EMERSON.[1]

[1] _Essays._ By Ralph Waldo Emerson. _Nature_, an Essay, and

_Orations_. By the same.

The genius of America seems hitherto disposed to manifest itself

rather in works of reason and reflection than in those displays of

poetic fervour which are usually looked for in a nascent literature.

And a little consideration would lead us, probably, to expect this.

America presents itself upon the scene, enters into the drama of the

world, at a time when the minds of men are generally awakened and

excited to topics of grave and practical importance. It is not a great

poem that mankind now want or look for; they rather demand a great

work, or works, on human society, on the momentous problems which our

social progress, as well as our social difficulties, alike give rise

to. If on a new literature a peculiar mission could be imposed, such

would probably be the task assigned to it.

The energetic and ceaseless industry of the people of America, the

stern and serious character of the founders of New England, the

tendency which democracy must necessarily encourage to reason much and

boldly on the interests of the community,--would all lead us to the

same anticipation; so far as any anticipation can be warranted,

regarding the erratic course and capricious development of literary

genius.

The first contribution, we believe, our libraries received from

America, was the half theological, half metaphysical treatise on the

Will by Jonathan Edwards. This follower of Calvin is understood to

have stated the gloomy and repulsive doctrines of his master with an

unrivalled force of logic. Such is the reputation which _Edwards on

the Will_ enjoys, and we are contented to speak from reputation. The

doctrine of necessity, even when intelligently applied to the circle

of human thoughts and passions, is not the most inviting tenet of

philosophy. It is quickly learned, and what little fruit it yields is

soon gathered. But when combined with the theological dogma, wrung

from texts of scripture, of predestination; when the law of necessity

supposed to regulate the temper and affairs of the human being in this

little life, is converted into a divine sentence of condemnation to a

future and eternal fate--it then becomes one of the most odious and

irrational of tenets that ever obscured the reason or clouded the

piety of mankind. We confess, therefore, that we are satisfied with

re-echoing the traditional reputation of Jonathan Edwards, without

earning, by perusal of his work, the right to pronounce upon its

justice.

The first contribution, also, which America made to the amount of our

knowledge, was of a scientific character, and, moreover, the most

anti-poetical imaginable. As such, at least, it must be described by

those who are accustomed to think that a peculiar mystery attached to

one phenomenon of nature more than another, is essentially poetic.

Several poets, our Campbell amongst the number, have complained that

the laws of optics have disenchanted the rainbow; but the analysis of

Newton is poetry itself compared to that instance of the daring and

levelling spirit of science which Franklin exhibited, when he proved

the lightning to be plain electricity; took the bolts of Jupiter,

analysed them, bottled them in Leyden jars, and experimented on them

as with the sparks of his own electrical machine.

As the first efforts of American genius were in the paths of grave and

searching inquiry, so, too, at this present moment, if we were called

upon to point out amongst the works of our trans-Atlantic brethren,

our compatriots still in language, the one which, above all others,

displayed the undoubted marks of original genius,--it would be a prose

work, and one of a philosophical character we should single out:--we

should point to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Americans are frequently heard to lament the absence of

nationality in their literature. Perhaps no people are the first to

perceive their own character reflected in the writings of one of their

countrymen; this nationality is much more open to the observation of a

foreigner. We are quite sure that no French or German critic could

read the speculations of Emerson, without tracing in them the spirit

of the nation to which this writer belongs. The new democracy of the

New World is apparent, he would say, in the philosophy of one who yet

is no democrat, and, in the ordinary sense of the word, no politician.

For what is the prevailing spirit of his writings? Self-reliance, and

the determination to see in the man of to-day, in his own, and in his

neighbour's mind, the elements of all greatness. Whatever the most

exalted characters of history, whatever the most opulent of

literatures, has displayed or revealed, of action or of thought,--the

germ of all lies within yourself. This is his frequent text. What does

he say of history? "I have no expectation that any man will read

history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men

whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is

doing to-day." He is, as he describes himself, "an endless seeker of

truth, with no past at his back." He delights to raise the individual

existing mind to the level, if not above the level, of all that has

been thought or enacted. He will not endure the imposing claims of

antiquity, of great nations, or of great, names. "It is remarkable,"

he says, "that involuntarily we always read as superior beings.

Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not, in their

stateliest pictures, in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the

triumphs of will or of genius, anywhere make us feel that we intrude,

that this is for our betters, but rather is it true that in their

grandest strokes, there we feel most at home. _All that Shakspeare

says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner, feels

to be true of himself._"

Neither do the names of foreign cities, any more than of ancient

nations, overawe or oppress him. Of travelling, he says, "I have no

churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the

purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first

domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat

greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat

which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even

in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind

have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the

discovery that place is nothing. At home, I dream that at Naples, at

Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my

trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in

Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self,

unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the

palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I

am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go."

In a still higher strain he writes, "There is one mind common to all

individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same, and to all of the

same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a

freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought he may think; what

a saint has felt he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man he

can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind, is a party to

all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent."

This passage is taken from the commencement of the Essay on History,

and the essay entitled "Nature," opens with a similar sentiment. He

disclaims the retrospective spirit of our age that would "put the

living generation into masquerade out of the faded wardrobe of the

past." He will not see through the eyes of others. "Why should not we

also," he demands, "enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why

should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of

tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of

theirs? The sun shines to-day also! Let us demand our own works, and

laws, and worship."

