passed away. 
 The older generation whom he had most offended was 
 gone from the scene. The transcendentalists and the 
 abolitionists had ceased from the land, and he was no 
 longer encumbered by the ludicrousness of the one or 
 the unpopularity of the other. He had been accepted 
 into literature as one of the most effective writers of 
 his country. It is true that he had founded no school 
 and was to leave no disciple ; but he lectured through- 
 out the North, and the circulation of his books had 
 become important ; it was as a man of letters, rather 
 than in any other capacity, that he now held his place. 
 The times had changed, too, at Harvard College. The 
 University which had so long looked at him with an un- 
 favourable eye, though on his side he had continued a 
 loyal connection with it by going up to Cambridge at 
 its annual occasions of the reassembling of the alumni, 
 now recognized its most distinguished son, gave him 
 the degree of LL.D., made him an overseer, in which 
 capacity he served twelve years, and on the thirtieth 
 anniversary of his Phi Beta Kappa Address invited 
 him to address the society once more. He had resumed 
 
 178 
 
chap, vi.] TERMINUS 179 
 
 lecturing, from which he derived his main income 
 before the war closed, and in the years following he 
 visited the West in winter and spoke every night for 
 several weeks together. He published a second col- 
 lection of poems, May-Day and Other Pieces, in 1867, 
 and a volume of essays, Society and Solitude, in 1870. 
 They did not represent new work, but were made out 
 of his accumulated writings. His last piece of original 
 composition seems to have been the preface to an edi- 
 tion of Plutarch published in 1870. • The only fresh 
 attempt he made was The Natural History of Intellect. 
 Harvard College had invited him to give a course 
 there to the students, and he did so in 1870 to a class 
 of thirty, and the succeeding year he repeated the 
 course. He apparently meant to give a particular 
 account of his metaphysics, in accordance with a plan 
 that had been many years in his mind ; but he suc- 
 ceeded only in making up a new arrangement of 
 thoughts from his old store, and he early became 
 discouraged and ended the course by readings from 
 Oriental and Platonistic writers. The lectures are in- 
 teresting only as confirming his incapacity for meta- 
 physics. He enjoyed, however, his contact with the 
 students, as he was always pleased to associate with 
 youth. It was becoming evident to himself that his 
 vigour was waning, and signs of the approach of age 
 were noticed by his friends. At the close of the lec- 
 tures he made a journey to California with a pleas- 
 ant party of family friends, and accompanied by his 
 daughter, and spent six weeks in seeing the country, 
 including the Yosemite, during which he also lectured 
 in San Francisco. 
 
 He returned from this trip much refreshed, and 
 
180 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 lectured as usual in Boston in the fall and spring, 
 and later at Amherst College. It was on his return 
 from this lecture that a serious misfortune befell him 
 in the burning of his house. He was already weak- 
 ened, and the shock was severe. A friend gave him 
 five thousand dollars, and other friends soon made a 
 joint gift of nearly twelve thousand dollars, which, 
 after some reluctance, he was persuaded to accept. 
 It was thought desirable that he should take a voyage 
 while his house was being rebuilt, and he sailed in 
 October, 1872, visited London and Paris, and made 
 his way by Italy to the Nile, up which he travelled 
 as far as Philae. He was, however, little interested 
 in the journey and took more pleasure, as always, in 
 persons than things, and though the strangeness of 
 Egypt and the sight of the ancient monuments pleased 
 and entertained him, he was ready at all times to go 
 home. He breakfasted with the Khedive, and received 
 attention wherever he was ; on the way back he met 
 many distinguished men, especially in Paris and in 
 England ; and in the latter place he spoke once at the 
 Workingmen's College. He arrived home in May and 
 was met at the station by the townspeople, who escorted 
 him to the new house, where an arch of triumph had 
 been erected ; and there he found his study with his 
 books and the pictures and keepsakes he cared for in 
 their old order, as if they had never been disturbed. 
 In the winter he read his Boston poem on the anniver- 
 sary of the throwing of the tea into the harbour ; it 
 was an old poem and made over for the occasion. In 
 1874 he was nominated for the Lord Kectorship of 
 Glasgow University, and received five hundred votes 
 against seven hundred for Disraeli. In 1875 he was 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 181 
 
 made an associate member of the French Academy. 
 His literary work had been difficult for him, but 
 he had published Parnassus, an anthology of his 
 favourite pieces, made mainly long before, from 1855 
 to 1865. He now received the friendly assistance of 
 Mr. J. Elliot Cabot, who helped prepare for the press 
 the volume, Letters and Social Aims, published in 1875. 
 From this time Mr. Cabot, who afterward wrote the 
 family biography, aided him to gather and arrange out 
 of old material the new lectures which he still gave 
 from time to time. The most unfortunate of these oc- 
 casions was his address before the University of Vir- 
 ginia in 1876, when he was unable to make his voice 
 heard, and the audience began to disregard the speaker, 
 and the talk increasing and becoming general, Emerson 
 observing the state of affairs brought his lecture to an 
 abrupt close. He, however, made no complaint, even 
 to his friends. In 1878 he gave his hundredth lecture 
 at the Concord Lyceum. He seldom appeared, and 
 then often only in a half-private way, in his last years. 
 The failure of his powers, which began with a loss of 
 memory for words, became more marked ; his mind 
 gradually clouded and weakened ; but he was sur- 
 rounded with sheltering care and suffered no disturb- 
 ance from his failings. He withdrew from society, 
 thinking that conversation with one who could con- 
 verse so slowly and with difficulty was unfair, and he 
 lived with his family and old friends ; yet he would 
 sometimes see a new face, especially if the visitor was 
 a young man. His life, under these conditions, was 
 characterized by unbroken placidity and cheerfulness ; 
 he was at ease, happy, and took his short walks or 
 watched the play of his grandchildren with an old 
 
182 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 man's pleasure. Toward the close of his life he re- 
 sumed the habit of going to church, as he had always 
 liked to have his children go. His last public ap- 
 pearances were at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
 when he read a paper on Carlyle in February, 1881, 
 and at the Concord School of Philosophy, when he lec- 
 tured on Aristocracy, in July of the same year. In 
 April, 1882, he took cold and pneumonia developed. 
 He died April 27, and three days later, on Sunday, 
 amid the general and public mourning of the com- 
 munity, he was buried from the old church of his 
 fathers in the grove of Sleepy Hollow, near to Haw- 
 thorne and Thoreau. 
 
