Emerson left off going regularly to the "Saturday Club" probably in

1875. He used to depend on meeting Mr. Cabot there, but after Mr. Cabot

began to come regularly to work on "Letters and Social Aims," Emerson,

who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings.

The trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his

staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a

part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and

readings and to church. His hearing was very slightly impaired, and his

sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled,

and that "M's" and "N's" troubled him to read. He recognized the members

of his own family and his _old_ friends; but, as I infer from this

statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new

acquaintances, as is common with old persons.

He continued the habit of reading,--read through all his printed works

with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and

endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. In these Dr. Emerson found

written "Examined 1877 or 1878," but he found no later date.

In the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his

table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a

child. He liked to look over the "Advertiser," and was interested in the

"Nation." He enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to

guests.

All this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of Dr.

Emerson in answer to my questions. The twilight of a long, bright day

of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and

gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing

and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to

the very verge of its earthly existence.

But darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. From

these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of

the worn-out bodily frame.

In April, 1882, Emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he

could hardly speak. When his son, Dr. Edward Emerson, called to see him,

he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression

than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. As he lay on his couch he

pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of Carlyle "the

good man,--my friend." His son told him that he had seen Carlyle, which

seemed to please him much. On the following day the unequivocal signs of

pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. He still recognized

those around him, among the rest Judge Hoar, to whom he held out his

arms for a last embrace. A sharp pain coming on, ether was administered

with relief. And in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him

and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. He lived very nearly to the

completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born May 25, 1803, and

his death occurring on the 27th of April, 1882.

Mr. Ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for

the most part, taken the following extracts:--

"The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson took place

at Concord on the 30th of April. A special train from Boston carried

a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted

by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church

where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town

bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with

other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped,

and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at

the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman.

"The services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred

at 2.30, and were conducted by Rev. W.H. Furness of Philadelphia, a

kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. They were simple in

character, and only Dr. Furness took part in them. The body lay in

the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and

close friends of the deceased. The only flowers were contained in

three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and

white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were filled

with friends and neighbors.

"At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival

of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was

packed. In front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of

pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow

jonquils, the gift of Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Among the floral

tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the Emerson

school. By the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums

and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath.

"Before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut

coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid was turned back,

and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small

bouquet of roses. While the coffin was being carried in, 'Pleyel's

Hymn' was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the

deceased. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge

E. Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the

congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his

voice many times trembling with emotion."

I subjoin this most impressive "Address" entire, from the manuscript

with which Judge Hoar has kindly favored me:--

"The beauty of Israel is fallen in its high place! Mr. Emerson

has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing

company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his

grave,--to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our

parting tribute of memory and love.

"There is nothing to mourn for him. That brave and manly life was

rounded out to the full length of days. That dying pillow was

softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to

the sleep which the Lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the

face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the

opening heavens.

"Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his

fame is established and secure. Throughout this great land and from

beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great

public loss. But we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was

_ours_. He was descended from the founders of the town. He chose our

village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. It was

to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was

our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and

the elders with reverence. He was our ornament and pride.

"'He is gone--is dust,--

He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished!

For him there is no longer any future.

His life is bright--bright without spot it was

And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour

Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap.

Far off is he, above desire and fear;

No more submitted to the change and chance

Of the uncertain planets.--

"'The bloom is vanished from my life,

For, oh! he stood beside me like my youth;

Transformed for me the real to a dream,

Clothing the palpable and the familiar

With golden exhalations of the dawn.

Whatever fortunes wait my future toils,

The _beautiful_ is vanished and returns not.'

"That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high

aspirations,--those lips of eloquent music,--that great soul, which

trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality,--that large

heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,--that

hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no

repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,--oh,

friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there

no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and

farewell!"

Judge Hoar's remarks were followed by the congregation singing the

hymns, "Thy will be done," "I will not fear the fate provided by Thy

love." The Rev. Dr. Furness then read selections from the Scriptures.

The Rev. James Freeman Clarke then delivered an "Address," from which I

extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any

that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their

subject,--for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or

write of Emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not

wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion.

"The saying of the Liturgy is true and wise, that 'in the midst of

life we are in death.' But it is still more true that in the midst

of death we are in life. Do we ever believe so much in immortality

as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a

few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? 'He is not here:

he is risen.' That power which we knew,--that soaring intelligence,

that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit,--_that_ cannot have

been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. It

has left its darkened dust behind. It has outsoared the shadow of

our night. God does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to

nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell,

or some bodily tissue. Life does not die, but matter dies off from

it. The highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which

meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose,

insight,--this agent of immense resource and boundless power,--this

has not been subdued by its instrument. When we think of such an one

as he, we can only think of life, never of death.

"Such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on 'Immortality.'

But he himself was the best argument for immortality. Like the

greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the

higher evidence of universal instincts,--the vast streams of belief

which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those

shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the

Atlantic and Pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the

revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun."

* * * * *

"Let us then ponder his words:--

'Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know

What rainbows teach and sunsets show?

Voice of earth to earth returned,

Prayers of saints that inly burned,

Saying, _What is excellent

As God lives, is permanent;

Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;

Hearts' love will meet thee again._

* * * *

House and tenant go to ground

Lost in God, in Godhead found.'"

After the above address a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M.

Brown, of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the

church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott recited the

following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion:---

"His harp is silent: shall successors rise,

Touching with venturous hand the trembling string,

Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise,

And wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing?

Shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes,

As when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise,

World-wide his native melodies did sing,

Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories?

Ah, no! That matchless lyre shall silent lie:

None hath the vanished minstrel's wondrous skill

To touch that instrument with art and will.

With him, winged poesy doth droop and die;

While our dull age, left voiceless, must lament

The bard high heaven had for its service sent."

"Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors,

friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the

dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore

a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession

took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall

pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies

of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being

concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray

surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. The services

here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final

resting-place.

"The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal

clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the

Lord's Prayer, ending at the words, 'and deliver us from evil.'

In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pronounced the

benediction. After it was over the grandchildren passed the open

grave and threw flowers into it."

So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory.

CHAPTER XVI.

EMERSON.--A RETROSPECT.

Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a

Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As

influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and

Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an

American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and

Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and

Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of

his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard.

Emerson's earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so

slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the

accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has

been long living in the companionship of his thought. Still, he had to

be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all

immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to

let them all "soar and sing" as he left his earthly half-way house. It

is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the

daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals,

ourselves among the rest. But Emerson has said truly "Great geniuses

have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about

them. They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life

was trivial and commonplace."

The reader has had many extracts from Emerson's writings laid before

him. It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are

so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like

distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he

says from his undiluted thought. His books are all so full of his life

to their last syllable that we might letter every volume _Emersoniana_,

by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

From the numerous extracts I have given from Emerson's writings it may

be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man

and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. But he may

probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from

the hand of his biographer, if the author of this Memoir may borrow the

name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the

same field. He may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of

the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading.

He will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the Memoir

if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the

interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate.

Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of

scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in

the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that

he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly

have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very

light for a man of his stature. He got on the scales at Cheyenne, on

his trip to California, comparing his weight with that of a lady of

the party. A little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller,

Professor Thayer, "How much did I weigh? A hundred and forty?" "A

hundred and forty and a half," was the answer. "Yes, yes, a hundred and

forty and a half! That _half_ I prize; it is an index of better things!"

Emerson's head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a

philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the

_cephalometer_ used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches

and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven

and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It

was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly

equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most

heads.

His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this

peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like "Ammon's great son," he carried

one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose

somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide,

well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in

its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin

shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His

expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement,

centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New

Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three

cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied

thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port

of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring

intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious. Few of our

fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished

personages than our present minister at the Court of St. James. In

a recent letter to myself, which I trust Mr. Lowell will pardon my

quoting, he says of Emerson:--

"There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he

habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if

ever, only rise in spurts."

From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars

relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record.

His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick.

His eyes were of the "strongest and brightest blue." The member of the

family who tells me this says:--

"My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else

had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in

sea-captains. I have seen three sea-captains who had them."

He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very

limited, if we may judge from this family story. When he was in College,

and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented

himself, intending to learn to sing. The master received him, and when

his turn came, said to him, "Chord!" "What?" said Emerson. "Chord!

Chord! I tell you," repeated the master. "I don't know what you mean,"

said Emerson. "Why, sing! Sing a note." "So I made some kind of a noise,

and the singing-master said, 'That will do, sir. You need not come

again.'"

Emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in

the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with

others using it, but always _pie_ at breakfast. "It stood before him and

was the first thing eaten." Ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour

of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven.

Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could

do night after night. He never was hungry,--could go any time from

breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for

food when it was set before him.

He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and

often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the

better.

It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life

long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency.

He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about

ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to

Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily

inheritance. In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:--

"I bear in youth the sad infirmities

That use to undo the limb and sense of age."

Four years later:--

"Has God on thee conferred

A bodily presence mean as Paul's,

Yet made thee bearer of a word

Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?"

and again, in the same year:--

"Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,

Trembling for the body's sake."--

Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing

in "Terminus" his inherited weakness of organization.

And in writing to Carlyle, he says:--

"You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and

postponement of the blonde constitution."

Again, "I am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast

debility and procrastination."

He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be

observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that

semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His

presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough

to make him a rapid and enduring walker.

Emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the

lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly

penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as

to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through

his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a

well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite

sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon

pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until

it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.

He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it

were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to

seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while

his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground

swell," as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed

convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to

Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.

Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered

the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of

the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity,

and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail,

--which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it

to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of

inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been very

accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it

is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work

with a spade, cried out, "Take care, papa,--you will dig your leg."

He used to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about

his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the

nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the

words.

There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the

earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he

had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary

that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with

endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.

Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy,

over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos

eseito]--Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have

been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling

learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with

impunity.

In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham,

Emerson is reported as saying, "God has given me the seeing eye, but not

the working hand." His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its

envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in

connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all

this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden

and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the

patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one

thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left

no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with

natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its

various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity

(_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it

appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity,

according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for

an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that

Franklin showed in the affairs of common life.

He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become

able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships.

We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first

edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears

in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that

recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still.

What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded

worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between

the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience

and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to

make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham

gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections

which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his

equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed,

and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed

itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree.

Of Emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory

of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked

or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be

his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity

apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the

part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little

children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic

smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated

with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are

living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has

already been written. Margaret Fuller,--I must call my early schoolmate

as I best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of

five artists,--Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully

commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives

in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne

awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.