In the Essay on Self-reliance--a title which might over-ride a great

portion of his writings--he says: "Our reading is mendicant and

sycophantic. In history, our imagination makes fools of us, plays us

false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier

vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common

day's work: but the things of life are the same to both: the sum total

of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and

Scanderberg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous: _did they wear

out virtue?_" And in a more sublime mood he proceeds: "Whenever a mind

is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass

away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall. Whence, then, this

worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity

and majesty of the soul.... Man is timid and apologetic. He is no

longer upright. He dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some

saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing

rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses,

or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God

to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose,--perfect

in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he

does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past,

or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to

foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he, too, lives

with nature in the present, above time."

Surely these quotations alone--which we have made with the additional

motive of introducing at once to our readers the happier style and

manner of the American Philosopher--would bear out the French or

German critic in their views of the nationality of this author. The

spirit of the New World, and of a self-confident democracy, could not

be more faithfully translated into the language of a high and abstract

philosophy than it is here. We say that an air blowing from prairie

and forest, and the New Western World, is felt in the tone and spirit

of Emerson's writings; we do not intend to intimate that the opinions

expressed in them are at all times such as might be anticipated from

an American. Far from it. Mr Emerson regards the world from a peculiar

point of view, that of an idealistic philosophy. Moreover, he is one

of those wilful, capricious, though powerful thinkers, whose opinions

it would not be very easy to anticipate, who balk all prediction, who

defy augury.

For instance, a foreigner might naturally expect to find in the

speculations of a New England philosopher, certain sanguine and

enthusiastic views of the future condition of society. He will not

find them here. Our idealist levels the past to the present, but he

levels the future to the present also. If with him all that is old is

new, so also all that is new is old. It is still the one great

universal mind--like the great ocean--ebbing, flowing, in tempest now,

and now in calm. He will not join in the shout that sees a new sun

rising on the world. For ourselves, (albeit little given to the too

sanguine mood) we have more hope here than our author has expressed.

We by no means subscribe to the following sentence. The measure of

truth it expresses--and so well expresses--bears but a small

proportion to the whole truth. "All men plume themselves on the

improvement of society, and no man improves. Society never advances.

It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes

continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilised, it is

christianised, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not

amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.

Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast

between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a

watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked

New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an

undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But compare the health

of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal strength the

white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage

with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal

as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall

send the white to his grave. The civilised man has built a coach, but

has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but loses

so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has

lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical

almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it,

the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he

does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright

calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks

impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance

office increases the number of accidents; it may be a question whether

machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement

some energy, by a christianity (entrenched in establishments and

forms) some vigour of wild virtue. _For every stoic was a stoic; but

in Christendom where is the Christian?_"

A French critic has designated Emerson the American Montaigne, struck,

we presume by his independence of manner, and a certain egotism which

when accompanied by genius is as attractive, as it is ludicrous

without that accompaniment. An English reader will be occasionally

reminded of the manner of Sir Thomas Brown, author of the "Religio

Medici." Like Sir Thomas, he sometimes startles us by a _curiosity_ of

reflection, fitted to suggest and kindle thought, although to a dry

logician it may seem a mere futility, or the idle play of imagination.

Of course this similarity is to be traced only in single and detached

passages; but we think we could select several quotations from the

American writer which should pass off as choice morsels of Sir Thomas

Brown, with one who was familiar with the strain of thought of the old

Englishman, but whose memory was not of that formidable exactness as

to render vain all attempt at imposition. Take the following for an

instance:--"I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in

the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the

lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either

of these worlds of life? As long as the Caucasian man--perhaps

longer--these creatures have kept their council beside him, and there

is no record of any word or sign that has passed from the one to the

other.... I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our

so-called history is. How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and

Constantinople. What does Rome know of rat or lizard? What are

Olympiads and Consulates to these neighbouring systems of being?"

Or this:--"Why should we make it a point to disparage that man we are,

and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is contented. I love

and honour Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it

more just to love the world of this hour, than the world of his hour.

Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying

'he acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good, when the

need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the

man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his

lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of

love and fortitude. Why should we be busy-bodies, and superserviceable?

Action and inaction are alike to the true.... Besides, why should we

be cowed by the name of action? 'Tis a trick of the senses,--no more.

We know that the ancestor of every action is a thought. The rich mind

lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act."

Or if one were to put down the name of Sir Thomas Brown as the author

of such a sentence as the following, are there many who would detect

the cheat? "I like the silent church, before the service begins,

better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the

persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary; so let us

always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or

father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to

have the same blood?"

But Emerson is too original a mind to be either a Montaigne or a Sir

Thomas Brown. He lives, too, in quite another age, and moves in a

higher region of philosophy than either of them. The utmost that can

be said is, that he is of the same class of independent, original

thinkers, somewhat wayward and fitful, who present no system, or none

that is distinctly and logically set forth, but cast before us many

isolated truths expressed in vivid, spontaneous eloquence.