 The one impression left on the mind by this career of 
 nearly fourscore years is of the wholeness of the life ; 
 it is the same trait that marks his writings ; the whole, 
 not the details, counts. It was the life of a New Eng- 
 land citizen, interested in public affairs, but not ab- 
 sorbed by them ; employed in self-support by long and 
 wide lecturing in the country at large for which he 
 received an inconsiderable reward, and by writing a 
 few books for which he was ill paid, but managing 
 with the aid of a small inherited competency to pay 
 his way. There were no events in his life, except the 
 one decisive step of leaving the church, which brought 
 upon him a state of Coventry for a period and devel- 
 oped his individual resources by throwing him upon 
 them. He became, without seeking, the heresiarch 
 of the transcendentalists, who plentifully exemplified 
 the biblical theory that wisdom is the foolishness of 
 this world ; and later he became an abolitionist who 
 under the stress of the John Brown incident and the 
 Fugitive Slave Law doubted the uses of the actual 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 183 
 
 government. He was by the character of the times 
 thrown out of sympathy with both church and state, 
 and thus found more liberty to develop a non-con- 
 formist theory of life. He was at all points a dis- 
 senter. Yet, though a preacher, he was not a prose- 
 lytizer. He respected the individuality of other men. 
 He was indifferent to the practical forms that his ideas 
 might take, and watched the efforts going on about 
 him with friendly and benevolent eyes, but without 
 great interest. He held mankind and their doings in 
 but small respect, and reserved his optimism for a 
 distant posterity. He spent his life in announcing 
 an idea of regeneration. He mixed with the best 
 minds of his time in his own country and met many 
 of the most distinguished men of Europe and espe- 
 cially of England ; he travelled in early and in middle 
 manhood ; but he was in no way influenced or moulded 
 by travel or by the great men he encountered, and he 
 remained entirely home-bred. 
 
 In his personal nature there was a strain of haughti- 
 ness that belonged with the formality of his manners 
 and his inherited pride, which underlay his inde- 
 pendence and was in his blood ; the superiority with 
 which he looked upon both society and literature, with 
 confident criticism, was allied to this ; and his profes- 
 sion as a clergyman and public teacher sustained these 
 fundamental qualities in his character. There was no 
 lack of tenderness in his heart ; but there was coldness 
 in his personal relations with friends and distance in 
 his relations with the stranger. He had not the secret 
 of companionableness with his equals, and was rather 
 a listener than a sharer in talk. Those who were near 
 to him, and especially those of his friends who were 
 
184 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 actively engaged in social reform, found an unsatisfac- 
 toriness in him, though their feeling seldom reached 
 the point of a practical expression of dissatisfaction. 
 He had the power to impose respect for himself under 
 all circumstances, and to do so unconsciously. He 
 was the more attached to solitude or the privacy of 
 two; but he was fond of society, also, and in the 
 Saturday Club, which began from the nucleus formed 
 about his table at Parker's, he enjoyed the best com- 
 panionship of the times, and was there a valued mem- 
 ber. The slowness of his temperament was a primary 
 fact in his life ; he was slow in all ways : in his motions, 
 in his speech, in his mental progress and maturing; 
 and his incapacity to mix with the company, to give 
 himself in friendship, to enter actively into practical 
 affairs except under protest, and then only in the 
 Anti-Slavery conflict, is a part of this temperamental 
 quality. He was slow to think and slow to write, as 
 is shown by his methods. The life with nature in 
 the Concord fields and woods harmonized with this 
 temperament, and made an environment that appealed 
 to him on every side. 
 
 He had nothing of the anchorite, nothing of the 
 saint in his composition. In his personality he was 
 very close to the soil ; race was stamped upon his 
 countenance. It was also in his marrow. There was 
 a fund in him, at bottom, of local trait, instinct, and 
 habit that can only be called Yankeeism. He was 
 a Yankee in the same sense that Lincoln was a 
 Westerner. In the anecdotes about him that give 
 personal details and little trifles, in his phrases some- 
 times, in his general bearing and the character that 
 may be called practical as opposed to moral, one sees 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 185 
 
 these home-bred ways. He was attached to plain 
 living, to independence in money matters, to doing 
 chores for himself ; he had no patience with any kind 
 of "nonsense" in practical things, and liked best the 
 bare, old-fashioned ways in which he and his people 
 had been bred for generations. " To go without " was 
 a shibboleth with him, and no phrase is more charac- 
 teristic of what was most honest, proud, and strong 
 in the old New England life. When he was old he 
 evidently disliked to be taken too much care of, and 
 on one of the last nights of his life he insisted on 
 taking the firebrands apart and caring for the hearth 
 alone as was his custom. To this plain simplicity of 
 the old days his refinement and deference gave a strik- 
 ing grace; it was like the light on his mobile and 
 expressive face with its large, firm features, which is 
 the trait that most affected the eyes of those who saw 
 and heard him. He showed habitually and to all a 
 certain reverence that ennobled them in their own 
 eyes, and an expectancy of something from them, 
 sincere and shining from his own heart — the courtesy 
 so old-fashioned that it seems now, like chivalry, a 
 legend of fair manners. He was of the best that 
 democracy gave birth to on his native soil, in both his 
 solid and his rarer qualities, in his practicality and his 
 spirituality, and his home was the type of a plain, 
 intellectual, unluxurious home of the people of the 
 old time. " No house," he told his children once, " is 
 perfect without having a nook where a fugitive slave 
 can be safely hidden away"; and in this home were 
 many shelters for all the world's poor. He was not 
 only a man singularly free from condemnation for 
 others, whatever their defects, but he was tender of 
 
186 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 the unfortunate, the foolish, and the weak. He was 
 hospitable not only to guests but to mankind. If his 
 influence extends throughout the world, it is but a 
 just tribute to his heart. 
 
