"Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your

first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I

have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the

inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well,

and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave

question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so

much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for

I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better

than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time

of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my

house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have

known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation.

He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of

man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He

postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so

that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But

some time I shall see you and speak of him."

Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book

of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no

name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author,

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay

with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. For it has

proved for many,--I will not say a _pons asinorum_,--but a very narrow

bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they

must cross it, or one domain of Emerson's intellect will not be reached.

It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. It

talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning

simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until,

as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of

his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words

which "a certain poet sang" to him.

This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was

peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's

"Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was

vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves

common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to

travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very

long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell

five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats's

"doubtful tale from fairy-land

Hard for the non-elect to understand."

The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.

"Whatever is too original," says De Quincey, "will be hated at the

first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance

of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a

counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering

against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William

Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was

the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since

then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the

echo of his name."

No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than

Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of "Nature," his

first thoroughly characteristic Essay. There is the same thought in the

Preface to "The Excursion" that we find in the Introduction to "Nature."

"The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;

we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original

relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and

philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by

revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"

"Paradise and groves

Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old

Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be

A history only of departed things,

Or a mere fiction of what never was?"

"Nature" is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters,

which might almost as well have been called cantos.

Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with

which the aspects of nature inspired him. He had recently for the first

time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the

planetary influences above, beneath, around him. The air of the country

intoxicated him. There are sentences in "Nature" which are as exalted

as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been

etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of

his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. Yet underlying these

excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured

the anxious. The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and

the stars shone again in quiet reflection.

After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses

himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes "part or particle of

God," he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled _Commodity_, the

ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing

and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of

Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," as he has

called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural

conveniences.

But "a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love

of _Beauty_" which is his next subject. There are some touches of

description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and

impressions for pictures.

Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be

found here. Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature. "What is

common to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."--"Nothing

is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."--"No

reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." How easily

these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems,

"Each and All," and "The Rhodora." A good deal of his philosophy comes

out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:--

"Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for

the universe; God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty are

but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not

ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not

alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a

part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of

Nature.".

In the "Rhodora" the flower is made to answer that

"Beauty is its own excuse for being."

In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse

itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper

than itself.

He passes next to a consideration of _Language_. Words are signs of

natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular

spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very

profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in

which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become

transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature.

"A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual

processes, will find that always a material image, more or less

luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought,

which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and

brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories."

From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful

mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material

images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves

when great exigencies call for them.

"The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been

nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year,

without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson

altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long

hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in

the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their

morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the

passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again

the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and

the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his

infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of

power, are put into his hands."

It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say

that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of

Wordsworth:--

"These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness sensations sweet

Felt in the blood and felt along the heart."

It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may

have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the

comparison.

In _Discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence

of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will.

Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp,

because

"Time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"The moral

law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the

circumference."--"All things with which we deal preach to us.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?"--"From the child's successive

possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'Thy

will be done!' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under

his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the

whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character."

The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to.

He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. When a

friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with

sweet and solid wisdom "it is a sign to us that his office is closing,

and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time." This

thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles,

which occurred a few months before "Nature" was published. He had

already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some

recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "To a man

laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.

Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has

just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down

over less worth in the population." This was the first effect of the

loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders

events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first.

The chapter on _Idealism_ must be read by all who believe themselves

capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment

of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the

existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical

inquiries." The most essential statement is this:--

"It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World,

that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a

certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon,

man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test

the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the

impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what

difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or

some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?"

We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like

that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which

cheat the senses by false appearances.

The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities

between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The

philosopher pursues Truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones

the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought."

Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature

and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts

Nature."--"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"Michael Angelo said of

external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses

the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not

undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed

understanding." "I have no hostility to Nature," he says, "but a

child's love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and

melons."--But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is

phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the

world in God,"--as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant

eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the

next chapter, which has for its title _Spirit_.

Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the

demands of the spirit. "It leaves God out of me."--Of these three

questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory

answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a

substance.