This class of writers may be described as one whose members, though

not deficient in the love of _truth_, are still more conspicuous for

their love of _thought_. They crave intellectual excitement; they have

a genuine, inexhaustible ardour of reflection. They are not writers of

systems, for patience would fail them to traverse the more arid parts

of their subject, or those where they have nothing new, nothing of

their _own_, to put forth. The task of sifting and arranging materials

that have passed a thousand times through the hands of others, does

not accord with their temperament. Neither are they fond of retracing

their own steps, and renewing, from the same starting-place, the same

inquiry. They are off to fresh pastures. They care not to be ruffling

the leaves of the old manuscript, revising, qualifying, expunging.

They would rather brave all sorts of contradictions and _go on_,

satisfied that to an ingenuous reader their thoughts will ultimately

wear a true and faithful aspect. They will not be hampered by their

own utterances more than by other men's--"If you would be a man," says

Emerson, "speak what you think to-day in words as hard as

cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words

again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day." These

headstrong sages, full of noble caprice, of lofty humours, often pour

forth in their wild profusion a strange mixture of great truths and

petty conceits--noble principles and paradoxes no better than

conundrums. As we have said, they are lovers pre-eminently of thought.

Full of the chase, they will sometimes run down the most paltry game

with unmitigated ardour. Such writers are not so wise as their best

wisdom, nor so foolish as their folly. When certain of the ancient

sages who were in the habit of guessing boldly at the open riddle of

nature, made, amidst twenty absurd conjectures, one that has proved to

be correct, we do not therefore give them the credit of a scientific

discovery. One of these wise men of antiquity said that the sea was a

great fish; he asserted also that the moon was an opaque body, and

considerably larger than she appears to be. He was right about the

moon; he was wrong about the fish; but as he speculated on both

subjects in the same hap-hazard style, we give him very little more

credit in the one case than the other. Perhaps his theory which

transformed the sea into a fish, was that on which he prided himself

most. Something of the same kind, though very different in degree,

takes place in our judgment upon certain moral speculators. When a man

of exuberant thought utters in the fervour or the fever of his mind

what _comes first_, his fragments of wisdom seem as little to belong

to him as his fragments of folly. The reader picks up, and carries

off, what best pleases him, as if there were no owner there, as if it

were treasure-trove, and he was entitled to it as first finder. He

foregoes the accustomed habit of connecting his writer with the

assemblage of thoughts presented to him, as their sole proprietor for

the time being: "he cries halves," as Charles Lamb has said on some

similar occasion, in whatever he pounces on.

The task of the critic on a writer of this class, becomes more than

usually ungracious and irksome. He meets with a work abounding with

traits of genius, and conspicuous also for its faults and

imperfections. As a reader only, he gives himself up to the pleasure

which the former of these inspire. Why should he disturb that pleasure

by counting up the blemishes and errors? He sees, but passes rapidly

over them; on the nobler passages he dwells, and to them alone he

returns. But, as critic, he cannot resign himself entirely to this

mood; or rather, after having resigned himself to it, after having

enjoyed that only true perusal of a book in which we forget all but

the truth we can extract from it, he must rouse himself to another and

very different act of attention; he must note defects and blemishes,

and caution against errors, and qualify his admiration by a recurrence

to those very portions of the work which he before purposely hurried

over.

We take up such a book as these Essays of Emerson. We are charmed with

many delightful passages of racy eloquence, of original thought, of

profound or of _naive_ reflection. What if there are barren pages?

What if sometimes there is a thick entangled underwood through which

there is no penetrating? We are patient. We can endure the one, and

for the other obstacle, in military phrase, we can _turn_ it. The page

is moveable. We are not bound, like the boa-constrictor, to swallow

all or none. Meanwhile, in all conscience, there is sufficient for one

feast. There is excellence enough to occupy one's utmost attention;

there is beauty to be carried away, and truth to be appropriated. What

more, from a single book, can any one reasonably desire? But if the

task of criticism be imposed upon us, we must, nevertheless, sacrifice

this easy and complacent mood,--this merely receptive disposition; we

must re-examine; we must cavil and object; we must question of

obscurity why it should stand there darkening the road; we must refuse

admittance to mere paradox; we must expose the trifling conceit or

fanciful analogy that would erect itself into high places, and assume

the air of novel and profound truth.

Some portion of this less agreeable duty we will at once perform, that

we may afterwards the more freely and heartily devote ourselves to the

more pleasant task of calling attention to the works of a man of

genius,--for we suspect that Emerson is not known in this country as

he deserves to be. With some who have heard his name coupled with that

of Carlyle, he passes for a sort of echo or double of the English

writer. A more independent and original thinker can nowhere in this

age be found. This praise must, at all events, be awarded him. And

even in America--which has not the reputation of generally

overlooking, or underrating, the merits of her own children--we

understand that the reputation of Emerson is by no means what it ought

to be; and many critics there who are dissatisfied with merely

imitative talent, and demand a man of genius _of their own_, are not

aware that he stands there amongst them.

When we accuse Mr Emerson of obscurity, it is not obscurity of style

that we mean. His style often rises--as our readers have had already

opportunities of judging--into a vivid, terse, and graphic eloquence,

agreeably tinged at times with a poetic colouring; and although he

occasionally adopts certain inversions which are not customary in

modern prose, he never lays himself open to the charge of being

difficult or unintelligible. But there is an obscurity of thought--in

the very matter of his writings--produced first by a vein of mysticism

which runs throughout his works, and, secondly, by a manner he

sometimes has of sweeping together into one paragraph a number of

unsorted ideas, but scantily related to each other--bringing up his

drag-net with all manner of fish in it, and depositing it then and

there before us.