 The secret of his style is his diction. It may be 
 described as seventeenth-century diction, and is de- 
 rived from his early familiarity with old English 
 writers. It fits both the man, his profession, and the 
 quality of his ideas. He obtains by it verbal clear- 
 ness, and in the short sentence which he especially 
 cultivated he achieves weight and point, which are 
 both oratorical qualities. He had also in his earlier 
 writings fluidity, not in thought but in eloquence, the 
 flow of the orator, for comparatively brief passages ; 
 in the Essays this quality is almost lost, owing to the 
 way in which these writings were composed by selec- 
 tion and rearrangement from more extended composi- 
 tions ; the method had its advantages, for condensation 
 and brilliancy of detail, but it necessarily forfeited con- 
 secutiveness, harmony, and naturalness. The posthu- 
 mous publications, made up of uncollected papers and 
 extracts from his manuscripts, in successive editions 
 of his complete works, add nothing to his reputation, 
 though they afford fuller illustrations of his life and 
 thought. In style, except in the speeches, they are 
 inferior. He had the same defects in prose as in 
 verse ; his taste was often at fault in both word and 
 phrase, so far as the diction is concerned, and his 
 effort for effect in short sentences sometimes betrayed 
 him to expressions that are grotesque and result in 
 caricature of the thought. He was not a great writer 
 in the sense in which Bacon, Montaigne, or Pascal are 
 great writers ; but he was a writer with greatness of 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 187 
 
 mind, just as he was not a great poet, but a poet 
 with greatness of imagination. 
 
 He was extremely deficient in the artistic sense. 
 With regard to painting and sculpture he had hardly 
 more than a rudimentary sense of art, and in this he 
 faithfully represented his people among whom men 
 with the perception and love of beauty in ideal forms 
 were as rare as good men in Sodom. The love of 
 beauty has never been an English trait, and is still 
 less an American one. The same deficiency in artistic 
 sense made him indifferent to the larger part of litera- 
 ture in general, especially to the classic and highly 
 refined forms of it. He exhibited that trait of ro- 
 manticism which sought out the primitive and the 
 distant and brought into repute the early monuments 
 of the Norse and Oriental novelties ; he read with 
 delight Anglo-Saxon and early English verse, and the 
 German translations of Persian poets. He was, never- 
 theless, far from being catholic in his tastes, but was 
 narrowly bound in the limits of his early reading be- 
 yond which in pure literature he seldom ventured ; he 
 cared nothing for the French or the Italian genius, in 
 which aesthetic qualities predominate, and his attach- 
 ment to the ancient classic poets was weak. The 
 startling sentence, — " Perhaps Homer and Milton 
 will be tin pans yet," — foolish as it is, is nevertheless 
 one that rains judgment upon the sayer. With so 
 imperfect a hold on the qualities that make for per- 
 manence in literature, with so narrow a sympathy for 
 the fair forms of the art, with such indifference to 
 beauty in artistic embodiment and to the ways and 
 means by which ideal expression is obtained, it was 
 impossible that he should achieve more than a limited 
 
188 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 and partial success as a writer, so far as the form of 
 his work is concerned. 
 
 The substance of his writings has been already pre- 
 sented, with no more critical suggestion than was 
 necessary to define it, and in as colourless a manner 
 as was possible. It is proper to add here one or 
 two general considerations. It is quite true that his 
 writings, like his life, make their impression by their 
 wholeness and not by their detail. In the individual, 
 character is above truth, and more often than 
 reason determines the opinions of the man; so here 
 the character of Emerson's works is above their 
 intellectual contents, and exerts an influence inde- 
 pendent of the ideas which are embodied in them. 
 His books are full of personal ascendency. It is 
 nevertheless desirable that the character of such an 
 ascendency, especially if as in this case it is moral, 
 should be plainly marked in order that it may prevail 
 only in its proper sphere. It is obvious that Emerson's 
 limitations are fundamentally important ; they lie at 
 the base, and in the very origin and conception of his 
 works, which are largely determined in character by 
 them. The first and most important general consid- 
 eration with respect to him is his blindness to the life 
 of humanity in the race. It may be that human fac- 
 ulty in the individual is, as he said, not progressive 
 in time, that is, that individual power of intellect, for 
 example, is not greater now than in the Greek ages ; 
 but it is also true that the efficiency of this power is 
 greater than it was because of the accumulation of 
 knowledge, the definition of the field of the problem, 
 and especially the elaboration of methods in the con- 
 duct of the intellect, which time has brought about. 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 189 
 
 It is also true that society achieves something which 
 the individual alone cannot accomplish, and that the 
 institutional life of the race is, for civilization, of 
 greater importance than individual life, or at least is 
 not a negligible thing. Emerson so stated the doc- 
 trine of individuality as to deny institutional life. 
 He dissolved mankind into its atoms, the private 
 person, and so related the private person to God that 
 all truth in knowledge and all impulse in action came 
 from this divine source. He is sometimes said to have 
 employed the theory of evolution ; but his conception 
 of evolution was a purely metaphysical one, an unfold- 
 ing of the soul in combination with Nature by a spirit- 
 ual law. Of the true doctrine of evolution, the modern 
 doctrine, as an accumulation of power in time so far 
 as it relates to humanity and a temporal process of 
 the material universe, Emerson had not the slightest 
 idea ; under such a conception half his writings would 
 have been impossible. He made a tabula rasa of the 
 soul upon which only God should write ; in evolution 
 there is no such thing as a tabula rasa. He first 
 isolated the soul and deprived it of all ancestral 
 benefit; and then he left it to Intuition and Impulse, 
 mystically conceived, for all knowledge and guidance. 
 What the primitive mind thought of as characteristic 
 of the prophet, he extended to all the tribe ; this illu- 
 minism is one of the earliest of old-world ideas, and 
 had its place in religious development ; but now it is 
 little better than an atavistic survival. It involves 
 contempt for experience as the guide of life. Em- 
 erson, in this spirit, slighted history, science, art and 
 letters, and religion, the entire recorded life of the 
 race ; but civilization is an inheritance, a gift of the 
 
190 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 past to man, and the individual adds but little to it 
 even by the best faculty and fortune. In setting up 
 the doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual in the 
 form which he employed, he put himself in contra- 
 diction to the evolutionary conception of humanity at 
 every point. He had a mind compact of miracle, and 
 intellectually he belongs in the age of miracle and not 
 of science. 
 
