"The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest

history in the world; but they need all and more than all the

resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that

country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of

society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to

avoid it.... It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only

say, Let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal

institutions.... If only the men are employed in conspiring with the

designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we

shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others' censures,

out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social

state than history has recorded."

Thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are

taken was delivered. The "Young American" of that day is the more than

middle-aged American of the present. The intellectual independence of

our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was

written. But the social alliance between certain classes of Americans

and English is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the

wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes

of the old world. It is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly

acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired

fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which

its representatives are unworthy. The plain and wholesome language of

Emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. His

words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following

the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic,

bracing, strengthening to the American, who requires to be reminded of

his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties.

On the first day of August, 1844, Emerson delivered in Concord an

address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the

British West India Islands. This discourse would not have satisfied the

Abolitionists. It was too general in its propositions, full of humane

and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate

method of action.

* * * * *

Emerson's second series of Essays was published in 1844. There are

many sayings in the Essay called "The Poet," which are meant for the

initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read:--

"All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is

the principal event in chronology."

Does this sound wild and extravagant? What were the political ups and

downs of the Hebrews,--what were the squabbles of the tribes with each

other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to

whom we owe the Psalms,--the sweet singer whose voice is still the

dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind?

The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this

eloquent apostrophe:--

"Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or

water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight,

wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,

wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets

into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is

Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st

walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition

inopportune or ignoble."

"Experience" is, as he says himself, but a fragment. It bears marks of

having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other

essays. His most important confession is this:--

"All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I

would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly

love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my

heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in

success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from

the Eternal."

The Essay on "Character" requires no difficult study, but is well worth

the trouble of reading. A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone

and doctrine.

"Character is Nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it,

or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance and of

persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all

emulation."

"There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long

intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they

have been unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an

accumulation of that power we consider.

"The history of those gods and saints which the world has written,

and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have

exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and

who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality

of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death

which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol

for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest

fact."

In his Essay on "Manners," Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:--

"The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and

expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner

dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions.

Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes

good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then

gentleness.--Power first, or no leading class.--God knows that

all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in

strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point

at original energy.--The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of

this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio,

Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very

carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to

value any condition at a high rate.--I could better eat with one

who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and

unpresentable person.--The person who screams, or uses the

superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms

to flight.--I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it

excels in woman."

So writes Emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which

seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme.

This essay is plain enough for the least "transcendental" reader.

Franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of

many of the qualities which go to the Emersonian ideal of good manners,

a typical American, equal to his position, always as much so in the

palaces and salons of Paris as in the Continental Congress, or the

society of Philadelphia.

"Gifts" is a dainty little Essay with some nice distinctions and some

hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse:--

"The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.

Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the

farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the

painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing."

"Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because

they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the

utilities of the world.--Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they

are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being

attached to them."

"It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning

from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very

onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally

wishes to give you a slap."

Emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the

tingling effect of a witty over-statement.

We have recognized most of the thoughts in the Essay entitled "Nature,"

in the previous Essay by the same name, and others which we have passed

in review. But there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure.

Here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar:--

"Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought

again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated,

and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of

free thought."

And here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this

Essay:--

"They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from

the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of

our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration

of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's

life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow."

This is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the

prediction, M. Jules Verne would be the best authority to consult. Poets

are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative Frenchman

gave it a name, he would probably call _Onditologie_.

It is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be

satisfied with the condition of the American political world at the

present time, or when the Essay on "Politics" was written, some years

before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many

respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters

of the old parties unchanged. This is Emerson's view of them as they

then were:--

"Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share

the nation between them, I should say that one has the best

cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the

poet, or the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote

with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the

abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating

in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources

of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the

so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these

liberties. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of

democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American

radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no

ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and

selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of

the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is

timid, and merely defensive of property. It indicates no right, it

aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous

policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor

foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor

emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the

immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any

benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate

with the resources of the nation."

The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the

famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find

a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled "Nominalism and

Realism." But there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering

and considering. We have the complaint of the Cambridge "Phi Beta

Kappa Oration," reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a

collection of fragmentary men.

As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side

were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously.

"In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good

deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they

round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living.

"Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in

household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees

them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind

drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion.

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and

insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh

particulars."

_New England Reformers_.--Would any one venture to guess how Emerson

would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism,

his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous,

too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears,

in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng

of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites

many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin?

We must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on

a Sunday in the year 1844. The Brook Farm experiment was an index of the

state of mind among one section of the Reformers of whom he was writing.

To remodel society and the world into a "happy family" was the aim

of these enthusiasts. Some attacked one part of the old system, some

another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old

church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was

for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was

meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart

in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had

the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he

was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the

unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the

lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and

women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities.

He describes these Reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical

way:--

"They defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a

realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable.

What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One

apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no

man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil;

another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink

damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death

to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made

yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he

does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element

in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No,

they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment.

Stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us

scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of

agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny

of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox

must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the

hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk

wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect

world was to be defended,--that had been too long neglected, and a

society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes

was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts

of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and

their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles!"

We have already seen the issue of the famous Brook Farm experiment,

which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation.

Emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he

had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing

impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of

which he was in no sense responsible.

He says in the lecture we are considering:--

"These new associations are composed of men and women of superior

talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such

a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the

good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of

superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the

association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an

asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the

strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of

men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some

compromise."

His sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too

well to believe in a Noah's ark full of idealists.

All this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of

lectures in Boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in

and out of New England.

His letters to Carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how

punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. He

was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to

play the part of an accountant.

He speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and

that some of this company exacted much time and attention,--more than he

could spare,--is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in

his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered

in prose.

In 1846 Emerson's first volume of poems was published. Many of the poems

had been long before the public--some of the best, as we have seen,

having been printed in "The Dial." It is only their being brought

together for the first time which belongs especially to this period,

and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in

connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the

title, "May-Day and other Pieces."

In October, 1847, he left Concord on a second visit to England, which

will be spoken of in the following chapter.

CHAPTER VII.

1848-1853. AET. 45-50.

The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" Visit to Europe.--England.

--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published. I. Uses

of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New

Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the

Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the

World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of

Margaret Fuller Ossoli."

A new periodical publication was begun in Boston in 1847, under the name

of the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." Emerson wrote the "Editor's

Address," but took no further active part in it, Theodore Parker being

the real editor. The last line of this address is characteristic: "We

rely on the truth for aid against ourselves."

On the 5th of October, 1847, Emerson sailed for Europe on his second

visit, reaching Liverpool on the 22d of that month. Many of his admirers

were desirous that he should visit England and deliver some courses of

lectures. Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions

during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit

have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. Mr. Conway

quotes passages from a letter of Emerson's which show that he had some

hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be

heard by the English audiences favorably disposed towards him.

"I feel no call," he said, "to make a visit of literary propagandism in

England. All my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at

home." He does not like the idea of "coaxing" or advertising to get

him an audience. He would like to read lectures before institutions or

friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. He has had a good many

decisive tokens of interest from British men and women, but he doubts

whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps

in London. It proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire

to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of

the kingdom.

From Liverpool he proceeded immediately to Manchester, where Mr. Ireland

received him at the Victoria station. After spending a few hours with

him, he went to Chelsea to visit Carlyle, and at the end of a week

returned to Manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements

which had been arranged for him. Mr. Ireland's account of Emerson's

visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons

is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons

visited by Emerson. He lectured at Edinburgh, where his liberal way of

thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. But he

did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. A young student, Mr. George

Cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by Mr.

Ireland, I borrow a single sentence,--one only, but what could a critic

say more?

Speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he

says: "In this respect, I take leave to think that Emerson is the most

mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared."

Emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never

addicted. But what would youth be without its extravagances,--its

preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and

unstinted admiration?

I need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other

notabilities whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought "the

two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and

De Quincey." His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon

him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe

that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of

his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy

behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles

Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous

vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric

rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never

forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long

endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter,"

which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would

have been discordant to Emerson's ears, which were offended by such

noisy manifestations.

During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished

him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but

never printed.

From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for

publication. These make up the volume entitled "Representative Men,"

which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its

contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and

conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a

good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical,

and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men

considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own

affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography,

no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of

his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not

Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest

us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and

Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we

see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally,

unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first

to recognize.

Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation.

Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of

all great men: "The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we

are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to

which also Plato was debtor."

Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes "rough and

smooth," "scourges of God," and "darlings of the human race." He likes

Julius Caesar, Charles the Fifth, of Spain, Charles the Twelfth, of

Sweden, Richard Plantagenet, and Bonaparte.

"I applaud," he says, "a sufficient man, an officer equal

to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master

standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome,

eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination

into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff,

or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the

world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and

all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of

persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our

thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the

potentate is nothing.--

"The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The

qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less,

and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--All that

respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the

individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a

catholic existence."

No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But

Plato takes the first place in Emerson's gallery of six great personages

whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says:--

"Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical

compliment to the Koran, when he said, 'Burn the libraries; for

their value is in this book.' Out of Plato come all things that are

still written and debated among men of thought."--

"In proportion to the culture of men they become his

scholars."--"How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up

out of night to be _his men_!--His contemporaries tax him with

plagiarism.--But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are

praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and

Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and

every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone

quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."

The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when

he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his

storehouses.

A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of

the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples.

The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest

expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the

Indian Scriptures. "'The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu,

who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as

not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor

coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are

others, others; nor am I, I.' As if he had said, 'All is for the soul,

and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings;

and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is

imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" All of which we see

reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."--"The country of unity, of

immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in

abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of

a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith

in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius

of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its

philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade,

freedom."--"Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of

each."

But Emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of

another,--"The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell

what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides

of every great question from him."

The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of

holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform

soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,--are

fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called

"Plato: New Readings."

Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or,

the Mystic." The believers in his special communion as a revealer of

divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The

believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence

at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching

themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,

which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in

its bosom." The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims

put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer.

"Philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called

them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will

not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen

with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the

poets, they can take their choice of Emerson's poetical or prose

estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In

"The Test," the Muse says:--

"I hung my verses in the wind,

Time and tide their faults may find;

All were winnowed through and through,

Five lines lasted good and true ...

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,

Nor time unmake what poets know.

Have you eyes to find the five

Which five hundred did survive?"

In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets

referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, _Swedenborg_, and Goethe.

And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that "his

books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead

prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird

ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so

transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a

beautiful person, is a kind of warning." Yet Emerson says of him that

"He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue

to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature."

Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer,

he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.

"Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned

Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for

Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other

reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes

him as being.

"There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never

a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never

insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that

he cares for.

"The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.

I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the

language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and

they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.--

"Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and

himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests,

or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish

to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or

time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes

pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we

pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he

rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones

underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration;

contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.

There is but one exception,--in his love for Socrates. In speaking

of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion."

The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same

characteristics. Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he

must have found a great relief in getting into "the middle of the road"

with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often

led him round to the point from which he started.

As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative

and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the

Essay itself.

In writing of "Shakespeare; or, the Poet," Emerson naturally gives

expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of

poetry.

"Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by

originality." A poet has "a heart in unison with his time and

country."--"There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production,

but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions,

and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of

in his times."

When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of

amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and

library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd

of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a

great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time

to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: "A great poet who

appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which

is anywhere radiating." Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was

their wit. "Chaucer is a huge borrower." Emerson gives a list of authors

from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have

learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury's which I have had the

privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us.

The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing,

especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough.

He was arguing in his own cause,--not defending himself, as if there

were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim

of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their

acquisitions.

"Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can

tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us."--"Shakespeare is as

much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the

crowd. A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and

think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of

doors."

After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare,

he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares "the

halfness and imperfection of humanity."

"He converted the elements which waited on his command into

entertainment. He was master of the revels to mankind."

And so, after this solemn verdict on Shakespeare, after looking at the

forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet,

Israelite, German, and Swede, he says: "It must be conceded that these

are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet-priest, who

shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves

with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with

equal inspiration."

It is not to be expected that Emerson should have much that is new to

say about "Napoleon; or, the Man of the World."

The stepping-stones of this Essay are easy to find:--

"The instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle

class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate

democrat.--

"Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his

fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers." As Plato borrowed,

as Shakespeare borrowed, as Mirabeau "plagiarized every good

thought, every good word that was spoken in France," so Napoleon is

not merely "representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other

minds."

He was "a man of stone and iron,"--equipped for his work by nature as

Sallust describes Catiline as being. "He had a directness of action

never before combined with such comprehension. Here was a man who in

each moment and emergency knew what to do next. He saw only the object;

the obstacle must give way."

"When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and

satisfied."--

"I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern

society.--He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the

internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the

opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse."

But he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and

finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson

gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation

superfluous:--

"In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power

and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but

with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of

Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

"So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the

power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry

of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; '_Assez de

Bonaparte_.'"

It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death

we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible

satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by

her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks

and ruins.

But after all, Carlyle's "_carrière ouverte aux talens_" is the

expression for Napoleon's great message to mankind.

"Goethe; or, the Writer," is the last of the Representative Men who

are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the

fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in

the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that

he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could

hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found

the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with

side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds

an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his

author. "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"He has

said the best things about nature that ever were said.--He flung into

literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has

been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the

Prometheus.--He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and

sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not

spiritualist.--I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives

of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of

conventions,--two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have

severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for

this time and for all time."

This must serve as an _ex pede_ guide to reconstruct the Essay which

finishes the volume.

In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which

Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took

a part. Emerson's account of her conversation and extracts from

her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his

interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid

portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written

of her than by anything she ever wrote herself.

CHAPTER VIII.

1858-1858. AEt. 50-55.

Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture

read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at

Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The

"Saturday Club."

After Emerson's return from Europe he delivered lectures to different

audiences,--one on Poetry, afterwards published in "Letters and Social

Aims," a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of

which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many

others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of

Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same

year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York.

His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the

planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is

the only practical course, and is innocent." It would cost two thousand

millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there

ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would

be?"

His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph

from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could

not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free

Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project

for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in

1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in

steel and not in gold:--

"Pay ransom to the owner,

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him."

His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with

indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at

Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the

front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode

inscribed to W.H. Channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of

the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the

cause of all the trouble.