"But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many

truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn

that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread

universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or

power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all

things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that

behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is

one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from

without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through

ourselves."--"As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the

bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at

his need, inexhaustible power."

Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a

"creator in the finite."

"As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more

evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from

God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer

run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us."

All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next

chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.

This next and last chapter is entitled _Prospects_. He begins with

a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction,

undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught

sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the

"imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In

a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for

the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all--or most of us,

certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more

of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and

to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the

realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert's

"Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air

of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature

which a certain poet sang to me."--"A man is a god in ruins."--"Man is

the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He

filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the

sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--But he no longer

fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop."

Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct."

Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England

Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the

Mount: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect."

The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us,

"Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to

the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." The

seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, "There

shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." The sage of

Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "A correspondent revolution in

things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable

appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons,

enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen."

* * * * *

It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New

Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the "Revelation." He

found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. Yet,

considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble

imagery and wonderful beauty. "Nature" is the Book of Revelation of our

Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a

poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its

pantheistic character, as Wordsworth's "Lines composed near Tintern

Abbey" had been long before. But here and there it found devout readers

who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical

beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the "Democratic Review" in

terms of enthusiastic admiration.

Mr. Bowen, the Professor of Natural Theology and Moral Philosophy

in Harvard University, treated this singular semi-philosophical,

semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "Christian Examiner,"

headed "Transcendentalism," and published in the January number for

1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his

subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the

acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations

between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article.

The professor turns the book over and over,--inspects it from plastron

to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes

successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound

philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by

obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more

than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after

some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily

agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:--

"On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the

criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only

allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in

itself."

Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837:--

"Your little azure-colored 'Nature' gave me true satisfaction. I

read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a

sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back.

You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it

rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build

whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the

true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a

man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look

out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear

for the _Ewigen Melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and

utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to

be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a

kind of attempt to write down."

The first edition of "Nature" had prefixed to it the following words

from Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last

thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not

know." This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:--

"A subtle chain of countless rings

The next unto the farthest brings;

The eye reads omens where it goes,

And speaks all languages the rose;

And striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form."

The copy of "Nature" from which I take these lines, his own, of course,

like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was

printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin's

"Origin of Species," twenty years and more before the publication of

"The Descent of Man." But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844,

had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems

as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does

not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to

catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in

the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than

the naturalist's theory that the progenitor of the human race was an

acephalous mollusk. "I will not be sworn," says Benedick, "but love may

transform me to an oyster." For "love" read science.

Unity in variety, "_il piu nell uno_" symbolism of Nature and its

teachings, generation of phenomena,--appearances,--from spirit, to

which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and

elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may

be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an

aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome,--a

stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of New England

scholastic intelligence. But here and there it found a reader to whom it

was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation,--

"The golden key

Which opes the palace of eternity,"

inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth,

because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through

the purification of their own souls.

Next to "Nature" in the series of his collected publications comes "The

American Scholar. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society

at Cambridge, August 31, 1837."

The Society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the

uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that

philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the

annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many

distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual

addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest.

Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any

former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured

in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded

and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what

enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"

Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas

found expression in it. This was to be expected in an address delivered

before such an audience. Every real thinker's world of thought has its

centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle

round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and

then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through

those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture;

for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become

atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It

begins with a note like a trumpet call.

"Thus far," he says, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign

of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to

give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an

indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when

it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard

intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and

fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better

than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our

long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a

close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot

always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events,

actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can

doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in

the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers

announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?"

Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was

in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into

fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. The fable covers the

doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial

manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole

man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many

faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is

one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and

strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach,

an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing,

into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute

book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship."

This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted

by omnivorous old Burton: "_Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes

hominis_." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making.

It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing

the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled

in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a

fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's

time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found

cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when

in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special

acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of

men's thoughts and working faculties.

"In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated

intellect. In the right state he is _Man thinking_. In the

degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a

mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is

continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory

pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites."

Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature

upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his

previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of

the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence.

"Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is

hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is

just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to

give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel.

"Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation

for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit

this."

When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to

become an object of idolatrous regard.

"Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The

sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the

incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this

book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged.

Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not

by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set

out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to

accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given;

forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in

libraries when they wrote these books.--One must he an inventor to

read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth

of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'--When the

mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book

we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is

doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the

world."

It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of

books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him.

"Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.

Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen

into truth.--The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action

past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the

intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this

by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is

converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours."

Emerson does not use the words "unconscious cerebration," but these

last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. The beautiful

paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration

of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so

Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were

his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with

him, at least through the pages of this discourse. The reader shall have

the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to.

"There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not,

sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by

soaring from our body into the empyrean.

"Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and

dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many

another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already;

friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation

and world must also soar and sing."

Having spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, by

action, he speaks of the scholar's duties. "They may all," he says, "be

comprised in self-trust." We have to remember that the _self_ he means

is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to

the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which

all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he

sings in "The Sphinx ":--

"The heavens that now draw him

With sweetness untold,

Once found,--for new heavens

He spurneth the old."

"First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater

by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The

man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be

enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of

this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which,

flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the Capes of Sicily,

and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and

vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand

stars. It is one soul which animates all men."

And so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid

down to the American scholar of to-day. He does not spare his censure;

he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is

to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of

humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather

confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:--

"The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the

ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the

hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We

have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of

the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative,

tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of

this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There

is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant."

The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted.

"What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young

men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not

yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his

instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."

Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was

created to bear.

"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;

we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first

time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the

Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence.

Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel

Adams supported the affirmative of the question, "Whether it be lawful

to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be

preserved." It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there.

The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was

startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the

firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts

suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic

illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the

grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so

stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet

had been proclaiming to them "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever

forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker

it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more

like that of immediate inspiration.

CHAPTER V.

1838-1843. AET. 35-40.

Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human

Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:

Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of

Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The

Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The

Dial."--Brook Farm.

Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,

Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,

Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account

of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's

Son.--Threnody.

Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an

Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,

which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a

controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus

when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest

and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual

consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for

the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.

He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the

change of an expression:--

"In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath

of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with

fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and

sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new

hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.

Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost

spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge

globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and

prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn."

How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear,

and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased

attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed

the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and

milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the

smell of Lebanon." And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when

it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did

not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from

the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of

Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But "when

Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and

cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was

consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." Such was probably the fate

of many a copy of this famous discourse.

It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of

Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been

applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this

new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this

alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the

theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that

it is read as calmly to-day as a common "Election Sermon," if such are

ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the

reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and

its tendencies.

The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty,

deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws

which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and

illustration of this mind. What am I? What is?--are questions always

asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.

But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man

is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and

weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the

presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately

stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in

each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The

intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of

the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we

associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,

the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into

hell."

These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the

world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one

mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of

the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks

good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being

shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute

badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms

him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then

deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom."

"This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively

creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest

in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in

Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt,

in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental

genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men

found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon

mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the

history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this

infusion."

But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition.

What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject

it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the

church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the

doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of

voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul."

The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity

and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by

the discourse:--

"Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with

open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,

ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.

Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was

true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in

man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.

He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through

me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see

thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion

did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the

following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear

to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this

high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This

was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say

he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his

rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not

built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a

Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He

spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and

all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the

character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian

churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one

with the blowing clover and the falling rain."

He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of

historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive,

the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the

Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us.

"To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The

preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies;

they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and

peculiarity.

Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of

Christ is that the Moral Nature--the Law of Laws--is not explored as the

fountain of the established teaching in society. "Men have come to speak

of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were

dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its

fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the

assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is

closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing

him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our

theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not

was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like

Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost."

When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the

"practical application," some of his young hearers must have been

startled at the style of his address.

"Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all

conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it

first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and

money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that

you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the

immeasurable mind."

Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of

Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and

secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but

with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed

an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed

as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was

assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom

generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity,

rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same

divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with

whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words

carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the

spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must

have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses

they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one

having authority, and not as the Scribes.'"

Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its

doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ

of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed

and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in

which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson's

discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of

Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer:--

"What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I

might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known

opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time,

and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and

presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of

dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is

perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse,

and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very

important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the

nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my

opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would

rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise.

Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as

it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not,

be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished

by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the

'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I

heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and

love."

Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of

September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the

idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson's philosophy, and

sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of

which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings

of that most excellent and truly apostolic man.

To this letter Emerson sent the following reply:--

CONCORD, October 8, 1838.

"MY DEAR SIR,--I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter

of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right

manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it

assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps I am not so quick to see it

as writers generally,--certainly I did not feel any disposition

to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your

thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think

of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men

at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of

criticism. I have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical

writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to

rail,--lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed

near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the

notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated

fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no

scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I

could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not

possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on

which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments

are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in

telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it

is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see

that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the

present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly

raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I

advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make

good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such

thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have

always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the

page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing

whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the

same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that

my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society,

loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my

conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in

motley,--and so I am your affectionate servant," etc.

The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no

part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his

office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just

given,--"Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see." But among his

listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution,

not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose

voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the

long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--Theodore

Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the

conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present

day.

In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course

of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten

Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV.

Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty;

X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false

with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life."

Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures

or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in "Lectures

and Biographical Sketches;" and "The Comic" in "Letters and Social

Aims."

* * * * *

I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my

kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke.

The first letter was accompanied by the Poem "The Humble-bee," which

was first published by Mr. Clarke in the "Western Messenger," from the

autograph copy, which begins "Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has

a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected

works.

CONCORD, December 7, 1838.

MY DEAR SIR,--Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my

friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me

in the spring if I hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. I

remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of

yours that the verses, "Take, O take those lips away," were not

Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both

together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that

stanza. I know it is in "Rollo," but it is in "Measure for Measure"

also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and

critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and

those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all

for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not,

and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we _who_

sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and

servant, R.W. EMERSON.

TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

CONCORD, February 27, 1839.

MY DEAR SIR,--I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an

answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are

quite welcome to the lines "To the Rhodora;" but I think they need

the superscription ["Lines on being asked 'Whence is the Flower?'"].

Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world," etc] I send you a

corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them

that I think you must read them once again with your critical

spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years

ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury

called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper

than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and

am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic

date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry,

and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any

verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these

juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses,

that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up

old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely

as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to

music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe

I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than

_afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I

may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my

MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of

a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily

treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a

year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard

to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I

remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it;

but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall

have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself

of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle

Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent

spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he

writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring

lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind

enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done

by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to

betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any

line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the

universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the

old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you

will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every

possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I

heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year,

and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men

are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted

service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that

concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail,

of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to

trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad

to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson's

new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers,

aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along

the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but

I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.

Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON.

On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery

of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an

Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor

of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have

been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to

which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of

Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious

old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or

questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which

they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous

repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy

old dogmatists as dry as ever.

Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling

at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the

speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his

audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of

the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen,

provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of

the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver.

Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental

conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place

and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the

sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony

between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary

colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side

that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go

anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief

from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner,

such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to

quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.

The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the

same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence

as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem

misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these

discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his

complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned

its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which

freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and

all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find

some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative

illustration.

"Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a

prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and

earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet,

he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled

the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are

indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery

productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought."

For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie

all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his

confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual

independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history

and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits

a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:--

"An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of

injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their

possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything

that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that

he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a

grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny

to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is

piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_

annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him

talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved."

But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of

their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be

forever blighted.

From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his

tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied.

"Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of

Nature to us is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I

give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" And in the same way he would

have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to

the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution

of things. "He must embrace solitude as a bride." Not superstitiously,

but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all

that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of

the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst

of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it:--

"You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear

that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What

is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask, with

derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore

truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say,

'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early

visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and

romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then

dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and

poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand

thousand men.--Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from

every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to

show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you

renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for

the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has

its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world,

and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as

shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all

men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."