 The second general consideration relates to that 
 misprision of the human faculties which has already 
 jeen alluded to, as integral in his thought. He put the 
 law of impulse in the place of the will, and the state of 
 ecstasy as its climax in the place of reason and judg- 
 ment. He was, however, saved from the consequences 
 of the doctrine; and just as, when philosophical ideal- 
 ism became inconvenient to|him, he retired to the or- 
 dinary and everyday view of Nature, since he had no 
 real grasp on metaphysics, so when it came to the touch- 
 stone of common action he contented himself with giv- 
 ing admirable Baconian counsels based on the necessity 
 of accepting practical conditions and living in the world 
 as it is. He says in one place that we have almost 
 a total inexperience of ecstasy as a rule of life ; at 
 all events, it seems to have been to him more a dream 
 of the mind, like a millennial hope, than a practical 
 mode of living. He had great powers of practical 
 compromise with actuality in the present world, and 
 the extremes of his theory are held in check by 
 his general prudence ; it is only when the conditions 
 are wholly ideal that he rises to paradox and affronts 
 the common sense of men. In the case of the intel- 
 lect, he discredited the reasoning and logical faculties 
 from the beginning, and followed in this a private 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 191 
 
 idiosyncrasy. It was consonant, however, with his 
 distrust of science. This was based, nevertheless, on 
 a different ground, and really proceeded from his 
 belief that the chief end of the study of Nature was 
 not to formulate the laws of phenomena, but to make 
 phenomena render up the moral laws which they con- 
 tained as in a cryptogram. He was possessed with 
 this conception of Nature. It belougs, like illuminism 
 and ecstasy, to a primitive stage, of the human mind, 
 though like these it constantly reappears in the world. 
 His objection to science was only that it did not make 
 moral philosophy its end. On the other hand, he was 
 much impressed by the mechanical inventions and the 
 scientific theories of his time. In the third place, with 
 regard to the heart, his theory of love has for its 
 central idea the progress from a love of persons to a 
 love of God known impersonally in the abstractions 
 of Truth, Beauty, and Virtue, and this carried as a 
 consequence his depreciation of the personal side of 
 love and his rule that one can love only what is supe- 
 rior. This part of his thought seems to have the least 
 reality, to be more purely theoretic, than anything 
 else except his doctrine of ecstasy. It must be ob- 
 served, however, that it is in opposition to the drift 
 of humanity in the ideal of love, which crowns as its 
 noblest form the love of the higher for the lower that 
 in its climax and consummation results in the sacrifice 
 of the higher for the lower. This is the ideal of Chris- 
 tian love, and in its modern expansion and application 
 in humanitarianism it retains the features of Christian 
 tradition; in the thoughts of civilized men to-day 
 throughout the world the love of inferiors is the chief 
 grace of a noble mind. The criticism, however, is not 
 
192 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 to be unduly pressed, because here, as in other parts of 
 his doctrine, Emerson's practice pleads against his 
 words. It must be allowed, also, that with regard to the 
 part of the will and of impulse in life his views suggest 
 the primacy of the unconscious in life, and are so far 
 sympathetic with the study of the unconscious which 
 has been so leading a subject in the investigation and 
 speculation of the philosophy of the last century. 
 
 In the field of religion the power of Emerson seems 
 to lie in the fact that he confirms, as it were, the 
 mystical moments that visit the soul and gives to 
 them a divine sanction. All men have such moments 
 in which they are in the presence of an unknown ele- 
 ment in human destiny and are subject to feeling of 
 which they can make no analysis and whose meaning 
 they cannot read. Such moments are touched with 
 emotion, according to their origin and the character 
 of the individual, through all the range from sublimity 
 to terror ; they are moments of conviction. In gen- 
 eral, religion is the key which men apply to them, and 
 all religions make great use of them both for faith 
 and discipline ; the association of religion with these 
 moments is the main support of all faiths. It is to 
 be recollected that in Emerson's case he was placed 
 by birth and breeding in a community where religion 
 had been gradually drying up in its sources. Unita- 
 rianism had already given over a considerable part of 
 the ordinary Christian faith, and especially that por- 
 tion in which emotion most resides, the person and 
 authority of Christ. He required, therefore, a new 
 means of emotion, if he was to retain his religious life. 
 He found this means in metaphysical ideas, which 
 allowed him to certify his religious states of mind as 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 193 
 
 divine, precisely as a pagan might have done without 
 Christianity. There were others besides himself in 
 the same predicament, and since that time there have 
 been many thousands whose religious nature has been 
 without guidance or authority, and at a loss ; but the 
 mystical moments that come to all men still visit 
 them ; and in Emerson's writings such persons have 
 found a confirmation of their experience, a spiritual 
 interpretation of it which does not have its value in 
 the mode of explanation, but in the mere affirmation 
 that the experience is divine. The reader does not 
 further inquire into the reasonableness of the doctrine ; 
 he has found the gospel that serves him, and he treats 
 its enigmas, mysteries, and obscurities as other reli- 
 gious people treat the blind passages and transcendent 
 truths in their own creeds. All religion has a ten- 
 dency to prevail by putting the mind to sleep. The 
 important thing is to be assured of the divine and 
 infinite nature of the soul and to have an account of 
 the soul's personal experience of the human mystery 
 in itself or in the face of the world at large. Emerson 
 provides all this with the sincerity and conviction, 
 the eloquence and enthusiasm, the authority, too, of a 
 great moral preacher. He is the priest of those who 
 have gone out of the church, but who must yet retain 
 some emotional religious life, some fragment of the 
 ancient heavens, some literary expression of the feel- 
 ing of the divine. It is because of the multitude of 
 such minds under modern conditions that his Essays 
 have had so broad and profound an influence, and the 
 tenderness and veneration with which his memory is 
 widely regarded are due to the peculiarly intimate 
 and personally precious service which he has rendered. 
 