"The over-god

Who marries Right to Might,

Who peoples, unpeoples,--

He who exterminates

Races by stronger races,

Black by white faces,--

Knows to bring honey

Out of the lion."

Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he

refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where

"Things are of the snake."

The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to

borrow Mr. Cooke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men

took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a

heartier assent to the outward methods adopted."

* * * * *

No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a

lecture read to the "Woman's Rights Convention" in 1855, he takes bold,

and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in

the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way

in which he expresses himself:

"I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in

public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it.

Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous

impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be

equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a

church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do

theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish

a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse

them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our

Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.--The new movement

is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may

proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to

desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish."

Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor,

that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord

before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He

afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for "Putnam's Magazine," from

which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch

concluded:--

"He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make

what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an

impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is

an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class

remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are

native."

The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough

for an Elizabethan monumental inscription.

"With beams December planets dart

His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;

July was in his sunny heart,

October in his liberal hand."

Emerson's "English Traits," forming one volume of his works, was

published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not

a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired

the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the

wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is

indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic

characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final;

they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less

sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded,

sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence

made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him

well-disposed to all the world.

A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which

Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal

portion of his record. Only one _place_ is given as the heading of a

chapter,--_Stonehenge_. The other eighteen chapters have general titles,

_Land, Race, Ability, Manners_, and others of similar character.

He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the

British Aristocracy:--

"Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the

House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy

and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything

they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and

killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin.

Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent

and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy

thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by

assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and

snake, which they severally resembled."

The race preserves some of its better characteristics.

"They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age.

The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin,

a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the

island."

English "Manners" are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck,

vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself,

safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly,

and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and

religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.

"They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and

mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the

cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They

hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use

a studied plainness."

"In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,

but the dinner is the capital institution."

"They confide in each other,--English believes in English."--"They

require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in

public men."

"As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented.

Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy."

Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly

two hundred years ago.

"_New England_, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing

and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless

instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those

_Melancholy Indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all

service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby

to lay _Violent Hands_ upon themselves at the last. These are among

the _unsearchable Judgments_ of God."

If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the

Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the

likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.

"They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of

waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run

into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly

carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense;

leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew

hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock

in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every

secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic;

they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why

she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the

inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate

and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from

shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror

they cause."

This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to

Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.

"A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the

curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first

deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them

justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and

low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a

savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The

stability of England is the security of the modern world."

Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than

the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted,

and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism

and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English

civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating

castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their

colonies."

In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or

the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain,

or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust

doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if

they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a

generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not

grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson

saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England.

A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a

field of mushrooms.

The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and

fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flashes of light

that have not come through its stained windows.

"The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on

the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's

chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed

hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him,

and the religion of a gentleman.

"The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing

left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and

reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to

take wine with him."

Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told

a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from

nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an

archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but Sydney Smith

would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch

of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his

little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose

unwieldy bulk he is playing.

Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established

Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with

soft-spoken words.

"Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake

the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde,

et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in

England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson,

and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame."

"English Traits" closes with Emerson's speech at Manchester, at the

annual banquet of the "Free Trade Athenaeum." This was merely an

occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had

sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up

in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in

their utterance.

* * * * *

The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated

by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people,

tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with

Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all

this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations

of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine

admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its

playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a

self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and

mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not

be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame

Tussaud's exhibition, the Lord-Mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if

one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American

traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went

up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the

little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through

the wide-awake town of Concord.

In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing

the name of "The Atlantic Monthly." Professor James Russell Lowell

was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the

originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old

contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them

Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of

them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh

volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as "The

Romany Girl," "Days," "Brahma," "Waldeinsamkeit," "The Titmouse,"

"Boston Hymn," "Saadi," and "Terminus."

At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association,

which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club," the members

dining together on the last Saturday of every month.

The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present

day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic

connection, and the "Atlantic Club" has been spoken of as if there was

or had been such an institution, but it never existed.

Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality

before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic

idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of

crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the

habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House"

of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a

club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its

first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as

visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat

Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable

rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always

pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's

conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust,

sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger

who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the

table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana,

Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar,

eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical

critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion

of freedom, Andrew, "the great War Governor" of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe,

the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy

of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of

the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured

utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental

phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular

attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at

its table, until within a year or two of his death.

Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed

unrecorded.

CHAPTER IX.

1858-1863: AET. 55-60.

Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial

Festival--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker

and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication

of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;

Behavior; Worship; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions.

The Essay on Persian Poetry, published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in

1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the

influence of Oriental poetry on Emerson's verse. In many of the shorter

poems and fragments published since "May-Day," as well as in the

"Quatrains" and others of the later poems in that volume, it is

sometimes hard to tell what is from the Persian from what is original.