Mysticism is a word often so vaguely and rashly applied, that we feel

bound to explain the sense in which we use it. It is not because Mr

Emerson is an idealist in his philosophy--what we are in the habit in

the present day of describing as the German school of metaphysics,

though he does not appear to have drawn his tenets from the Germans,

and more frequently quotes the name of Plato than that of Kant or

Hegel--it is not for this we pronounce him to be a mystic. Berkeley

was no mystic. In support of this philosophy reasons may be adduced

which appeal to the faculties, and are open to the examination of all

men. We do not pronounce idealism to be mystical, but we pronounce him

to be a mystic who upholds this, or any other philosophy, upon grounds

of conviction not open to all rational men; whose convictions, in

short, rest upon some profound intuition, some deep and peculiar

source of knowledge, to which the great multitude of mankind are utter

strangers. A man shall be an idealist, and welcome; we can discuss the

matter with him, we can follow his reasonings, and if we cannot

sustain ourselves in that nicely-balanced aerial position he has

assumed, poised above the earth on a needle's point of faith, we can

at least apprehend how the more subtle metaphysician has contrived to

accomplish the feat. But the moment a man proclaims himself in the

possession of any truth whatever, by an intuition of which we, and

other men, find no traces in our own mind, then it is that we must, of

force, abandon him to the sole enjoyment of an illumination we do not

share, and which he cannot impart. We call him mystical, and he calls

us blind, or sense-beclouded. We assume that he pretends to see where

there is no vision, and no visual organ; he retorts that it is we, and

the gross vulgar who have lost, or never attained, the high faculty of

vision which he possesses. Whether it is Plato or Swedenborg, Pagan or

Christian, who lays claim to this occult and oracular wisdom, we must

proclaim it a delusion. It is in vain to tell us that these men may be

the _élite_ of humanity, that they are thus signally favoured because

they have more successfully cultivated their minds, both

intellectually and morally, and purified them for the reception of a

closer communion with the divine and all-sustaining and

interpenetrating Intelligence, than is vouchsafed to the rest of

mankind. We, who have nothing but our eyesight and our reason, we of

the multitude who are not thus favoured, can, at all events, learn

nothing _from them_. Whether above or beside human reason, they are

equally remote from intellectual communion. We do not recognise their

reason as reason, nor their truth as truth; and we call them mystics

to express this unapproachable nature of their minds, this hopeless

severance from intercommunion of thought, from even so much of contact

as is requisite for the hostilities of controversy. These wisest of

mankind are in the same predicament as the maddest of mankind; both

believe that they are the only perfectly sane, and that all the rest

of the world have lost their reason. The rest of the world hold the

opposite opinion, and we are not aware that in either case there is

any appeal but to the authority of numbers, to which, of course,

neither the lunatic nor the mystic will submit.

We have frequent intimations in Mr Emerson's writings of this high

intuitive source of truth. Take the following passage in the Essay on

Self-reliance:--

"And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains

unsaid, probably, cannot be said; for all that we say is the

far off remembering of the intuition. The thought by what I

can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is

near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any

known or appointed way; you shall not discern the

foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man;

you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good,

shall be wholly strange and new; it shall exclude all other

being. You take the way from man not to man. All persons

that ever existed are its fugitive ministers. There shall be

no fear in it. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks

nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. _We are then in

vision_. There is nothing that can be called gratitude,

nor, properly, joy. The soul is raised over passion. _It

seeth identity and eternal causation. It is a perceiving

that Truth and Right are._ Hence it becomes a tranquillity

out of the knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of

nature--the Atlantic Ocean--the South Sea--vast intervals of

time--years--centuries--are of no account. This, which I

think and feel, underlay that former state of life and

circumstances as it does underlie my present, and will

always all circumstance, and what is called life, and what

is called death."

Whenever a man begins by telling us that he cannot find language to

express his meaning, we may be pretty sure that he has no intelligible

meaning to express; and Mr Emerson, in the above passage, fully bears

out this general observation. "I cannot," he says in another place, "I

cannot, nor can any man, speak precisely of things so sublime, but it

seems to me, the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency,

his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond

explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the

only logician. Not exhortation, not argument, becomes our lips, but

pæans of joy and praise. But not of adulation: _we are too nearly

related in the deep of the mind to that we honour. It is God in us

which checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In the

bottom of the heart it is said 'I am, and by me, O child! this fair

body and world of thine stands and grows. I am: all things are mine:

and all mine are thine._'"

If we can gather any thing from this language, it must imply that the

individual mind is _conscious_ of being a part, an emanation of the

Divine mind--is conscious of this union or identity--the pretension to

which species of consciousness is, in our apprehension, pure

mysticism.

But we shall not weary our readers by seeking further proofs of this

charge of mysticism; for what can be more wearisome than to have a

number of unintelligible passages brought together from different and

remote parts of an author's works. We pass to that other cause of

obscurity we have hinted at,--the agglomerations of a multitude of

unrelated, or half-related, ideas. Sometimes a whole paragraph, and a

long one too, is made up of separate fragments of thought or fancy,

good or amusing, it may be, in themselves, but connected by the

slightest and most flimsy thread imaginable. Glittering insects and

flies of all sorts, caught and held together in a spider's web,

present as much appearance of unity as some of these paragraphs we

allude to.