194 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 A second source of his power is the vigour with 
 which he has stood for individuality. Self-reliance 
 on his lips is a clarion call. He has the advantage, 
 also, of exemplifying the cause in his own person. 
 The absoluteness with which he cut all moorings ex- 
 cites the mind. It is true that it is in the principle 
 of authority that progress stops; life petrifies there. 
 In church or state or books, tradition is the power 
 that binds ; experiment is the power that looses. Men 
 are, in general, willing enough to experiment, but 
 they are afraid. He vivifies them. Energy in life is 
 what he most values ; and energy certified by success. 
 He has little to say of resignation and sacrifice. The rule 
 of useful life seems to him to be the other way, — indus- 
 try, self-assertion, effort for the prize of life ; and he 
 values these prizes, which in his broad terms are aristoc- 
 racy and property, and he is content that those who win 
 them should have them. The practical instincts of 
 men respond to this sure touch ; in worldly wisdom 
 and the cunning of goods he has sagacity, and he has 
 observed the course of human events, where and how 
 property goes and into what hands. It is as a proof 
 of energy that he values it and all other titles of 
 success. The secret of a man's power is to use greater 
 power, turning its channels through himself ; charac- 
 ter is the greatest personal power, and it is moral — it 
 is moral power funded. Moral power indicated by 
 material success is his reading of the practical ideal. 
 He is sound, too, in his democracy ; equal rights and 
 equal opportunities, a fair field, wealth measured by 
 toil, liberty, and a principle of protection that shall 
 grow stronger in proportion to the weakness of the 
 individual and his necessity for succour or defence, — 
 
vi.] TERMINUS 195 
 
 these are his principles, and more manifest in the 
 spirit of his writings than any particular expression. 
 He was closer to the soil in his democracy, nearer to 
 the plain people of the country, than any other man of 
 letters ; and in his works he embodied more vitally 
 the practical ideal of the American, industrious, suc- 
 cessful, self-reliant, not embarrassed by the past, not 
 disturbed by the future, confident, not afraid. If the 
 actual state of affairs discouraged him, he never 
 doubted of the issue ; as time went on, his optimism 
 as to his country increased, and he saw in it the vast 
 home of labouring men, free and well-intentioned, with 
 power to hold in their own hands the experiment of 
 democracy in which their welfare is the chief factor. 
 The fortune of the republic was for him not accumu- 
 lated wealth but widespread welfare. He was by 
 birth a patriot, by tradition a Puritan democrat, and 
 these views were natural to him. His Americanism 
 undoubtedly endears him to his countrymen. But 
 it is not within narrow limits of political or 
 worldly wisdom that his influence and teachings have 
 their effect; but in the invigoration of the personal 
 life with which his pages are electric. No man rises 
 from reading him without feeling more unshackled. 
 To obey one's disposition is a broad charter, and 
 sends the soul to sail all seas. The discontented, the 
 troubled in conscience, the revolutionary spirits of 
 all lands, are his pensioners ; the seed of their thoughts 
 is here, and also the spirit that strengthens them in 
 lonely toils, and perhaps in desperate tasks, for the 
 wind of the world blows such winged seed into far 
 and strange places. It is not by intellectual light but 
 by this immense moral force that his genius works 
 
196 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 
 
 in the world. He was so great because he embodied 
 the American spirit in his works and was himself a 
 plain and shining example of it ; and an American 
 knows not whether to revere more the simple man- 
 hood of his personal life in his home and in the 
 world, or that spiritual light which shines from him, 
 and of which the radiance flowed from him even in 
 life. That light all men who knew him saw as 
 plainly as Carlyle when he watched him go up the 
 hill at Craigenputtock and disappear over the crest 
 " like an angel." 
 
 His inspiring power, in religion to many and in 
 practical life to many more, has long been recognized 
 as the substance of his influence and fame. The 
 intellectual part with which it is associated has 
 always been more in question ; but the reader, from 
 whom it is for the most part veiled, leaves the doubtful 
 ideas and takes in full measure the spirit that enfran- 
 chises and strengthens and makes him not to be afraid ; 
 and it is to be hoped that he may imbibe a portion 
 also of Emerson's sense of the actual as a governing 
 if unwelcome element in life and a corrective of all 
 theory ; for after all, revolutionary power is the best 
 of Emerson's gifts. If in this account which has 
 here been given there is much limitation, it proceeds 
 from a desire to arrive at the truth about him in his 
 own spirit by one who, the familiar lover of his 
 pages from boyhood, has by many repeated readings 
 through years winnowed this meaning from them. 
 He was exclusively a man of religion; his other 
 thought is a corollary from his religious premises. 
 It belongs to primary honesty, therefore, to say that 
 he was not a Christian in any proper use of the 
 
vi.] TEKMINUS 197 
 
 word; it is a cardinal fact in considering his rela- 
 tion to the religious changes of the time ; rather he 
 was a link in the de-Christianization of the world in 
 laying off the vesture of old religion ; but it is plain 
 that no modern mind can abide in his ideas. They 
 were the tent where the Spirit rested for a night, 
 and is now gone ; and who can forecast the ways of 
 the Spirit ? To those who live in the spirit, he will 
 long be, as Arnold said, the friend ; to the young 
 and courageous he will be an elder brother in the v*" 
 tasks of life ; and in whatever land he is read he will 
 be the herald and attendant of change, the son and 
 father of Revolution. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Academy, French, associate 
 membership in, 180-181. 
 