On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held

at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the

poet's birth. He spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such

beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as

one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers

was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that "every word seemed to have just

dropped down to him from the clouds." Judge Hoar, who was another of his

hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his

time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself

present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these

gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His

words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most

natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with,

but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his

inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.

I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed

to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most

devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:--

CONCORD, May 13, 1859.

Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these

lines, which I will hasten to finish. Louis Napoleon will not bayonet

you the while,--keep him at the door. So long I have promised to

write! so long I have thanked your long suffering! I have let pass the

unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with

Gisela von Arnim (Bettina's daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and

Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,--wandering in

Europe with hope of meeting you,--yet met. This contumacy of mine I

shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer

first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when

once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are

drawn.--Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and

coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you

did not like Germany. Where then did Goethe find his lovers? Do all the

women have bad noses and bad mouths? And will you stop in England, and

bring home the author of "Counterparts" with you? Or did----write the

novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them? How

strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret! I think

our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent.

But----is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him.

I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than

mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the

first day. The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and

creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the

irresistibility of our bias. Still this is only science, and must remain

science. Our _praxis_ is never altered for that. We must forever hold

our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed.

I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an

immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new

stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer

no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in

our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good

understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or

pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but

from a more convenient nature. But 'tis almost chemistry at last, though

a meta-chemistry. I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer,

however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth,

that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of

peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in

the most passive acceptance,--if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out

around me at this moment the new June,--the leaves say June, though the

calendar says May,--and we must needs hail our young relatives again,

though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters

receiving a late-born brother or sister. Nature herself seems a little

ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game

again without a new bract or sepal. But you will think me incorrigible

with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this

summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers. My children scan

curiously your E.'s drawings, as they have seen them.

The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours!

R.W. EMERSON.

In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke

of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor

to his memory. Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in

the Music Hall to Mr. Parker's society after his death. In 1862, he lost

his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was

published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for August of the same year. Thoreau

had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson

is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the

canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston

in September, 1862. The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the

following extract:--

"Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the

earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see

Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold

them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart

with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the

melioration of our planet:--

"'Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.'"

The "Conduct of Life" was published in 1860. The chapter on "Fate" might

leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what

he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that

his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in

adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. But let

him hold fast to this reassuring statement:--

"If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm

liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty,

the power of character.--We are sure, that, though we know not how,

necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world,

my polarity with the spirit of the times."

But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the

mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the

limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are

illustrated.

"Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must

see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a

man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.--The

way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider,

the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the

crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these

are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just

dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in

the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive

races,--race living at the expense of race.--Let us not deny it up

and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its

end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed

instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a

clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity."

Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he

believed in so fully:--

"They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a

lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear."

But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic

predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who

dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words,

which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the

delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:--

"People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine

brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with

high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to

distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that

a free-soiler."

Let us see what Emerson has to say of "Power:"--

"All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were

_causationists_. They believed that things went not by luck, but by

law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that

joins the first and the last of things.

"The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young

orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--Imbecility; imbecility

in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in

all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and

fear. This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no

habit of self-reliance or original action.--

"We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_

condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of

main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found

in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the

supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive,

yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and

absorbents provided to take off its edge."

The "two economies which are the best _succedanea"_ for deficiency of

temperament are concentration and drill. This he illustrates by example,

and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which "Poor

Richard" would have cheerfully approved. He might have accepted also the

Essay on "Wealth" as having a good sense so like his own that he could

hardly tell the difference between them.

"Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and

wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet

water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress

when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick

lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross

the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in

books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and

auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it

added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day,

and knowledge and good will. Wealth begins with these articles of

necessity.--

"To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and

chief men of each race.--

"The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the

thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their

word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush

to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest

civilization should be undone."

Who can give better counsels on "Culture" than Emerson? But we must

borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. All kinds of

secrets come out as we read these Essays of Emerson's. We know something

of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet.

It is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite

portraits Mr. Galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as

follows:--

"The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism

is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong

necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual

attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such

necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely

overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and

disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which

each individual persists to be what he is.

"The antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and

variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world,

with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with

eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and

religion: books, travel, society, solitude."

"We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they

must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their

best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for

occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude,

the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the

cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it

farther than suns and stars."

We must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. Try the

rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth

knowing. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims

high, must dread an easy home and popular manners."

Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble

career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least.

But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he

respected. It was "the hand of Douglas" again,--the same feeling that

Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the

introduction to this volume.

Here are a few good sayings about "Behavior."

"There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an

egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke

of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage."

Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of "Manners" in his Essay under the

above title.

"The basis of good manners is self-reliance.--Manners require time,

as nothing is more vulgar than haste.--

"Men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first

time,--and every time they meet.--

"It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his

talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that

stands by himself, the universe stands by him also."

In his Essay on "Worship," Emerson ventures the following prediction:--

"The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming

ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind

must have a faith which is science.--There will be a new church

founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a

manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church

of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will

have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol

and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture,

poetry."