For an example, we will turn to the first essay in the series, that on

History. It is, perhaps, the most striking of the whole, and one which

has a more distinct aim and purport than most of them, and yet the

reader is fairly bewildered at times by the incongruous assemblage of

thoughts presented to him. It is the drift of the essay to show, that

the varied and voluminous record of history is still but the

development and expansion of the individual being man, as he existed

yesterday, as he exists to-day. "A man," he says, "is the whole

encyclopædia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one

acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded

already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire,

republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit

to the manifold world." This idea is explained, illustrated,

amplified, and very often in a novel and ingenious manner. To

exemplify the necessity we feel to recognise _ourselves_ in the past,

he says,--"All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the

pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio circles, Mexico,

Memphis, is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous

There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. It is

to banish the _Not me_, and supply the _Me_. It is to abolish

difference and restore unity. Belzoni digs and measures in the

mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the

difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has

satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such

a person as himself, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he

himself, in given circumstances, should also have worked, the problem

is then solved, his thought lives along the whole line of temples and

sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all like a creative soul,

with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are _now_."

This is good, but by and by he begins to intercalate all sorts of

vagrant fantasies, as thus:--

"Civil history, _natural history_, the history of art, and the history

of literature,--all must be explained from individual history, or must

remain words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does

not interest us,--kingdom, college, _tree_, _horse_, or iron shoe, the

roots of all things are in man. It is in the soul that architecture

exists. Santa Croce and the dome of St Peter's are lame copies after a

divine model. Strasburg cathedral is a material counterpart of the

soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind, the true

ship is the ship-builder," and so forth. It would be waste of time and

words to ask how "tree and horse," in the same sense as kingdom and

college, can be said to have "their roots in man;" or whether, when it

is said that "Strasburg cathedral is the material counterpart of the

soul of Erwin of Steinbach," this can possibly mean anything else than

the undoubted fact, that the architect thought and designed before he

built.

This subject of architecture comes sadly in the way of the author, and

of the reader too, whom it succeeds in thoroughly mystifying. "The

Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable

demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an

eternal flower with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as the

aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty. _In like

manner_, all public facts are to be individualised, all private facts

are to be generalised. Then at once history becomes fluid and true,

and biography deep and sublime."

The fables of Pagan mythology next cross his path, and these lead to

another medley of thoughts. "These beautiful fables of the Greeks," he

says, "being proper creations of the imagination, and not of the

fancy, are universal verities." And well they may be, whether of the

fancy or the imagination (and the great distinction here marked out

between the two, we do not profess to comprehend), if each mind, in

every age, is at liberty to interpret them as it pleases, and with the

same unrestrained license that our author takes. But how can he find

here an instance of the _present man_ being written out in history,

when the old history or fable is perpetually to receive new

interpretations, as it is handed down from generation to

generation--interpretations which assuredly were never dreamt of by

the original inventor?

"Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. Every man is a

divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven

had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here

they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals

the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and

they mope and wallow like dogs." Whether witty or wise, such

interpretations have manifestly nothing to do with the fable as it

exists in history, as part of the history of the human mind.

"The transmigration of souls: that too is no fable; I would it were.

But men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard,

the field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are

under the earth, has contrived to get a footing, and to leave the

print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright,

heaven-facing speakers." Very good; only, if poets and wits are to set

themselves to the task, we should like to know what fable there is in

the world, whether the product of imagination or fancy, which might

not be shown to abound in eternal verities.

Travelling on a little farther, we meet with the following paragraph,

some parts of which are to be made intelligible by putting ourselves

in the point of view of the idealistic philosopher; but the whole

together, by reason of the incongruity of its parts, produces no other

effect than that of mere and painful bewilderment,--

"A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose

flower and fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer to

natures out of him. All his faculties predict the world he

is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water

exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose a

medium like air. Insulate and you destroy him. He cannot

live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let

his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no

stake to play for, and he would beat the air and appear

stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense population,

complex interests and antagonist power, and you shall see

that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a profile

and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but

Talbot's shadow;

"His substance is not here:

For what you see is but the smallest part,

And least proportion of humanity;

But were the whole frame here,

It is of such a spacious lofty pitch,

Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and

Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-strewn celestial

areas. One may say, a gravitating solar system is already

prophesied in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the

brain of Davy and Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring

always the affinities and repulsions of particles,

anticipate the laws of organisation. Does not the eye of the

human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict

the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive

fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, and Arkwright, predict

the fusible, hard, and temperable texture of metals, the

properties of stone, water, and wood? the lovely attributes

of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations

of civil society? Here, also, we are reminded of the action

of man on man. A mind might ponder its thoughts for ages,

and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love

shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has

been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard

an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in

a national exultation and alarm? No man can antedate his

experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object

shall unlock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a

person whom he shall see to-morrow for the first time."