 Adams, Abel, 85, 93. 
 
 Albee, Mr., 96. 
 
 Alcott, A. Bronson, 52, 78, 86, 
 89, 94, 95. 
 
 , Mrs., 94. 
 
 , Louisa M., 80-81 . 
 
 American Scholar, The, ad- 
 dress, 52. 
 
 Amherst College lecture, 180. 
 
 Ancient and Honorable Artil- 
 lery, 4. 
 
 Anti-Slavery question, 70-74. 
 
 Apology, The, poem, 164. 
 
 " Apostles of the Newness," 53. 
 
 Aristocracy, lecture, 182. 
 
 Aristophanes, opinion of, 86. 
 
 Astrcea, poem,' 166. 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, The, contri- 
 butions to, 106. 
 
 Austen, Jane, 86. 
 
 B 
 
 Bacchus, poem, 167, 174. 
 Baucroft, George, 103. 
 Blight, poem, 170. 
 Book Club, the, 17. 
 Boston Hymn, the, 105. 
 Bowdoin prize, Harvard, 16. 
 Boylston prize, Harvard, 16. 
 Bramah, poem, 83, 167, 172. 
 
 Brook Farm, 68-70. 
 Brown, John, 72-73. 
 Bulkeley, Peter, 4. 
 Burke, lecture, 41. 
 Burns Centenary address, 77- 
 78. 
 
 C 
 
 Cabot, J. Elliot, 34-35, 86, 181. 
 California, trip to, 179. 
 Canterbury Lane residence, 
 
 22-23. 
 Card-playing, dislike of, 82. 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 39, 43, 58, 
 
 66, 68, 85, 97, 100-101, 102, 
 
 103, 106, 108, 196 ; paper on, 
 
 182. 
 Channing, Edward Tyrrel, 14. 
 , William Ellery, 4, 45, 96- 
 
 97. 
 
 Character of Socrates, The, es- 
 say, 16. 
 
 Chardon Street Convention, 
 53. 
 
 Cherokees, removal of, 74. 
 
 Children, Emerson and, 80-82, 
 95-96, 164-165. 
 
 Christian Science, 154. 
 
 Civil War period, 104-105. 
 
 Clarke, James Freeman, 66-67. 
 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 103- 
 104. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 30, 33, 39-40, 
 45, 108. 
 
 199 
 
200 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Concord, life at, 42-43, 64-66, 
 
 80-82, 93-101, 181-183. 
 Concord Hymn, the, 41. 
 Conduct of Life, The, 105-106. 
 Conservative, The, address, 61. 
 Conventicle Club, the, 17. 
 
 Dante, opinion of, 86. 
 
 Dartmouth College, address at, 
 61. 
 
 Days, poem, 172. 
 
 Day's Bations, The, 172. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 103. 
 
 Dial, TJie, 68, 95, 106. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 86. 
 
 Dirge, The, poem, 165. 
 
 Discontented Poet : a Masque, 
 The, 44. 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 180. 
 
 Divinity School Address, Har- 
 vard, 55-56, 67, 105. 
 
 Don Quixote, 86. 
 
 Dorr, classmate, 16. 
 
 E 
 
 Each and All, poem, 168. 
 Edinburgh, lectures in, 102. 
 Egypt, visit to, 180. 
 Elements, prefatory lines, 166. 
 Emerson, Bulkeley (brother), 
 
 6, 26. 
 , Charles (brother), 6, 26, 
 
 28, 29, 42. 
 , Edward (brother), 6, 16, 
 
 21, 26, 28, 33, 40, 42. 
 — , Mary (aunt), 3, 7, 8-9, 
 
 14, 24. 
 — , Ralph Waldo : birth and 
 
 ancestry, 2-5 ; death of 
 father, 5-6 ; brothers, sis- 
 
 ter, and mother, 6-7 ; aunt, 
 Miss Mary Emerson, 8-9 ; 
 removal of family from Bos- 
 ton to Concord, 9-10 ; early 
 school-life, 11-13 ; Harvard 
 days, 13-18 ; assistant at 
 brother William's school for 
 young women, 21-22 ; re- 
 moval to Canterbury Lane, 
 22-23 ; exclusively clerical 
 surroundings in early life, 
 24-25 ; student at Harvard 
 Divinity School, 26-27 ; suf- 
 ferings from rheumatism and 
 visit to South, 27-28 ; re- 
 newal of theological studies, 
 28 ; engagement and mar- 
 riage to Ellen Louisa Tucker, 
 29-30 ; ordained colleague of 
 Dr. Ware at Old North 
 Church, Boston, 29-30 ; 
 trend of mental develop- 
 ment, 30-33 ; proposes dis- 
 continuance of use of the 
 elements in celebrating Com- 
 munion, and consequent res- 
 ignation, 35-37 ; death of 
 wife, 38 ; first journey abroad 
 (1831), 38-39; meets Car- 
 lyle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
 and Landor, 39-40 ; income 
 from wife's fortune, 40 ; lec- 
 tures during 1833-1835, 41 ; 
 Concord Hymn, 41 ; occa- 
 sional preaching, especially 
 at New Bedford, 41-42 ; set- 
 tles permanently at Concord, 
 and marries Lydia Jackson, 
 42-43 ; varying fates of 
 brothers, 42-43 ; helps in- 
 troduce Carlyle to American 
 readers, 43; poetic side of 
 