The next Address Emerson delivered was "The Method of Nature," before

the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11,

1841.

In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: "As usual at this

season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an

oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges

nine days hence.... My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches

acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done,

what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent,

sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and

stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted

the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced

in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.

The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is

"The Method of Nature." He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments

and promises of this literary Anniversary.

"The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the

foundations of the castle."--"We hear too much of the results of

machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle

folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid

wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the

incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes

of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the

bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the

farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and

feature of man."--"While the multitude of men degrade each other,

and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a

bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself."

I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than

in any of those which preceded it.

"Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this

saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with

whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think

meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his

ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?"

That there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true

wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it,

that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force,"

that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into

character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in

this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how

far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few

broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn.

We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this

discourse on "The Method of Nature," as the pictorial beauty of

their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson's

speculations is well shown in this paragraph:--

"We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not

thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for

our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring

reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the

receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy."--"It is God

in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In

the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this

fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are

mine; and all mine are thine.'"

We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same

paragraph, "I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so

sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his

tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond

explanation."

"We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency

appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is

growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else;

is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be

man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring,

a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit

and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that

it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends,

but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no

private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by

one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life

which in conscious beings we call ecstasy."

Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for

the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.

"The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify

the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of

stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!

thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning

and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry

of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of

right and wrong."

His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the

extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:--

"We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know

that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which

house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal

activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a

natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this

one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist,

cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that

they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they

were."

It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity

recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which

is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many

expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and

vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history

of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was

only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold

benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would

feel that they lost by his counsels.

"The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,

Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and

generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for

themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to

which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if

pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence

to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with

objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible

to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never

touched; always giving health."

Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses

and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many

organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their

views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their

special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in

the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the

Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he

preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have

a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--That he cannot give up

labor without suffering some loss of power. "How can the man who has

learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall

we say all we think?--Perhaps with his own hands.--Let us learn the

meaning of economy.--Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast

fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house

with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I

may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and

road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is

frugality for gods and heroes."

This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This "house with one

apartment" was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April

of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on

intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him

that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or

whether this idea was working in Thoreau's mind and was suggested to

Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed

so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau

entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the

philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others

carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common

sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the

conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to

prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends

"Teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more

commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.

"The Americans have many virtues," he says in this Address, "but they

have not Faith and Hope." Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the

burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by "a

great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual

and the actual world.

In the "Lecture on the Times" he shows very clearly the effect which a

nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves

Reformers had upon him.

"The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice,

but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are

quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no

more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they

reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal

and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness

that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who

are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of

mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as

the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work

of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him;

but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done

in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management,

by tactics and clamor."

All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by

the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson

had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser

and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in

view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination

and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts

that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes

it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the

dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who

sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any

rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of

those daring images which defy the critics.

"As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain,

the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall

eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we

shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds."

He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in

his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get

rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been

accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence

covers with its soothing tribute!

"All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame

what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but

of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment

man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised

and discredited angels."

The Lecture called "The Transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at

with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly

applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples.

It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and

accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together

very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this

comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson

explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of

thoughts cast in a new mould.

"What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism:

Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever

divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class

founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class

beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class

perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us

representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they

cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the

force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on

the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on

individual culture."

"The materialist takes his departure from the external world,

and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his

departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an

appearance.--His thought, that is the Universe."

The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of

"Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the

periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were

in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of

it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these "same

Transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "The Dial," which was

their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than

from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any

other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and

the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best

witness.

In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he sketches

in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the

development of the "new views" above mentioned. "There are always two

parties," he says, "the party of the Past and the party of the Future;

the Establishment and the Movement."

About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity

manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in

literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the

genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early

causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance

to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who

returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward

Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus

Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great

orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life

in a few old men's memories. It is therefore with delight that one who

remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his

full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant,

grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal

vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the

harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the

glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is

enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but

many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great

master of academic oratory.

Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to

the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of

science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the

influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate

community, the writings of Channing,--he left it to others to say of

Emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it

so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the

ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at

organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came

together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins

Warren's,--Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full

of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on

smoothly enough with the usual small talk,--

"When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster

supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before

Dr. Warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to

establish aesthetic society in Boston.

"Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs.

Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies

and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.--Margaret Fuller,

George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr.

Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others

gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at

each other's houses in a serious conversation."

With them was another, "a pure Idealist,--who read Plato as an

equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were

intellectual." He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to

say:--

"I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston

that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain

opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy,

and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite

innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or

three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual

vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge

and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and

sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but

had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary.

I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or

sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody

knows by whom, or when it was applied."

Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to

suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.

"In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human

thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any

presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts

it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this

largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist, who thanks

no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his

conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its

reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has

done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

"These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no

compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one

compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely

exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist

in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible

friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and

what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without

service to the race of man."

The person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in

nature," is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known

colloquially as a "crank." The person who does not thank, by word or

look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or

water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a

churl.

Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or

churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some

of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing

machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed

more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that

their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What

forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What

great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you

performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little

real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock

and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled

no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist"

dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as

that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.

In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious

persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader

must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and

not a scoffer:--

"They are not good citizens, not good members of society:

unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens;

they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public

religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions,

foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the

temperance society. They do not even like to vote."

After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual

beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this

is what they have to say:--

"'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you

want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the

labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust:

but we do not like your work.'

'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'

'We have none.'

'What will you do, then?' cries the world.

'We will wait.'

'How long?'

'Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.'

'But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.'

'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but

I will not move until I have the highest command.'"

And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his

reasons for doing nothing.

It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is

easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the

subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life

and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of

themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress

for indolence than "the Everlasting No." The chimney-corner is the true

arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their

all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among

his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a

fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow.

Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on

the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was

picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of

themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of

thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.

Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that

delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he

makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.

"Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must

behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet

accrue from them to the state. Besides our coarse implements, there

must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and

telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers,

there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges

and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct,

who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the

by-stander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and

monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the

electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks

the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not

be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare

and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and

verify our bearings from superior chronometers."

It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which

Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were

naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle,

and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical

judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew

a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:--

"There has sprung up in Boston," says Dickens, in his "American

Notes," "a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On

inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I

was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be

certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this

elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the

Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I

should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much

that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying

so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold.

Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has

not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not

least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to

detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe.

And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a

Transcendentalist."

In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The

Conservative." It was a time of great excitement among the members of

that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson

show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more

beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference

to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the

conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as

well as that of the other. "Conservatism tends to universal seeming and

treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers

govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will

fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a

general law without a particular application,--law for all that does

not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine

resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated

self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining

and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so,

whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed

of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an

impossible whole."

He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair

play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be

unjust to the present or the past.

We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that

Dr. Charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because

he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue

a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a

spiritual philosophy." Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in

a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this

country, Emerson says:--

"It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which

we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would

do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be

made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned

to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called 'The

Transcendentalist;' or, 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like....

Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous

contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured."

The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to

know as "The Dial!" A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry

old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be

content with Carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as

thus:--

"'The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it

may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be

things not dreamt of over in that _Transoceanic_ parish! I shall

certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure

forerunner of things better."

There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the

Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the

close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest

which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more

deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a

possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm.

They were to a certain extent synchronous,--the Magazine beginning in

July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in

1841, and breaking up in 1847.

"The Dial" was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by

Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse,

among them "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "Chardon Street

and Bible Convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "The

Problem," "Woodnotes," "The Sphinx," "Fate." The other principal writers

were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman

Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot

Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs.

Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the

contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest.

It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and

enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard

a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and

curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond

the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number.

Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her

part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with

his "trip-hammer" in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems

in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others,

whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are

still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent

contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to "The Dial," with all its

crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the "Anthology."

Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the

pledge of a better season.