It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and

unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the

established facts of science and history when these last reach it in

their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science

more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date

than "Beauty," or "Illusions." But accidental circumstances made such

confusion in the strata of Emerson's published thought that one is often

at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer

layer.

We come to "Considerations by the Way." The common-sense side of

Emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical

intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher

of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth.

"Franklin said, 'Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they

begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it

discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'"

"Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the

minority, surely." Here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant,"

which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered

lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this

matter of the _vox populi_. "Leave this hypocritical prating about the

masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and

need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede

anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and

draw individuals out of them."

Père Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer

in due time. After reading what Emerson says about "the masses," one is

tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and

be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not

make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great

necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which

he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often

discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the

Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble

ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather

than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something

of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing

in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens,

entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses

his listeners and readers.

The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the

following passage:--

"The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of

everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left

their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My

boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors,

and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the

intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word

has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my

stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box!

I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to

sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy

in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact,

which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days

so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the

imagination."

One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce

of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day

memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if

often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A

coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a

Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification.

Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something

could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he

cannot lift the object he would fain idealize.

The habitual readers of Emerson do not mind an occasional

over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them

amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two

always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up

as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no

one should venture upon Emerson. If he had seen the lecturer's smile

as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact

unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found

a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never

show him.

The Essay on "Illusions" has little which we have not met with, or shall

not find repeating itself in the Poems.

During this period Emerson contributed many articles in prose and

verse to the "Atlantic Monthly," and several to "The Dial," a second

periodical of that name published in Cincinnati. Some of these have

been, or will be, elsewhere referred to.

CHAPTER X.

1863-1868. AET. 60-65.

"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other

Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of Abraham Lincoln."--Essay

on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious

Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta

Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in

Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard

University.--"Terminus."

The "Boston Hymn" was read by Emerson in the Music Hall, on the first

day of January, 1863. It is a rough piece of verse, but noble from

beginning to end. One verse of it, beginning "Pay ransom to the owner,"

has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it:--

"I cause from every creature

His proper good to flow:

As much as he is and doeth

So much shall he bestow.

"But laying hands on another

To coin his labor and sweat,

He goes in pawn to his victim

For eternal years in debt.

"To-day unbind the captive,

So only are ye unbound:

Lift up a people from the dust,

Trump of their rescue, sound!"

"Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is

more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than

the plain song of the "Boston Hymn."

"But best befriended of the God

He who, in evil times,

Warned by an inward voice,

Heeds not the darkness and the dread,

Biding by his rule and choice,

Feeling only the fiery thread

Leading over heroic ground,

Walled with mortal terror round,

To the aim which him allures,

And the sweet heaven his deed secures.

Peril around, all else appalling,

Cannon in front and leaden rain

Him duly through the clarion calling

To the van called not in vain."

It is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they

were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand

years:--

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,

The youth replies, _I can_."

"Saadi" was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1864, "My Garden" in

1866, "Terminus" in 1867. In the same year these last poems with many

others were collected in a small volume, entitled "May-Day, and

Other Pieces." The general headings of these poems are as follows:

May-Day.--The Adirondacs.--Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces.--Nature

and Life.--Elements.--Quatrains.--Translations.--Some of these poems,

which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous

pages. "The Adirondacs" is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared

for its poetical character with "May-Day," one passage from which,

beginning,

"I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"

is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. In this volume will be found

"Brahma," "Days," and others which are well known to all readers of

poetry.

Emerson's delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and

sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham

Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the

homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth and delicacy:--

"Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor;

the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four

years,--four years of battle-days,--his endurance, his fertility

of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found

wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his

fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the

centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American

people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow

with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true

representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of

his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart,

the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue."

In his "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association,"

Emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and

sufficiently "transcendental" way: intelligibly for those who wish to

understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept

the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, "The Sphinx."

--"As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within

his own mind,--is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds

with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to

face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the

power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste,

all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a

religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the

private action."

Nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the

suggestive remark,--

--"What I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by

which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true

Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure

benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of

active duty, that worship finds expression.--The interests that grow

out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the

old eternal duties."

In a later address before the same association, Emerson says:--

"I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous

dispensation,--certainly not to the _doctrine_ of Christianity.--If

you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a

thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of

nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on

the teachings."

The "Progress of Culture" was delivered as a Phi Beta Kappa oration just

thirty years after his first address before the same society. It is very

instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a

whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in

1867, at the age of sixty-four. Both are hopeful, but the second is more

sanguine than the first. He recounts what he considers the recent gains

of the reforming movement:--

"Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or

adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an

honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil

status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she

controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her

share in power."

He enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of

intelligence,--"All, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary,

teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and

superseding kings."

He repeats some of his fundamental formulae.

"The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral

sentiment.

"Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any

material force, that thoughts rule the world.

"Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter."