And the essay concludes by presenting its leading idea in this

distorted and exaggerated shape:--

"Thus, in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce

its treasures for each pupil, each new-born man. He, too,

shall pass through the whole cycle of experience. He shall

collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no longer

shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just

and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles

a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me

feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple

of Fame. He shall walk as the poets have described that

goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events

and experiences;--his own form and features by that exalted

intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in

him the Foreworld; in his childhood the age of gold; the

apples of knowledge; the Argonautic expedition; the calling

of Abraham; the building of the temple; the advent of

Christ; dark ages; the revival of letters; the Reformation;

the discovery of new lands, the opening of new sciences, and

new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring

with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning

stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth."

We regret to say that instances of this painful obscurity, of this

outrageous and fantastical style of writing, it would not be difficult

to multiply, were it either necessary or desirable. We have quoted

sufficient to justify even harsher terms of censure than we have

chosen to deal in; sufficient to warn our readers who may be induced,

from the favourable quotations we have made, and shall continue to

make, to turn to the works of this author, that it is not all gold

they will find there, that the sun does not always shine upon his

page, that a great proportion of his writings may be little suited to

their taste.

That which forms the great and inextinguishable charm of those

writings is the fine moral temper they display, the noble ardour, the

high ethical tone they every where manifest and sustain, and

especially that lofty independence of his intellect, that freedom of

his reason which the man who aspires after true cultivation should

watch over and preserve with the utmost jealousy. Addressing the

Divinity students of Cambridge, U. S., he says,--

"Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse

the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination

of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

Friends enough you will find, who will hold up to your

emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, saints and prophets. Thank

God for these good men, but say, 'I also am a man.'

Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms

himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because

it was natural to him; and so in him it has a charm. In the

imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself

of his own beauty, to come short of another man's....

"Let us not aim at common degrees of merit. Can we not leave

to such as love it the virtue that glitters for the

commendation of society, and ourselves pierce the deep

solitudes of absolute ability and worth? We easily come up

to the standard of goodness in society. Society's praise can

be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with

those easy merits; but the instant effect of conversing with

God, will be to put them away. There are sublime merits;

persons who are not actors, not, speakers, but influences;

persons too great for fame, for display; who disdain

eloquence; to whom all we call art and artist seems too

nearly allied to show and by-ends, to the exaggeration of

the finite and selfish, and loss of the universal. The

orators, the poets, the commanders, encroach on us only, as

fair women do, by our allowance and homage. Slight them by

preoccupation of mind,--slight them, as you can well afford

to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel

that you have right, and that it is in lower places that

they must shine. They also feel your right; for they, with

you, are open to the influx of the all-knowing spirit, which

annihilates before its broad noon the little shades and

gradations of intelligence in the compositions we call wiser

and wisest.

"In such high communion, let us study the grand strokes of

rectitude: a bold benevolence, an independence of friends,

so that not the unjust wishes of those who love us shall

impair our freedom; but we shall resist, for truth's sake,

the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in

advance. And, what is the highest form in which we know this

beautiful element?--a certain solidity of merit that has

nothing to do with opinion, and which is so essentially and

manifestly virtue, that it is taken for granted that the

right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and

nobody thinks of commending it. You would compliment a

coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in

the world, is the highest applause."

Nothing but the necessity to husband our space prevents us from

quoting other passages of the same noble strain.

There is an Essay _on Love_ which has highly pleased us, and from

which we wish to make some extracts. To a man of genius the old

subjects are always new. The romance and enthusiasm of the passion is

here quite freshly and vividly portrayed, while the great moral end of

that charming exaggeration which every lover makes of the beauty and

excellence of his mistress, is finely pointed out. There is both

poetry and philosophy in the essay--as our readers shall judge for

themselves from the following extracts. We do not always mark the

omissions we make for the sake of economy of space, nor always cite

the passages in the order they appear in the essay.

"What fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like

any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps

we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again.

But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion,

and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take

the warmest interest in the development of the romance. _All

mankind love a lover_. The earliest demonstrations of

complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures.

It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and

rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the

school-house door;--but to-day he comes running into the

entry, and meets one fair child arranging her satchel: he

holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him

as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a

sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely

enough, but one alone distances him; and these two little

neighbours that were so close just now, have learned to

respect each other's personality."

As is ever the case when men describe what is, or might be an

exquisite happiness, there steals a melancholy over the description;

and our author makes it a primary condition,

"That we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to

the actual, to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared

in _hope_, and not in _history_. Let any man go back to

those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life,

which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment,

he will shrink, and shrink. Alas! I know not why, but

infinite compunctions imbitter in mature life all the

remembrances of budding sentiment, and cover every beloved

name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the

intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, as seen from

experience. It is strange how painful is the actual

world,--the painful kingdom of time and space. There dwell

care, canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is

immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses

sing. But with names and persons and the partial interests

of to-day and yesterday, is grief.

"But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man

ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and

brain which created all things new; which was the dawn in

him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature

radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied

enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the

heart beat, and the most trivial circumstance associated

with one form, is put in the amber of memory; _when we

became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one

was gone;_ when the youth becomes a watcher of windows, and

studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a

carriage; when no place is too solitary, and none too silent

for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in

his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best and

purest, can give him; when all business seemed an

impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro

in the streets, mere pictures.

"For, though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven,

seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty,

overpowering all analysis or comparison, and putting us

quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty

years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all

other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest

brows."