INDEX 
 
 201 
 
 character, 44; intellectually 
 a moralist, and a mystic 
 devotee, 45 ; attractions of 
 transcendentalism, 45-46 ; 
 publication of Nature, 48 ; 
 analysis and critical consid- 
 eration of Nature, 47-51 ; 
 delivers Phi Beta Kappa 
 Address (1837), 51-52; con- 
 nection with the Transcen- 
 dentalists, 52-54 ; the Divinity 
 School Address (1838), 55- 
 56 ; The Method of Nature 
 address (1841), 59-61 ; sub- 
 sequent addresses and their 
 significance, 61-63 ; home 
 life in Concord, 64-66 ; the 
 Transcendental Club and 
 The Dial, 67-68 ; Brook 
 Farm, 68-70; the Anti- 
 Slavery question, 70-74 ; 
 Lowell's description of 
 speeches, 75-78 ; N. P. 
 Willis's, 78 ; lecturing tours 
 in the West, 79-80 ; children 
 of, 80 ; fondness for chil- 
 dren, 81-82 ; personal ap- 
 pearance, 82-83 ; trait of 
 humour, 83-84 ; walking, 
 shooting, smoking, and busi- 
 ness habits, 84-85; reading 
 and writing habits, 85-87 ; 
 mode of study and composi- 
 tion, 88-90 ; friendships, 90- 
 97 ; lack of magnetism, 97- 
 100 ; as a letter-writer and 
 correspondent, 100-101 ; sec- 
 ond journey abroad (1847), 
 102-104 ; revisits Carlyle and 
 meets Leigh Hunt, De Quin- 
 cey, and Clough, 103-104 ; 
 effect of Civil War on affairs*. 
 
 104 ; visits Washington and 
 talks with Lincoln, 105 ; 
 works published from 1836 
 to 1865, 105-106; examina- 
 tion of the Essays, 107 ff. ; 
 passage on the nature of the 
 soul quoted, 146-147 ; the 
 poetic side, 158 ff. ; analysis 
 of poems, 161-177 ; beginning 
 of decline of vital energy, 
 178 ; honours from Harvard, 
 178 ; second Phi Beta Kappa 
 Address (1867), 178; Cali- 
 fornian trip, 179 ; burning 
 of home and third journey 
 abroad (1872), 180 ; candi- 
 dacy for Lord Rectorship of 
 Glasgow University, 180 ; 
 associate member of French 
 Academy, 181 ; later publi- 
 cations (Parnassus, Letters 
 and Social Aims), 181 ; inci- 
 dent of University of Vir- 
 ginia address, 181 ; last 
 public appearances, and 
 death, 182 ; impression left 
 by career, and conclusion, 
 182-197. 
 
 Emerson, Mrs. Ralph Waldo 
 (first wife), 29-30, 38. 
 
 , Mrs. Ralph Waldo (sec- 
 ond wife), 42, 66. 
 
 , Waldo (son), 80-81. 
 
 , (son), 78-79, 80, 82. 
 
 , William (grandfather) , 
 
 3-4. 
 
 — , William (father), 4, 5-6. 
 
 — , Mrs. William (mother), 
 3, 6, 40, 43, 80. 
 
 — , William (brother), 6, 
 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 25, 27, 
 33, 36. 
 
202 
 
 INDEX 
 
 English Literature, lecture, 41. 
 
 English Traits, 105. 
 
 Essays, 105, 107-157, 174, 186. 
 
 European journey, first (1831), 
 38-40; second (1847), 102- 
 104 ; third (1872), 180." 
 
 Everett, Edward, 12, 18-21. 
 
 F 
 
 Eire, loss of home by, 180. 
 Eirst Parish Church, Boston, 4. 
 First Philosophy, the, 109. 
 Forerunners, poem, 172. 
 Fortus, poem, 11. 
 France, visits to, 39, 102-104, 
 
 180 ; Essays known in, 106. 
 French literature, 85. 
 Friendship, essay, 150. 
 Fruitlands experiment, 94. 
 Fugitive Slave Law address, 
 
 72, 73. 
 Fuller, Margaret, 68, 83, 95, 
 
 97, 98 ; Memoirs of, 106. 
 Furness, Dr., 10-11, 83. 
 
 G 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 74. 
 Gentleman-farming, 70. 
 George Fox, lecture, 41. 
 German literature, 85. 
 Give All to Love, poem, 166. 
 Glasgow, Lord Rectorship of 
 
 University of, 180. 
 Goethe, 25, 54, 85. 
 Good-by, poem, 164. 
 Gourdin, classmate, 16. 
 Guy, poem, 166. 
 
 Hafiz, obligations to, 168. 
 Hamatreya, poem, 164. 
 
 Harvard College, life as stu- 
 dent at, 13-18 ; addresses at, 
 51-52, 55, 105, 178 ; classical 
 instruction at, 85 ; soldiers 
 of, 105 ; recognition and 
 honours from, 178, 179. 
 
 Haskins, Ruth. See Emerson, 
 Mrs. William (mother). 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 53, 83, 
 97-98. 
 
 Hermione, poem, 172. 
 
 Heroism, lecture, 74. 
 
 Hoar, Elizabeth, 93-94. 
 
 Hoar, Samuel, 72. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 90, 
 98. 
 
 Hosmer, farmer, 70. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 103. 
 
 Initial, Doemonic, and Celestial 
 
 Love, poem, 166. 
 Ireland, Alexander, 102. 
 Italy, travels in, 39, 180. 
 Italy, lecture, 41. 
 
 Jackson, Lydia. See Emerson, 
 
 Mrs. R. W. (second wife). 
 James, Henry, Sr., 98. 
 
 K 
 
 Kansas, the arming of settlers 
 
 in, 72. 
 Keats, point of analogy to, 166. 
 Khedive, breakfast with, 180. 
 Kossuth, Louis, 74. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 39-40, 
 
 108. 
 Lectures, first, 41 ; in Boston 
 
INDEX 
 
 203 
 
 and vicinity, 61, 65, 104, 
 180, 181 ; on Slavery, 71- 
 75; in the West, 79-80, 179 ; 
 in Great Britain, 102 ; at 
 Harvard College, 179; at 
 Amherst College, 180 ; last 
 courses of, 181. 
 
 Letters and Social Aims, 181. 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 105. 
 
 Literary Ethics, address, 61. 
 