And most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in

1867,--especially in the view of future possibilities. "Bad kings and

governors help us, if only they are bad enough." _Non tali auxilio_, we

exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these

concluding words: "I read the promise of better times and of greater

men."

In the year 1866, Emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as

the "grand climacteric." In that year Harvard University conferred upon

him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest honor in its gift.

In that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips,

he met his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, at the Brevoort House, in New

York. Then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards

published in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in his second volume, under the

title "Terminus." This was the first time that Dr. Emerson recognized

the fact that his father felt himself growing old. The thought, which

must have been long shaping itself in the father's mind, had been so far

from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly

avowed. The poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes

about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. The

reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a

particular purpose, but here is the whole poem:--

TERMINUS.

It is time to be old,

To take in sail:--

The god of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: "No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

There's not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few,

Timely wise accept the terms,

Soften the fall with wary foot;

A little while

Still plan and smile,

And,--fault of novel germs,--

Mature the unfallen fruit.

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,

Bad husbands of their fires,

Who when they gave thee breath,

Failed to bequeath

The needful sinew stark as once,

The baresark marrow to thy bones,

But left a legacy of ebbing veins,

Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,

Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.

"As the bird trims her to the gale

I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

'Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near,

And every wave is charmed.'"

CHAPTER XI.

1868-1873. AET. 65-70.

Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication

of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.

--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.

--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other

Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the

Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at

Concord on his Return.

During three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a

series of Lectures at Harvard University on the "Natural History of the

Intellect." These Lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a

great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or

reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an

extract from Prof. Thayer's "Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." He is

there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics.

It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms

employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words "subject and

object" with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin

shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions.

Once he ventures on the _not me_, but in the main he uses plain English

handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ.

"Society and Solitude" was published in 1870. The first Essay in the

volume bears the same name as the volume itself.

In this first Essay Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims

of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of

solitude. We are driven "as with whips into the desert." But there is

danger in this seclusion. "Now and then a man exquisitely made can live

alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.--Here again, as

so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and

our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.--The

conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our

sympathy."

The Essay on "Civilization" is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a

very agreeable way. The framed or stone-house in place of the cave or

the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting,

and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful

combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the

press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with

special brilliancy:--

"Right position of woman in the State is another index.--Place the

sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality

gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that

is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and

learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that I have

thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of

good women."

My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader

will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:--

"The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and

compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart,

longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven

by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from

home,--

"'The pulses of her iron heart

Go beating through the storm.'"

I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be

an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "The

Steamboat:"

"The beating of her restless heart

Still sounding through the storm."

It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer

lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his

verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's

special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that

'tis better to be quoted wrong

Than to be quoted not at all.

This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy

to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How

could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly

announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that

he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having

any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and

doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:--

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,

to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods

themselves."--

"'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that

the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON

TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and

bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find

all their teams going the other way,--Charles's Wain, Great Bear,

Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those

interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love,

freedom, knowledge, utility."--

Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the

same constellation; the _Dipper_ is what our people often call it, and

the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the

North Star.

I find in the Essay on "Art" many of the thoughts with which we are

familiar in Emerson's poem, "The Problem." It will be enough to cite

these passages:--

"We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in

hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had

a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in

the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the

artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work

of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.--

--"The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the

tragedies of Aeschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals,

the plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but

in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.--

--"The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest

and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid

every stone.--

"Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake,

whose melody is sweeter than he knows."

The discourse on "Eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial,

than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its

general purport:--

"Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards,

it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,

speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it

must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.--

"He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion

must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on

character and insight.--

--"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.--

--"Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their

integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they

toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a

reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or

morals, as above the whole world and themselves also."

"Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it

sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of

the goblet which holds some tonic draught:--

"Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in

his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the

soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham

and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations

when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,

the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to

swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful

and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that

all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more

charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching

than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--All day,

between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,

sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he

fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before

him."

Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about

"Farming." Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an

address before the "Middlesex Agricultural Society," and printed in the

"Transactions" of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and

the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some

general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:--

"The farmer's office is precise and important, but you must not try

to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to

fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.--This hard work will

always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor

by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men

of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and

timely."

Emerson's chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are

correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his

imaginative presentation. He tells the commonest facts so as to make

them almost a surprise:--

"By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have

found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting

the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that

Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises

to pay a better rent than all the superstructure."

In "Works and Days" there is much good reading, but I will call

attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest

of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson's assertions and

predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of

"the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables

a man to change his blood as often as his linen!" And once more,

"We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the

air."

Possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on

wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles.

The other point I have marked is that we find in this Essay a prose

version of the fine poem, printed in "May-Day" under the title "Days." I

shall refer to this more particularly hereafter.