And on this matter of beauty how ingenious and full of feeling are the

following reflections!--

"Wonderful is its charm. It seems sufficient to itself. The

lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and

solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding,

informing loveliness, is society for itself, _and she

teaches his eye why Beauty was ever painted with Loves and

Graces attending her steps_. Her existence makes the world

rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his

attention as cheap and unworthy, yet she indemnifies him by

carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal; so that

the maiden stands to him for a representation of all select

things and virtues. _For that reason the lover sees never

personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to

others._ His friends find in her a likeness to her mother,

or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. _The lover

sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond

mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds._

"Beauty is ever that divine thing the ancients esteemed it.

It is, they said, the flowering of virtue. Who can analyse

the nameless charm which glances from one and another face

and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and

complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion,

this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the

imagination by any attempt to refer it to organisation. Nor

does it point to any relations of friendship or love that

society knows or has, but, as it seems to me, to a quite

other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent

delicacy and sweetness, a true faerie land; to what roses

and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot get at beauty. Its

nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and

evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things,

which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts

at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter

signify, when he said to music, 'Away! away! thou speakest

to me of things which in all my endless life I have found

not, and shall not find.' The same fact may be observed in

every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then

beautiful, when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is

passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by

compass and measuring wand, but demands an active

imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act

of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always

represented in a transition _from_ that which is

representable to the senses, _to_ that which is not. Then

first it ceases to be a stone.

"So must it be with personal beauty which love worships.

Then first is it charming and itself when it dissatisfies us

with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when

it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly

satisfactions; when it seems

'Too bright and good

For human nature's daily food;'

when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he

cannot feel his right to it, though he were Cæsar; he cannot

feel more right to it, than to the firmament and the

splendours of a sunset."

But this dream of love is but one scene in the play; and our author

concludes his essay by pointing out what is, or should be, the

denouement of the drama.

"Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation

and combination of all possible positions of the parties to

extort all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the

whole strength and weakness of the other. For, it is the

nature and end of this relation, that they should represent

the human race to each other.

"At last they discover that all which at first drew them

together,--those once sacred features, that magical play of

charms, was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the

scaffolding by which the house was built; and the

purification of the intellect and the heart, from year to

year, is the real marriage foreseen and prepared from the

first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at

these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so

variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house

to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do

not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies

this crisis from early infancy,--at the profuse beauty with

which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and

intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the

melody they bring to the epithalamium. Thus are we put in

training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor

partiality, but which seeketh virtue and wisdom every where,

to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom."

If there is some of the _ideal_ in this account given of love and

matrimony, there is, nevertheless, a noble truth in it. And surely in

proportion as the sentiment of love is refitted and spiritualised, so

also ought the moral culture, to which it is subservient, to be pure

and elevated.

The longest essay in the collection, and that which approaches nearest

to the more formidable character of a treatise, is that entitled

"Nature." This exhibits, so to speak, the practical point of view of

an idealist. The idealist has denied the substantial, independent

existence of the material world, but he does not deny the existence of

a phenomenal world. The Divine Nature reveals itself in the twofold

form of finite mind and this phenomenal world. Thus, we believe, we

may express the general creed of these philosophers, though it is a

very delicate matter to act as interpreter to this class of thinkers:

they are rarely satisfied with any expressions of their own, and are

not likely to be contented with those of any other person. This

phenomenal world has for its final cause the development and education

of the finite mind. It follows, therefore, that all which a realist

could say of the utility of nature can be advanced also by the

idealist. He has his practical point of view, and can discourse, as Mr

Emerson does here, on the various "uses" of nature which, he says,

"admit of being thrown into the following classes:--commodity, beauty,

language, and discipline."

We have not the least intention of proceeding further with an analysis

of this essay; as we have already intimated, the value of Mr Emerson's

writings appears to us to consist in the beauty and truthfulness of

individual passages, not at all in his system, or any prolonged train

of reasoning he may adopt. It is impossible to read this production

without being delighted and arrested by a number of these individual

passages sparkling with thought or fancy; it would be equally

impossible to gather from it, as a whole, any thing satisfactory or

complete.

On the beauty of nature he is always eloquent; he is evidently one who

intensely feels it. "Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and

the stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows." The shows of

heaven and earth are with him a portion of daily life. "In the woods

is perpetual youth." "We talk," he says in another place, "with

accomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud,

the tree, the turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the

world is only their lodging and table." No such stranger is our

poet-philosopher. "Crossing a bare common, in twilight, under a

clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special

good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to

think how glad I am."

The only quotation we shall make from the Essay on "Nature," shall be

one where he treats of this subject--

"A nobler want of man is served by nature,--namely, the love

of beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such

the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary form,

as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a

delight _in and for themselves_; a pleasure arising from

outline, colour, motion, and grouping. And as the eye is the

best composer, so light is the first of painters. _There is

no object so foul, that intense light will not make

beautiful._ And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a

sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, will

make all matter gay. But besides this general grace diffused

over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable

to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some

of them; as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the

wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the

lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames,

clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the

palm.

"The influence of the forms and actions in nature is so

needful to man that, in its lowest functions, it seems to

lie on the confines of Commodity and Beauty. To the body and

mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company,

nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman,

the attorney, comes out of the din and craft of the street,

and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their

eternal calm he finds himself. The health of the eye seems

to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as we can

see far enough.