We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence

between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before

the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge

of our _young people_ than any he has had. It is true that unfledged

writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more

interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth

of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that

intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the

inspiration of these "young people" to whom Emerson refers. He has to

apologize for the first number. "It is not yet much," he says; "indeed,

though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should

be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake

of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--The

Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and

whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know." They did

print "The Problem." There were also some fragments of criticism from

the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called "The Last

Farewell," by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson's

"May-day and other Pieces."

On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple

of months, Emerson writes:--

"Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism;

and the _Dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains

scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored

by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least

betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public."

Carlyle finds the second number of "The Dial" better than the first, and

tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with

his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson's

readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for

the most part. "But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only

a body, which want means a great deal." And again, "'The Dial,' too, it

is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_

body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man_, with color in the

cheeks of him and a coat on his back?"

Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the "dubious

approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he

found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object

of tenderness and religion." So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the

end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. "I

cannot bid you quit 'The Dial,'" says Carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is

Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge_, nevertheless."

In the next letter he says:--

"I love your 'Dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem

to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present

Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage,

and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such

like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of

perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what

impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the

fore-hoof."

A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not

always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.

To all Carlyle's complaints of "The Dial's" short-comings Emerson did

not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty,

with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.

"For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write

as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of

these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary

history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite

ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make

confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish

to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and

evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they

reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer

in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come,

who will easily do the unknown deed."

"All the bright boys and girls in New England," and "'The Dial' dying of

inanition!" In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:--

"We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social

reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his

waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live

cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and

scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.

One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and

another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on

the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope."

Mr. Ripley's project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better

known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this

undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would

have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a

moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "It was a noble and

generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better

living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without

centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual

sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our

educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts."

The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm

experiment in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," its founder,

and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential

relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "Historic

Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the

ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the

sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he

says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and

lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to

the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in

ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen

without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward

laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest

humorists?

This is his benevolent summing up:--

"The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made

what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All

comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of

residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine,

variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means

of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade,

did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine.

There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the

associates, education; to many, the most important period of their

life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with

the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of

letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were

always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room.

It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of

Reason in a patty-pan."

The public edifice called the "Phalanstery" was destroyed by fire

in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon

afterwards it was dissolved.

Section 2. Emerson's first volume of his collected Essays was published

in 1841. In the reprint it contains the following Essays: History;

Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence;

Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. "The Young American,"

which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844.

Once accustomed to Emerson's larger formulae we can to a certain extent

project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. But we

cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious

illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the

Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by

the teachable disciple. The reader must be prepared for occasional

extravagances. Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays,

for instance. "Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts,

namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative,

history is to be read and written." When we come to the application,

in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such

discourse as this? The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one

upon the other, but their sense is continuous.

"I hold an actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall,

see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on

the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these

worlds of life?--How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and

Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are

Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?

Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau

seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the

stevedore, the porter?"

The connection of ideas is not obvious. One can hardly help being

reminded of a certain great man's Rochester speech as commonly reported

by the story-teller. "Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall

a hundred and fifty feet high! Greece in her palmiest days never had a

waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on! No

people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty

feet high!"

We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome

and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux. But the underlying idea of the

interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous.

Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that "every history should

be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and

looked at facts as symbols."

We have become familiar with his doctrine of "Self-Reliance," which is

the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he

always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks

authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom.

It is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme

self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his

proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.

"Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the

common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a

task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,

that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,

that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is

to others!"

"Compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be

praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from

a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that

judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful,

and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John

Bunyan's view:--

"A Christian man is never long at ease,

When one fright's gone, another doth him seize."

Emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and

trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble

scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which

would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.

The Essay on "Spiritual Laws" is full of pithy sayings:--

"As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as

there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect

virtue.--A man passes for that he is worth.--The ancestor of every

action is a thought.--To think is to act.--Let a man believe in

God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul

incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some

Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour

floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and

scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top

and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms;

until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some

other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and

head of all living nature."

This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud

of George Herbert's. The Essay on "Love" is poetical, but the three

poems, "Initial," "Daemonic," and "Celestial Love" are more nearly equal

to his subject than his prose.