How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came

to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That "majesty" Mr.

Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that

doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly

upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew

would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent

persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would

have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to

the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too

exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many

others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal

frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better

sphere of being.

Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village

in which he lived. He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on

no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures,

was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt

to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came

flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington.

* * * * *

What was the errand on which he visited our earth,--the message with

which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life?

Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. These may be opened

earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can

tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound.

Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they

were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country,

perhaps by too long contact with the "Sons of Liberty," and their

revolutionary notions. But the most "liberal" Boston pulpit still held

to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any

independent thinker.

In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, "began," as

was said of another,--"to be about thirty years of age." He had opened

his sealed orders and had read therein:

Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.

Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice

of God in thine own soul.

Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy

fellow-servants.

Thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit

of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold

interests of life and the typical characters of history.

Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul, in conscious

union with the Infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence.

This pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing

is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. Its least

appearance is not unworthy of thy study. Let thy soul be open and thine

eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere.

Go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they

must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with

the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see

God.

Teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect

freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that

today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to

reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning's sun.

To thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World,

that here, here in our America, is the home of man; that here is the

promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has

recorded.

Thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent,

hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere

thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities.

* * * * *

He was true to the orders he had received. Through doubts, troubles,

privations, opposition, he would not

"bate a jot

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer

Right onward."

All through the writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests

itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest

sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane"

where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the

homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners,

And all his work was done, not so much

"As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye,"

as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship.

He was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to

a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. He might have been an

idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw

all about him. He gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and

trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him

above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has

held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a

volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a

confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and

Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that

professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the

fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings

of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions.

Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely

made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not

in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague

aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them,

in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he

"Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer."

Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout

listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn,

who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was

over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life

in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.

"His was the task and his the lordly gift

Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift."

This was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier,

calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more

help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude

could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.

"Nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his

genius," as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a

poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in

circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these

directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and

he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room

naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from

the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very

popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a

very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.

--"I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished

in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos

not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as

conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics,

argument and confession." So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.

It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave

most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view

the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson

was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a

play-actor.

The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were,

accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the

lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of

Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given

length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and

lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience

would tire before the allotted time was over.

Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists.

They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative

observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in

their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen

portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes

little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an

elevated sentiment.

It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer

in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had

learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his

apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must

work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the

playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good

estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and

published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in

the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never

became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances

until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he

was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor,

writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and

dangerous winter season.

He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man

could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed

plain people whose classics were the Bible and the "Farmer's Almanac."

Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by

his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found

his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow.

When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public

in the shape of an Essay. But the Essay never lost the character it

borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a

lay sermon,--_concio ad populum_. We must always remember what we are

dealing with. "Expect nothing more of my power of construction,--no

ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs

tied together."--"Here I sit and read and write, with very little

system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary

result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent

particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer

and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom

of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," he says, "and there it

tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing,

sneer, or pray, according to your genius." In England, he says, "I find

this lecturing a key which opens all doors." But he did not tend to

overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so

diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again,

"I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and

am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received."

Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the

earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares

about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest

itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments.

But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations

enough. I remember Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could

fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very

advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was

unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely,

saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that

season.

No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages

with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he

was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was

deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the

end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly,

without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild

surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full

measure to his audience with perfect fairness.

[Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes

Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei

Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]

or, in Bryant's version,

"as the scales

Are held by some just woman, who maintains

By spinning wool her household,--carefully

She poises both the wool and weights, to make

The balance even, that she may provide

A pittance for her babes."--

As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. It is needless to handle

this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it. Of their effect on

his younger listeners he says, "To some of us that long past experience

remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson

awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of

the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may

fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of 'Chevy Chase,' and we in

Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of

victory."

There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in

Emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. So might "Peace, be

still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. I remember

that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror,

I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson's,

where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. An

hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the

diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for

a careworn soul.

An author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many

quarries. Emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide

range of authors. I shall presently show how extensive was his reading.

No doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would

seem, thoroughly. But let no one be frightened away from his pages by

the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or

Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not

pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a

man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks

very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.

"As he confesses in the Essay on 'Books,' his learning is second hand;

but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use

of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of

his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the

original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than

of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive

glimpses, and he is content."

One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has

"contrived to read" almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has

fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has

not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to

Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well

be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to Goethe are

very frequent.

Emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly

know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse

him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather

quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson

quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because

another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with

a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously

appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse

in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than

many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his

authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all,

and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named

references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are

three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred

and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven

are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times

or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or

more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names

alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one

thousand and sixty-five references.

Authorities. Number of times mentioned.

Shakespeare.....112

Napoleon.........84

Plato............81

Plutarch.........70

Goethe...........62

Swift............49

Bacon............47

Milton...........46

Newton...........43

Homer............42

Socrates.........42

Swedenborg.......40

Montaigne........30

Saadi............30

Luther...........30

Webster..........27

Aristotle........25

Hafiz............25

Wordsworth.......25

Burke............24

Saint Paul.......24

Dante............22

Shattuck (Hist. of

Concord).......21

Chaucer..........20

Coleridge........20

Michael Angelo...20

The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times.

It is interesting to observe that Montaigne, Franklin, and Emerson all

show the same fondness for Plutarch.