"But in other hours nature satisfies the soul purely by its

loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I

have seen the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over

against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions

which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud

float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the

earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem

to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment

reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning

wind. How does nature deify us with a few and cheap

elements! _Give me health and a day, and I will make the

pomp of emperors ridiculous._ The dawn is my Assyria, the

sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of

faerie."

Mr Emerson has published a volume of poems, and it has been generally

admitted that he has not succeeded in verse. But there are touches of

charming poetry in his prose. This discrepancy, which is not

unfrequently met with, must result, we presume, from an inaptitude to

employ the forms of verse, so that the style, instead of being

invigorated, and polished, and concentrated by the necessary attention

to line and metre, becomes denaturalised, constrained, crude, and

unequal. We have looked through this volume of poems, but we should

certainly not be adding to the reputation of the author by drawing

attention to it. If we wished to find instances of the poetry of

Emerson, we should still seek for them in his prose essays. Thus he

says:--

"In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me

record, day by day, my honest thought, without prospect or retrospect,

and I cannot doubt it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not

and see it not. _The swallow over my window should interweave that

thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also._"

"Our moods," he says, "do not believe in each other. To-day I am full

of thoughts; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in

which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall

wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this

infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow!

_I am God in nature--I am a weed by the wall!_"

"A lady," he writes on another occasion, "with whom I was riding in

the forest, said to me that the woods always seemed to her _to wait_,

as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the

wayfarer has passed onward. This is precisely the thought which poetry

has celebrated in the dance of the fairies which breaks off on the

approach of human feet." The lady had a true poetic feeling. And the

following thought is illustrated by a very happy image.

"In man, we still trace the rudiments or hints of all that we esteem

badges of servitude in the lower races, yet in him they enhance his

nobleness and grace; as Io in Æschylus, transformed to a cow, offends

the imagination, but how changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Jove,

a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the

lunar horns, as the splendid ornament of her brows!"

In his philosophy, we have seen that Mr Emerson is an idealist,

something, too, of a pantheist. In theology, we have heard him

described as a Unitarian; but although the Unitarians of America

differ move widely from each other, and from the standard of

orthodoxy, than the same denomination of men in this country, we

presume there is no body of Unitarians with whom our philosopher would

fraternise, or who would receive him amongst their ranks. His

Christianity appears rather to be of that description which certain of

the Germans, one section of the Hegelians for instance, have found

reconcilable with their Pantheistic philosophy. It is well for him

that he writes in a tolerant age, that he did not make his appearance

a generation too soon; the pilgrim fathers would certainly have burnt

him at the stake; he would have died the death of Giordano Bruno. And

we believe--if the spirit of his writings be any test of the spirit of

the man--that he would have suffered as a martyr, rather than have

foregone the freedom and the truthfulness of his thought. His essays

are replete with passages such as this:--"God offers to every mind its

choice between truth and repose. Take which you please--you can never

have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates ever. He in

whom the love of repose predominates, will accept the first creed, the

first philosophy, the first political party he meets,--most likely his

father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the

door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates, will keep

himself aloof from all moorings and afloat. He will abstain from

dogmatism, and recognise all the opposite negations, between which, as

walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense

and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other

is not, and he respects the highest law of his being."

We gather from what little has reached us of his biography, that he

has in fact sacrificed somewhat of the commodity of this life, to this

"higher law of his being." In a work which has just fallen into our

hands, entitled "_The Prose Writers of America, with a Survey of the

Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the Country, by

Rufus Wilmot Griswold_," we find the following scanty account of

Emerson. "He is the son of a Unitarian clergyman of Boston, and in

1821, when about seventeen years of age, was graduated at Harvard

University. Having turned his attention to theology, he was ordained

minister of one of the congregations of his native city, but,

embracing soon after some peculiar views in regard to the forms of

worship, he abandoned his profession, and retiring to the quiet

village of Concord, after the manner of an Arabian prophet, gave

himself up to 'thinking,' preparatory to his appearance as a

revelator." Which meagre narrative, not very happily told, leads us to

infer that the recluse of Concord has lived up to the high spirit of

his own teaching.

It is remarkable that Mr Griswold, in the prefatory essay which he

entitles _The Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the

Country_, although he has introduced a host of writers of all grades,

some of whom will be heard of in England for the first time, never

once mentions the name of Emerson! Yet, up to this moment, America has

not given to the world any thing which, in point of original genius,

is comparable to his writings. That she has a thousand minds better

built up, whose more equal culture, and whose more sober opinions, one

might prefer to have,--this is not the question,--but in that highest

department of reflective genius, where the power is given to impart

new insights into truth, or make old truths look new, he stands

hitherto unrivalled in his country; he has no equal and no second.

Very popular he perhaps never may become; but we figure to ourselves

that, a century hence, he will be recognised as one of those old

favourite writers whom the more thoughtful spirits read, not so much

as teachers, but as noble-minded companions and friends, whose

aberrations have been long ago conceded and forgiven. Men will read

him then, not for his philosophy,--they will not care two straws for

his idealism or his pantheism: they will know that they are there, and

there they will leave them,--but they will read him for those genuine

confessions of one spirit to another, that are often breathed in his

writings; for those lofty sentiments to which all hearts respond; for

those truths which make their way through all systems, and in all

ages.