It is wronging the Essay on "Books" to make extracts from it. It is all

an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the

public libraries. If I commit the wrong I have spoken of, it is under

protest against myself. Every word of this Essay deserves careful

reading. But here are a few sentences I have selected for the reader's

consideration:--

"There are books; and it is practicable to read them because they

are so few.--

"I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go

there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is

already within the four walls of my study at home.--

"The three practical rules which I have to offer are, 1. Never read

any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books.

3. Never read any but what you like, or, in Shakspeare's phrase,--

"'No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en;

In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.'"

Emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his Essay on

"Clubs," but nothing very notable on the special subject of the Essay.

Perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the

"Saturday Club," of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself

around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. But he

was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of

talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and

remembered more. He was hardly what Dr. Johnson would have called a

"clubable" man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he

would never have come from Concord so regularly to attend them. He gives

two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which I have

been speaking:--

"I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in

their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to

an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion

shall have its just influence on public questions of education and

politics."

"A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means

of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage."

I do not think "public questions of education and politics" were very

prominent at the social meetings of the "Saturday Club," but "worthy

foreigners," and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the

meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and

callings.

All that Emerson has to say about "Courage" is worth listening to, for

he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more

cowards than are found in the battle-field. He spoke his convictions

fearlessly; he carried the spear of Ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate

save that which protects him

"Whose armor is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill."

He mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of

mankind: 1. Disinterestedness; 2. Practical Power; 3. Courage. "I need

not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank.

They forgive everything to it. And any man who puts his life in peril in

a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men."--There are

good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this Essay or Lecture,

which closes with the spirited ballad of "George Nidiver," written "by a

lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known."

Men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its

subject, like the one now before me, "Success." Emerson complains of the

same things in America which Carlyle groaned over in England:--

"We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing

advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is

lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.--

"Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to

all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for

success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take

Michael Angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something

of worth and value.'"

Reading about "Success" is after all very much like reading in old books

of alchemy. "How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and

treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and

the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate

directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into

Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. "Success" in its

vulgar sense,--the gaining of money and position,--is not to be reached

by following the rules of an instructor. Our "self-made men," who govern

the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by

adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were

placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "Poor Richard," or any

other moralist or economist.--For such as these is meant the cheap

cynical saying quoted by Emerson, "_Rien ne réussit mieux que le

succès_."

But this is not the aim and end of Emerson's teaching:--

"I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition

in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public

opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one

feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly,

and the other hospitality of mind."

And so, though there is no alchemy in this Lecture, it is profitable

reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character,

the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the

market-place.

The Essay on "Old Age" has a special value from its containing two

personal reminiscences: one of the venerable Josiah Quincy, a brief

mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825,

Emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-President John Adams,

soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is enough to

allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all.

But many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. He

recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has

weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so

that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling

that he has found expression,--that his condition, in particular and in

general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing

his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future:--

"When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well

spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works

that belong to these. But the central wisdom which was old in

infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions,

leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard

that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that

whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is

announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles

our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the

inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving

skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the

inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment."

Other literary labors of Emerson during this period were the

Introduction to "Plutarch's Morals" in 1870, and a Preface to William

Ellery Channing's Poem, "The Wanderer," in 1871. He made a speech at

Howard University, Washington, in 1872.

In the year 1871 Emerson made a visit to California with a very pleasant

company, concerning which Mr. John M. Forbes, one of whose sons married

Emerson's daughter Edith, writes to me as follows. Professor James B.

Thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an

account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow Mr. Forbes's

letter:--

BOSTON, February 6, 1884.

MY DEAR DR.,--What little I can give will be of a very rambling

character.

One of the first memories of Emerson which comes up is my meeting

him on the steamboat at returning from Detroit East. I persuaded him

to stop over at Niagara, which he had never seen. We took a carriage

and drove around the circuit. It was in early summer, perhaps in

1848 or 1849. When we came to Table Rock on the British side, our

driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage.

We passed on by rail, and the next day's papers brought us the

telegraphic news that Table Rock had fallen over; perhaps we were

among the last persons on it!

About 1871 I made up a party for California, including Mr. Emerson,

his daughter Edith, and a number of gay young people. We drove with

B----, the famous Vermont coachman, up to the Geysers, and then made

the journey to the Yosemite Valley by wagon and on horseback. I wish

I could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at

this time. With the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes

drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently

indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes

of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. I especially

remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his

reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse's mouth,

without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding

Pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was

he, at the moment, of his surroundings.

In San Francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers,

in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were

deposited the stupefied Mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of

humanity to be found in the world. The contrast between them and

the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all

beholders.

When we reached Salt Lake City on our way home he made a point of

calling on Brigham Young, then at the summit of his power. The

Prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of

hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. He did not seem

to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so

doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast

between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces.

I regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and

other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of Professor

J.B. Thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you

some notes that would be valuable.

Perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is

his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at Naushon, no

doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost

none of their value from being transferred to his pages. Next to

his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable

recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs

which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor

which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which

you and I know he possessed in a marked degree.