Montaigne says, "I never settled myself to the reading of any book of

solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."

Franklin says, speaking of the books in his father's library, "There was

among them Plutarch's Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think

that time spent to great advantage."

Emerson says, "I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to

all the ancient writers."

Studies of life and character were the delight of all these four

moralists. As a judge of character, Dr. Hedge, who knew Emerson well,

has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of "English

Traits" can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the

intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes.

_Noscitur a sociis_ is as applicable to the books a man most affects as

well as to the companions he chooses. It is with the kings of

thought that Emerson most associates. As to borrowing from his royal

acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve.

"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.

There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By

necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."

What Emerson says of Plutarch applies very nearly to himself.

"In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate

between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into

the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not

stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all."

Mr. Ruskin and Lord Tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend

themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Emerson would never have taken

the trouble to do such a thing. His mind was overflowing with thought as

a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from

an endless variety of sources. He drew ashore whatever he wanted that

would serve his purpose. He makes no secret of his mode of writing. "I

dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature;

but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of

a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities."

Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of

his "lapidary style" and say "I build my house of boulders."

"It is to be remembered," says Mr. Ruskin, "that all men who have sense

and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they

meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest

is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human

minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the

world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original

powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to

their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it."

The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson's words

and thoughts and those of others.

Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. "Scorn trifles"

comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph

Waldo.--"What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?

This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." So writes Ralph Waldo

Emerson in his Lecture "New England Reformers."--"Hiding the badges of

royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest

their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags."

Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the "Harvard Register" nearly

twenty years before.

"The hero is not fed on sweets,

Daily his own heart he eats."

The image comes from Pythagoras _via_ Plutarch.

Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a

sentence which recalls Carlyle.

"The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.

The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all

its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a

long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule."

Compare this passage from "English Traits" with the following one from

Carlyle's "French Revolution":--

"So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and

character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch

all men:--till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire,

the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day!

For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass;

most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the

burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing

will put out."

"O what are heroes, prophets, men

But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow

A momentary music."

The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns's letters, again in

one of Coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a

letter of Leibnitz.

"He builded better than he knew"

is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson. The thought is constantly

recurring in our literature. It helps out the minister's sermon; and a

Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the "Address

without a Phoenix" among the Drury Lane mock poems. Can we find any

trace of this idea elsewhere?

In a little poem of Coleridge's, "William Tell," are these two lines:

"On wind and wave the boy would toss

Was great, nor knew how great he was."

The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle

called "Characteristics." It reappears in Emerson's poem "Fate."

"Unknown to Cromwell as to me

Was Cromwell's measure and degree;

Unknown to him as to his horse,

If he than his groom is better or worse."

It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this

connection. In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest

themselves. All the best poetry the world has known is full of such

resemblances. If we find Emerson's wonderful picture, "Initial Love"

prefigured in the "Symposium" of Plato, we have only to look in the

"Phaedrus" and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare's

famous group,--

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet."

Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental

coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed

from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished

copies, _éditions de luxe_ of sayings that all the world knows are old,

but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again.

The more improved versions of the world's great thoughts we have, the

better, and we look to the great minds for them. The larger the river

the more streams flow into it. The wide flood of Emerson's discourse has

a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries.

It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his

lectures and essays. He was always on the lookout in conversation for

things to be remembered. He picked up facts one would not have expected

him to care for. He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple's time at

Kalamazoo. I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me

right. He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown

in several instances. Another example is where he speaks of Quintus

Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the

self-sacrificing equestrian. Little inaccuracies of this kind did not

concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could

not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular

article.

Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him.

Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most

easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau.

Carlyle's harsh virility could not be without its effect on his

valid, but sensitive nature. Alcott's psychological and physiological

speculations interested him as an idealist. Thoreau lent him a new set

of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a

poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as

vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like

those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest

stone in the darkest night,--or come nearer to seeing it than those of

most mortals. Emerson's long intimacy with him taught him to give an

outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to

him but for this companionship. A nicer analysis would detect many

alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits

predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood

out distinct from the common family qualities. Mr. Whipple has well

said: "Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his

ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his

genius? Indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words,

and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius 'to spring,

like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the

past and refuse all history.'"

* * * * *

Emerson's place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He cannot

properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered

lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have

been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments

rather than of the results of systematic study. He was a man of

intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism.

This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost,

if not quite, unintelligible. We can, for this reason, understand why

the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and Dr. Walter

Channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. But it is not

always a writer's fault that he is not understood. Many persons have

poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand

themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. But that which is

mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring

imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. It is to be hoped that no

reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found

under the title "Diogenes," in the work of his namesake, Diogenes

Laertius. I translate from the Latin version.

"Plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of _mensality_ and _cyathity_

[_tableity_, and _gobletity_]. 'I can see a table and a goblet,' said

the cynic, 'but I can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.'

'Quite so,' answered Plato, 'because you have the eyes to see a goblet

and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and

gobletity.'"

This anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following Emerson into

the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation.

Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a

spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, "as

the wise Spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. This, of

course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than

Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India,

fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers

and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux,

Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has

his fancies on the subject. The geography of an undiscovered country and

the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to

romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge.

That the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a

simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different

proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its

retina,--why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such

questions very simply by saying it is so.

The poet in Emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the

philosopher. He speaks of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of

Immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. It

sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble

Ode as working truths.

"Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home."

In accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a

preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant:--

"Mighty prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest

Which we are toiling all our lives to find."--

These are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the

poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and

the age of eight years, at which Wordsworth finds the little girl of

whom he speaks in the lines,--

"A simple child--

That lightly draws its breath

And feels its life in every limb,--

What should it know of death?"

What should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which

Time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone

render appreciable to the consciousness? Undoubtedly every brain has its

own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own

individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a

good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as Dryden called it, from a

good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth

to plant himself on his instincts. But the individual to whom this

counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts.

He has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. His

instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous

conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided

tendencies. The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what

is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological

language, from God or the devil. That which was a safe guide for Emerson

might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy. The cloud of glory

which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts,

which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,--not the

truths themselves. And too many children come into life trailing after

them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory.

It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new

doctrine,--new to his young disciples,--of planting themselves on their

instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting

to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the

door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which

listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of

babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as

one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a

very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "The Dial"

was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness,

incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to

satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.

The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less

than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence.

It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we

cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance

in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout

religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious

free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right

and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its

legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or

institutions.

All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of

emancipation. For the Fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of Medmenham

Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense _ce que voudras_. There was

an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some

susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally

of the Bedlam sort. Emerson's disciples were never accused of falling

into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself

distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing

effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign

influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the

effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the

regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.

Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration

of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not

yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but

so was throwing the tea overboard. A provincial affair, if the Bohemian

press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was

fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over

the world.

* * * * *

Too much has been made of Emerson's mysticism. He was an intellectual

rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let

go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of

common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being

could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob

Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader

may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic

asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the

contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in

the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to

insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable,

the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played

with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified

the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual

divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach

to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out

of itself. If "Rejected Addresses" had not been written half a century

before Emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant

to ridicule and parody it.

"The song of Braham is an Irish howl;

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,

And nought is everything and everything is nought."

Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma

that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.

Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the "Yoga" doctrine

of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The

oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic

dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a

peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to

construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be,

of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and

ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to

build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a

human soul had ever constructed.

Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel,"

illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's

calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes

refers to,--that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I

become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. This

was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his

most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well

known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for

a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the

spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.

Emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question

sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to

the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a

charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and

disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have

a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "Uriel" is a poem which finds itself

perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt

not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment,

it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the

voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest

imaginative conceptions.

Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of

universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return.

Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects

in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the

landscape. Here is a curious extract from "The Adirondacs," in which the

reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron's--

"The sky is changed,--and such a change! O night

And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."--

Now Emerson:--

"And presently the sky is changed; O world!

What pictures and what harmonies are thine!

The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,

_So like the soul of me, what if't were me_?"

We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem

printed among the "Translations" in the Appendix to Emerson's Poems.

These are the last two lines of "The Flute, from Hilali":--

"Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,

If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?"

The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley's "Ode

to the West Wind":

"Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"

Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops

of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical

metempsychosis.

The laird of Balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him

cherry-brandy instead of port wine. In driving home over a wild tract of

land called Munrimmon Moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got

out of the gig and brought them to him. The hat he recognized, but not

the wig. "It's no my wig, Hairy [Harry], lad; it's no my wig," and he

would not touch it. At last Harry lost his patience: "Ye'd better tak'

it, sir, for there's nae waile [choice] o' wigs on Munrimmon Moor."

And in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman,

whose _Ego_ was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she

had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of

her four-footed companion:--

"If it be I, he'll wag his little tail;

And if it be not I, he'll loudly bark and wail."

I have not lost my reverence for Emerson in showing one of his fancies

for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. He would

doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense

of humor. But I take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about

"a foresmell of the Infinite" which Mr. Conway has attributed to me, who

am innocent of all connection with it.

The mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial

concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special

endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. It is

not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great

composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise

the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine

contemplation. The bewildered reader must not forget that passage of

arms, previously mentioned, between Plato and Diogenes.

* * * * *

Emerson looked rather askance at Science in his early days. I remember

that his brother Charles had something to say in the "Harvard Register"

(1828) about its disenchantments. I suspect the prejudice may have come

partly from Wordsworth. Compare this verse of his with the lines of

Emerson's which follow it.

"Physician art thou, one all eyes;

Philosopher, a fingering slave,

One that would peep and botanize

Upon his mother's grave?"

Emerson's lines are to be found near the end of the Appendix in the new

edition of his works.

"Philosophers are lined with eyes within,

And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.

In love he cannot therefore cease his trade;

Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,

He feels it, introverts his learned eye

To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.

His mother died,--the only friend he had,--

Some tears escaped, but his philosophy

Couched like a cat, sat watching close behind

And throttled all his passion. Is't not like

That devil-spider that devours her mate

Scarce freed from her embraces?"

The same feeling comes out in the Poem "Blight," where he says the

"young scholars who invade our hills"

"Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,

And all their botany is Latin names;"

and in "The Walk," where the "learned men" with their glasses are

contrasted with the sons of Nature,--the poets are no doubt meant,--much

to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. Emerson's mind

was very far from being of the scientific pattern. Science is

quantitative,--loves the foot-rule and the balance,--methodical,

exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. The poet is curious,

asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the

answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it. Emerson wonders,

for instance,--

"Why Nature loves the number five,"

but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any

farther. He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany

from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr.

Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial

anaesthesia. It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz,

who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most

delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science

and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came

among us. At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their

specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves

the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his

Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says:--

"Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet's

curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the

feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection

they awake."--

This was Emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of

nature.

Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes

quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects.

His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are

independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is

frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the

special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound

that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing

_audacities_:--

"There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is

naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."--

"He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and

carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic."--

"If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long

hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy

which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature."--

"Tapping the tempest for a little side wind."--

"The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot

every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and

employment and bind them fast in one web."--

He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes

the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe,

Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word "husband"

in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word "haughty" is so

fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its

employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But

his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like

dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty Ariel,"--"fine Ariel." It

belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to

Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators

are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of

Emerson's. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic

traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn

fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and

his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;"

his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word "fine," with a

certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the

word "melioration."

We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel

with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The "point and

surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch

belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is

very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects,

ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool

and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison

grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such

delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to

match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the

slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced

organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling

the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an

unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he "peddles out all the

wit he can gather from Time or from Nature," and we find that "he has

changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying

about the morning light as merchandise.

* * * * *

Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as

home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen

sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets

familiar to all of us,--"This great, intelligent, sensual, and

avaricious America." This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his

Essay, "Works and Days," he is quite as outspoken: "This mendicant

America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America." "I

see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the

respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "The war," he

says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." All his

life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization.

All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them.

To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the

ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "Here,"

he said, in words I have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is

the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has

recorded."

Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent;

he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him

as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our

fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. So it pleases us

to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of

Franklin's bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of

Emerson's:--

"A blessing through the ages thus

Shield all thy roofs and towers,

GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,

Thou darling town of ours!"

Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not

fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend

their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop,

and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the

penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of

the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. His courtesy and kindness

to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. Poets who come to recite

their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are

among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted

his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but

collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable

inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one

phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far

as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his

most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in

its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration.

* * * * *

The natural purity and elevation of Emerson's character show themselves

in all that he writes. His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him

from his writings. This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all

the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so

spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave

their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some

superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about

Boileau,--

"Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,--cela porte malheur."

(Don't let us abuse Nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up

dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had

their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the

assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him,

and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy,

sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England

was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The

_dour_ Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and

they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise

above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until

he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and

find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. So

did the music of Emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our

stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would

have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When

a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened

persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs

as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the

convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about

which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep

and anxious and devout religious scepticism.

It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by

Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his

ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but

when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the

end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the

more he found himself perplexed.

The name most frequently applied to Emerson's form of belief is

Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can

tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief

in the omnipresence of the Deity?

Theodore Parker explained Emerson's position, as he understood it, in an

article in the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." I borrow this quotation

from Mr. Cooke:--

"He has an absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of

Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it.

He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or

morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy

for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates

at Andover or Cambridge."

We read in his Essay, "Self-Reliance ": "This is the ultimate fact which

we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all

into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the

Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in

which it enters into all lower forms."

The "ever-blessed ONE" of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the

doctrine of the Trinity. The "Over-Soul" of Emerson is that aspect of

Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a

divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in

all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as

he was willing to be called a Platonist.

Explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like

this. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the

Almighty unto perfection?" But on certain great points nothing could be

clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of

spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His

views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character,

brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him

afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any

denial of the self-governing power of the will.

His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. In all

he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in

all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his light and guide; through

all nature he looked up to nature's God; and if he did not worship the

"man Christ Jesus" as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed

his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of

him as more like Christ than any man he had known.

Emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church

from which he had parted. Since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not

of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of

well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an

impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent

sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before.

Their official Confessions of Faith make far less difference in their

human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago.

These ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials

with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little

bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long

as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully

treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that.

Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of

Emerson's religious teachings I will select two as typical.

Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in

Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has

written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the

New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with

the following sentence:--

"Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of

Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one

of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole,

tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a

great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest

of human life: 'HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.'"

"But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report," says

Mr. Conway "('Macmillan,' June, 1879), that religion had there passed

through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that 'the genial

atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all

the churches equally.'"

What is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of Christianity?

The good Baptist minister's Essay is full of it. He comes asking what

has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of

"fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same

Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him.

The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if

he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations

ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later

he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was

called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished

to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into

pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals.

It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the

self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the

Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness

of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely

claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote:--

"Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place

these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man

sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again

to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our

faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the

Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be

there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and

the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of

conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the

spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of

voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself

there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from

the dead, to swell their number."

The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson's writings and life

is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and

critics. The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by

three considerable Memoirs. Mr. George Willis Cooke's elaborate work is

remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson's teachings.

Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway's "Emerson at Home and Abroad" is a lively

picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. Mr.

Alexander Ireland's "Biographical Sketch" brings together, from a great

variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of

Emerson's history and the comments of those whose opinions were best

worth reproducing. I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the

various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject.

From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our

intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and

appreciative criticisms of Emerson's Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the

portrait of the New England "Plotinus-Montaigne" in his brilliant "Fable

for Critics," to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John

Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson's

writings have furnished one of the most enduring _pièces de résistance_

at the critical tables of the old and the new world.

He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and

writers: Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services;

Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss

Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him "a noble man."

Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson's

fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but

unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned

whether they would pass current with posterity. He found discerning

critics in France, Germany, and Holland. Better than all is the

testimony of those who knew him best. They who repeat the saying that

"a prophet is not without honor save in his own country," will find an

exception to its truth in the case of Emerson. Read the impressive words

spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the

glowing tributes of three of Concord's poets,--Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing,

and Mr. Sanborn,--and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame

had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored,

beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his

own fireside.

It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the

language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the

adamant of Shakespeare," and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison

or Gray's Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought

entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified

the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as

a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. _Corpora non agunt

nisi soluta_, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as

material substances before they can act. "That which thou sowest is not

quickened except it die," or rather lose the form with which it was

sown. Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of "The

Burial of Sir John Moore" an immortal, and endowed the language with a

classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. But what is the gift of a

mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? How many lives

have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost

in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their

influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which

they formed a part and the generations that came after them! We can dare

to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr.

Cranch:--

"The wise will know thee and the good will love,

The age to come will feel thy impress given

In all that lifts the race a step above

Itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven."

It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson's best literary work in prose and

verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or

fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and

the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends,

indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization.

* * * * *

It is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly

pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose

footsteps Christendom professes to follow. The time was when the divine

authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported

to have wrought. As the faith in these exceptions to the general laws

of the universe diminished, the teachings of the Master, of whom it was

said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon

as evidence of his divine mission. Now, when a comparison of these

teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to

have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the

sinless and self-devoted servant of God and friend of man is appealed to

as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation

of the Divinity.

Judged by his life Emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity.

He was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even

the jail. But the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing

it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of Queen

Mary's martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. His faith was too large and

too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too

honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred

calling. His writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of

admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them

their true value. It was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on

so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the

privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise.

No matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks,

carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to

his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without

which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. He shaped an ideal for

the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after

truth. Look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall

see it everywhere. Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you

shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul. Trust yourself because

you trust the voice of God in your inmost consciousness.

There are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts

beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. So

transparent was the life of Emerson; so clearly did the true nature of

the man show through it. What he taught others to be, he was himself.

His deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere

among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest

manifestations of character. Here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may

have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if He who knew what was in man

had wandered from door to door in New England as of old in Palestine, we

can well believe that one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet"

would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been

that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson.

INDEX.

[For many references, not found elsewhere, see under the general

headings of _Emerson's Books, Essays, Poems_.]

Abbott, Josiah Gardiner, a pupil of Emerson, 49, 50.

Academic Races, 2, 3. (See _Heredity_.)

Action, subordinate, 112.

Adams, John, old age, 261.

Adams, Samuel, Harvard debate, 115.

Addison, Joseph, classic, 416.

Advertiser, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.

Aeolian Harp, his model, 329, 340.

(See _Emerson's Poems_,--Harp.)

Aeschylus, tragedies, 253. (See _Greek_.)

Agassiz, Louis:

Saturday Club, 222;

companionship, 403.

Agriculture:

in Anthology, 30;

attacked, 190;

not Emerson's field, 255, 256, 365.

Akenside, Mark, allusion, 16.

Alchemy, adepts, 260, 261.

Alcott, A. Bronson:

hearing Emerson, 66;

speculations, 86;

an idealist, 150;

The Dial, 159;

sonnet, 355;

quoted, 373;

personality traceable, 389.

Alcott, Louisa M., funeral bouquet, 351.

Alexander the Great:

allusion, 184;

mountain likeness, 322.

Alfred the Great, 220, 306.

Allston, Washington, unfinished picture, 334.

(See _Pictures_.)

Ambition, treated in Anthology, 30.

America:

room for a poet, 136, 137;

virtues and defects, 143;

faith in, 179;

people compared with English, 216;

things awry, 260;

_aristocracy_, 296;

in the Civil War, 304;

Revolution, 305;

Lincoln, the true history of his time, 307;

passion for, 308, 309;

artificial rhythm, 329;

its own literary style, 342;

home of man, 371;

loyalty to, 406;

epithets, 406, 407.

(See _England, New England_, etc.)

Amici, meeting Emerson, 63.

(See _Italy_.)

Amusements, in New England, 30.

Anaemia, artistic, 334.

Ancestry:

in general, 1-3;

Emerson's, 3 _et seq._

(See _Heredity_.)

Andover, Mass.:

Theological School, 48;

graduates, 411.

Andrew, John Albion:

War Governor, 223;

hearing Emerson, 379.

(See _South_.)

Angelo. (See _Michael Angelo_.)

Antinomianism:

in The Dial, 162;

kept from, 177.

(See _God, Religion_, etc.)

Anti-Slavery:

in Emerson's pulpit, 57;

the reform, 141, 145, 152;

Emancipation address, 181;

Boston and New York addresses, 210-212;

Emancipation Proclamation, 228;

Fugitive Slave Law, and other matters, 303-307.

(See _South_.)

Antoninus, Marcus, allusion, 16.

Architecture, illustrations, 253.

Arianism, 51.

(See _Unitarianism_.)

Aristotle:

influence over Mary Emerson, 17;

times mentioned, 382.

Arminianism, 51.

(See _Methodism, Religion_, etc.)

Arnim, Gisela von, 225.

Arnold, Matthew:

quotation about America, 137:

lecture, 236;

on Milton, 315;

his Thyrsis, 333;

criticism, 334;

string of Emerson's epithets, 406.

