On my return, I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithdale, in the parish of Dumscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, selfpossessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor, which floated everything he looked upon.

If Emerson writes comparatively little in the descriptive and narrative veins, it is neither from impotence nor by chance but on consideration. "Do you see," he asks himself, "what we preserve of history? a few anecdotes of a moral quality of some momentary act or word." The word of Canute on the sea-shore, he observes, is all the world remembers of the Danish conquest. Under the influence of this thought, he seems, for a time, to have meditated composing "a modern Plutarch," British and American, in which his "Thoreau" would well have taken the place of Cato, and his "Lincoln" a place of its own. His "Representative Men" was a partial fulfilment of the design. But quite early in life Emerson was much occupied by a rival thought, thus recorded in the fourth volume of the Journals: "I said to Bryant and to these young people, that the high poetry of the world from the beginning has been ethical, and it is the tendency of the ripe modern mind to produce it. . . . As I think, no man could be better occupied than in making up his own bible by hearkening to all those sentences which now here, now there, now in nursery rhymes, now in Hebrew, now in English bards, thrill him like the sound of a trumpet." In fulfilment of that design Emerson wrote his great essays.

To many a lonely student, obscure and friendless, meditating in the long cold spring and adolescence of his talent on his untried powers, Emerson has come as with the sound of a magical trumpet, shattering the dungeons of fear, send

ing the young knight on his quest inwardly fortified and resolute to give soul and body to that undertaking, whatever it be, for which he was sent into the world. Such is the primary function of the religious and democratic ethos with which he sought to impregnate American letters. He, too, had been lonely, obscure, uncertain of his way, feeble, and prone to husband his strength and his gifts. But when he found which way the planets are going and the well where the gods drink, he faltered no longer. "What a discovery I made one day, that the more I spent the more I grew, that it was as easy to occupy a large place and do much work as an obscure place to do little; and that in the winter in which I communicated all my results to classes, I was full of new thoughts." To this, let us add that other thought, so precious to him that it appears repeatedly in various forms in the Journals and in the Essays: "If a man knows the law, he may settle himself in a shanty in a pine forest, and men will and must find their way to him as readily as if he lived in the City Hall." We shall keep near the main stream of the Emersonian virtue, if we close with a variation and enlargement of the same theme: "Penetrate to the bottom of the fact which draws you, although no newspaper, no poet, no man, has ever yet found life and beauty in that region, and presently when men are whispered by the gods to go and hunt in that direction, they shall find that they cannot get to the point which they would reach without passing over that highway which you have built. Your hermit's lodge shall be the Holy City and the Fair of the whole world."

ESSAYS OF EMERSON

I

NATURE

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

INTRODUCTION

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order

1

of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses; in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.