There is a passage in the Lecture on "Friendship" which suggests

some personal relation of Emerson's about which we cannot help being

inquisitive:--

"It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a

friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the

other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is

not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall

wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the

reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold

companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of

treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness,

a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for

infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both."

Was he thinking of his relations with Carlyle? It is a curious subject

of speculation what would have been the issue if Carlyle had come to

Concord and taken up his abode under Emerson's most hospitable roof.

"You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house." How could

they have got on together? Emerson was well-bred, and Carlyle was

wanting in the social graces. "Come rest in this bosom" is a sweet air,

heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season

of close proximity, by that other strain,--

"No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole!

Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!"

But Emerson may have been thinking of some very different person,

perhaps some "crude and cold companion" among his disciples, who was not

equal to the demands of friendly intercourse.

He discourses wisely on "Prudence," a virtue which he does not claim for

himself, and nobly on "Heroism," which was a shining part of his own

moral and intellectual being.

The points which will be most likely to draw the reader's attention are

the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America,

for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our

love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all

one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of

sad sincerity painful to recognize.

"Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates

Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and

forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of

humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the

good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the

natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of

his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that

will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death

impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps

of absolute and inextinguishable being."

In the following Essay, "The Over-Soul," Emerson has attempted the

impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his

rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his

readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of

reaching, he says,--

"Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to

those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare

not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall

short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!

their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising

of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use

sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what

hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of

the Highest Law."

"The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-_flow_ of a spiritual

imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous,

God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms

borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute

in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those

applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols,

varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual

intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts

and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to

Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according

to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words,

and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving

in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of

consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea,

which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision.

Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon

Him whom "no man can see and live."

But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled

"Circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against

utterances which he will not defend. There can be no doubt that he would

have confessed as much with reference to "The Over-Soul" as he has

confessed with regard to "Circles," the Essay which follows "The

Over-Soul."

"I am not careful to justify myself.... But lest I should mislead

any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the

reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value

on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I

pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all

things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply

experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back."

Perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of Emerson, we might

borrow Goethe's language about Spinoza, as expressing the feeling with

which we are left.

"I am reading Spinoza with Frau von Stein. I feel myself very near

to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine.

"I cannot say that I ever read Spinoza straight through, that at any

time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has

stood clear in view before me. But when I look into him I seem to

understand him,--that is, he always appears to me consistent with

himself, and I can always gather from him very salutary influences

for my own way of feeling and acting."

Emerson would not have pretended that he was always "consistent with

himself," but these "salutary influences," restoring, enkindling,

vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess,

like Dr. Walter Channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these,

as he listened to them in a lecture, "made his head ache."

The three essays which follow "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect,"

"Art," would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we

should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom.

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then

all things are at risk."

"God enters by a private door into every individual."

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take

which you please,--you can never have both."

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must

carry it with us, or we find it not."

But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from

Babylon.

Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to

Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838.

"I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's

earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty

young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for

comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe,

$22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no

other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which

was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a

rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have

food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich

no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise

man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend,

because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not

wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife

Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and

keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest,

most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal

preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and

sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and

three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my

household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system,

and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary

result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely

repellent particle."

A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his

life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: "My little boy

is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love."

Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once

more:--

"My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages

by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little

boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You

can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such

a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a

very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to

tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace

and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a

perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever

child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by

scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one

girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I

shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I

should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so

gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible

and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet

sustain."

This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic

of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody,"--a lament not unworthy of comparison

with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's

well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the

place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases.

CHAPTER VI.

1843-1848. AET. 40-45.

"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation

of the Negroes in the British West Indies.[1]--Publication of the Second

Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.--Character.

--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist and Realist.--New

England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second Visit to England.

[Footnote 1: These two addresses are to be found in the first and

eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of

Emerson's works, namely, "Nature, Addresses, and Lectures," and

"Miscellanies."]

Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and

feeling; American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism; American, so

far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. He believed in

American institutions, he trusted the future of the American race. In

the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered

February 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent

patriot could ask. Not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the

significance of the following contrast.