Aryans, comparison, 312.

Asia:

a pet name, 176;

immovable, 200.

Assabet River, 70, 71.

Astronomy:

Harp illustration, 108;

stars against wrong, 252, 253.

(See _Galileo, Stars, Venus_, etc.)

Atlantic Monthly:

sketch of Dr. Ripley, 14, 15;

of Mary Moody Emerson, 16;

established, 221;

supposititious club, 222;

on Persian Poetry, 224;

on Thoreau, 228;

Emerson's contributions, 239, 241;

Brahma, 296.

Atmosphere:

effect on inspiration, 290;

spiritual, 413, 414.

Augustine, Emerson's study of, 52.

Authors, quoted by Emerson, 381-383.

(See _Plutarch_, etc.)

Bacon, Francis:

allusion, 22, 111;

times quoted, 382.

Bancroft, George:

literary rank, 33;

in college, 45.

Barbier, Henri Auguste, on Napoleon, 208.

Barnwell, Robert W.:

in history, 45;

in college, 47.

Beaumont and Fletcher, disputed, line, 128, 129.

Beauty:

its nature, 74, 94, 95;

an end, 99, 135, 182;

study, 301.

Beecher, Edward, on preexistence, 391.

(See _Preexistence_.)

Behmen, Jacob:

mysticism, 201, 202, 396;

citation, 380.

Berkeley, Bishop:

characteristics, 189;

matter, 300.

Bible:

Mary Emerson's study, 16;

Mosaic cosmogony, 18;

the Exodus, 35;

the Lord's Supper, 58;

Psalms, 68, 181, 182, 253;

lost Paradise, 101;

Genesis, Sermon on the Mount, 102;

Seer of Patmos, 102, 103;

Apocalypse, 105;

Song of Songs, 117;

Baruch's roll, 117, 118;

not closed, 122;

the Sower, 154;

Noah's Ark, 191;

Pharisee's trumpets, 255;

names and imagery, 268;

sparing the rod, 297;

rhythmic mottoes, 314;

beauty of Israel, 351;

face of an angel, 352;

barren fig-tree, 367;

a classic, 376;

body of death, "Peace be still!" 379;

draught of fishes, 381;

its semi-detached sentences, 405;

Job quoted, 411;

"the man Christ Jesus," 412;

scattering abroad, 414.

(See _Christ, God, Religion,_ etc.)

Bigelow, Jacob, on rural cemeteries, 31.

Biography, every man writes his own, 1.

Blackmore, Sir Richard, controversy, 31.

Bliss Family, 9.

Bliss, Daniel, patriotism, 72.

Blood, transfusion of, 256.

Books, use and abuse, 110, 111.

(See _Emerson's Essays_.)

Boston, Mass.:

First Church, 10, 12, 13;

Woman's Club, 16;

Harbor, 19;

nebular spot, 25, 26;

its pulpit darling, 27;

Episcopacy, 28;

Athenaeum, 31;

magazines, 28-34;

intellectual character, lights on its three hills, high caste

religion, 34;

Samaria and Jerusalem, 35;

streets and squares, 37-39;

Latin School, 39, 40, 43;

new buildings, 42;

Mrs. Emerson's boarding-house, the Common as a pasture, 43;

Unitarian preaching, 51;

a New England centre, 52;

Emerson's settlement, 54;

Second Church, 55-61;

lectures, 87, 88, 191;

Trimount Oracle, 102;

stirred by the Divinity-School address, 126;

school-keeping, Roxbury, 129;

aesthetic society, 149;

Transcendentalists, 155, 156;

Bay, 172;

Freeman Place Chapel, 210:

Saturday Club, 221-223;

Burns Centennial, 224, 225;

Parker meeting, 228;

letters, 263, 274, 275;

Old South lecture, 294;

Unitarianism, 298;

Emancipation Proclamation, 307;

special train, 350;

Sons of Liberty, 369;

birthplace, 407;

Baptists, 413.

Boswell, James:

allusion, 138;

one lacking, 223;

Life of Johnson, 268.

Botany, 403.

(See _Science_.)

Bowen, Francis: literary rank, 34;

on Nature, 103, 104.

Brook Farm, 159, 164-166, 189, 191.

(See _Transcendentalism_, etc.)

Brown, Howard N., prayer, 355.

Brown, John, sympathy with, 211.

(See _Anti-Slavery, South_.)

Brownson, Orestes A., at a party, 149.

Bryant, William Cullen:

his literary rank, 33;

redundant syllable, 328;

his translation of Homer quoted, 378.

Buckminster, Joseph Stevens:

minister in Boston, 12, 26, 27, 52;

Memoir, 29;

destruction of Goldau, 31.

Buddhism:

like Transcendentalism, 151;

Buddhist nature, 188;

saints

298. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma,

--_India_, etc.)

Buffon, on style, 341.

Bulkeley Family, 4-7.

Bulkeley, Peter:

minister of Concord, 4-7, 71;

comparison of sermons, 57;

patriotism, 72;

landowner, 327.

Bunyan, John, quoted, 169.

Burke, Edmund:

essay, 73;

times mentioned, 382.

Burns, Robert:

festival, 224, 225;

rank, 281;

image referred to, 386;

religious position, 409. (See _Scotland_.)

Burroughs, John, view of English life, 335.

Burton, Robert, quotations, 109, 381.

Buttrick, Major, in the Revolution, 71, 72.