 London, addresses in, 102, 180. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wads worth, 
 98. 
 
 Love, essay, 150. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 51, 53, 
 75-78, 98. 
 
 Luther, lecture, 41. 
 
 M 
 
 Man the Beformer, address, 61. 
 
 Martineau, Harriet, 70, 99. 
 
 Massachusetts Historical So- 
 ciety paper, 182. 
 
 Massachusetts Quarterly, con- 
 nection with, 68. 
 
 May-Day, poem, 163. 
 
 May-Day arid Other Pieces, 179. 
 
 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, 
 106. 
 
 Merlin, poem, 168. 
 
 Method of Nature, The, ad- 
 dress, 59-61. 
 
 Michael Angelo, lecture, 41. 
 
 Milton, lecture, 41. 
 
 Miscellanies, 105. 
 
 Mithridates, poem, 167. 
 
 Monadnock, poem, 172. 
 
 Montaigne, influence of, 32, 
 107-108. 
 
 Monthly Anthology, 5. 
 
 Moody, Father, 4. 
 
 Morley, John, 147. 
 Murat, Achille, 28. 
 My Garden, poem, 164. 
 
 N 
 
 Natural History of Intellect, 
 The, 109, 179. 
 
 Nature, first book, 46-51, 61, 
 105, 174. 
 
 New Bedford, sermons at, 41- 
 42. 
 
 New Jerusalem Church, 58. 
 
 Newton, residence at, 40. 
 
 Nile, trip up the, 180. 
 
 North American Beview, con- 
 tributions to, 106. 
 
 Norton, Dr. Andrews, 56. 
 
 O 
 
 Ode to Beauty, 166. 
 
 Old Manse, the, 10, 28, 42. 
 
 Old North Church, Boston, 
 
 29-30, 35-38, 44. 
 Osman, ideal poet, 44, 99-100, 
 
 160. 
 
 Paris, visits to, 39, 104, 180. 
 Park, The, poem, 167. 
 Parker, Theodore, 104. 
 Parnassus, anthology, 181. 
 Phi Beta Kappa Address, first 
 
 (1837), 51-52, 105; second 
 
 (1867), 178. 
 Phi Beta Kappa poem (1834), 
 
 41. 
 Phillips, Wendell, 74. 
 Pilgrims to Concord, 98-101. 
 Plato, 85. 
 
 Plotinus, influence of, 168. 
 Plutarch, 82, 85. 
 Poems, 105, 158-177. 
 
204 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Present State of Ethical Phi- 
 losophy, The, essay, 16. 
 Problem, The, poem, 168. 
 Pythologian Society, the, 17. 
 
 Q 
 
 Quinet, attention of French 
 called to Essays by, 106. 
 
 R 
 
 Belation of Man to the Globe, 
 
 The, lecture, 41. 
 Ttepresentative Men, 105. 
 Bhodora, The, 164. 
 Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 9-10, 28, 36, 
 
 42. 
 Ripley, George, 67, 69, 70. 
 Ripley, Samuel, 14, 27. 
 Bomany Girl, The, poem, 172. 
 
 S 
 
 Saadi, poem, 168. 
 Sailors' Mission, the, 34. 
 San Francisco lecture, 179. 
 Sartor Besartus, preface to, 43. 
 Saturday Club, the, 184. 
 Sea Shore, poem, 162. 
 Self-portraiture, Emerson's, 44. 
 Shelley, 86. 
 
 Slavery, speeches on, 71-74. 
 Snow Storm, poem, 162. 
 Society and Solitude, essays, 
 
 179. 
 Song of Nature, poem, 170- 
 
 171. 
 Sphinx, The, poem, 171. 
 Sumner, Charles, 72. 
 Swedenborg, mental response 
 
 to, 30. 
 
 Taylor, Father, 34. 
 Terminus, poem, 164. 
 Tests of Great Men, lecture, 41. 
 Thomson, James, 161. 
 Thoreau, Henry D., 68, 87, 96- 
 
 97; literary remains of, 106. 
 Threnody, poem, 81, 165. 
 Ticknor, George, 15. 
 Times, The, address, 61. 
 To Ellen in the South, poem, 
 
 164. 
 To Bhoea, poem, 166. 
 Transcendental Club, the, 67. 
 Transcendentalism, 44-45, 52- 
 
 53, 150. 
 Transcendentalist, The, ad- 
 dress, 61. 
 Travel, opinions on, 39, 104, 
 
 149, 180. 
 Tucker, Ellen Louisa. See 
 
 Emerson, Mrs. R. W. (first 
 
 wife). 
 Two Bivers, poem, 164, 167. 
 
 U 
 
 University of Virginia address, 
 
 181. 
 Uriel, poem, 167. 
 
 Venice, visit to and opinion of, 
 39. 
 
 W 
 
 Waltham, first sermon at, 27 ; 
 
 address at, 72. 
 Ware, Rev. Henry, 29-30, 56. 
 Washington, lecture in, 105. 
 
INDEX 
 
 205 
 
 Water, lecture, 41. 
 Waterville College, address at, 
 
 59-61. 
 Webster, Daniel, 73. 
 Whittier, John G., 98, 161. 
 Willis, Nathaniel P., 78. 
 Wood-Notes, poem, 165, 169. 
 Wordsworth, William, 39-40, 
 
 108. 
 
 Xenophanes, poem, 166. 
 
 Y 
 
 Yankeeism, element of, 83-84, 
 184. 
 
 Yosemite tour, 179. 
 
 Young American, The ad- 
 dress, 61. 
 
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 SHELLEY. ByJ.A. Symonds. 
 SHERIDAN. ByMrs.Oliphant. 
 
 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 
 
 By J. A. Symonds. 
 
 SOUTHEY. By Prof. Dowden. 
 SPENSER. By R. W. Church. 
 STERNE. By H. D. Traill. 
 SWIFT. By Leslie Stephen. 
 THACKERAY. ByA.Trollope. 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 By F. W. H. Myers. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York 
 

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