pits, but he gradually abandoned the church for the lyceum, which invited him as far west as Wisconsin and Illinois. He made a second visit to England in 1848. He was an active participant in the anti-slavery movement. But, for the most part, barring his winter lecturing tours and an occasional excursion to deliver a commencement address or a Phi Beta Kappa oration, he lived placidly in Concord, reading, meditating, writing, editing the short-lived Transcendental Dial, looking amusedly askance upon the Brook Farm experiment, and walking and talking with his famous fellow-villagers, the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau.

What ferment of radical thought went on beneath the decorous exterior of that quiet scholar's life we know with remarkable fullness and accuracy. From early boyhood Emerson kept a journal-a habit, in his case, denoting a mind disposed to make unusual exactions of the "hypocritic Days." At first, he is much occupied with what he has read or proposes to read; but presently his note-book becomes a kind of storehouse for mellowing the fruits of his daily meditations, and an experimental garden for planting the seeds of new thoughts gathered on his intellectual adventures. The Journals, now published in twelve volumes, give us an invaluable commentary upon the long-familiar essays, and they enrich greatly our sense of the personality behind them. Especially they illuminate the turning point in Emerson's life, when he abandoned the pulpit and became a wholly free thinker and speaker. With their help, one perceives that for years before the open break, the inner emancipation had been proceeding. One observes the young thinker expanding beyond the formulas of his parish, reaching out towards the life of his nation, feeling his way into the higher spirit of his times, daily becoming more eager to exchange messages and compare visions with the leaders of his generation.

It is a vulgar error of our day to think of Emerson and his friends as living in a rude and mentally poverty-stricken era. In his formative period, say from 1820 to 1832, society around the Golden Gate and along the southern

margin of Lake Michigan was indeed in a somewhat more primitive state than at present. But in compensation, such civilized society as the country possessed was concentrated in a smaller geographical area. To reside in Boston or New York was not then, as now, to live on the rim but at the center of population, within reach of the molding pressure of all the great Americans of one's time. The "moment," furthermore, was peculiarly rich in the presence of eminent men who had been shaped by the Revolution, and in the presence of men who were to become eminent in the movement which led to the Civil War. To a young man of Emerson's quality, the period of the Adamses, Jefferson, Randolph, and Jackson, the period of Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Everett, and Garrison, was not a dull period, not a dead interval, but a most stirring and exciting time between two epoch-making crises, with the thunder of a political Niagara at one's back, and the roar of wild rapids ahead. The air was full of promise and of peril and of conflicting measures for avoiding the one and fulfilling the other.

Politically-minded men, the Jacksons, the Clays, the Calhouns, brought to the problems of the hour political solutions. But the more sensitive spirits among the younger generation in New England had already experienced a certain reaction against the political faith and enthusiasms of their fathers. Already they heard the ominous creaking of democratic machinery under the manipulation of unskilful and unscrupulous hands. To them it began to appear that the next great improvement in the condition of society must depend less upon the alteration of laws and institutions than upon the intellectual and moral regeneration of men. The new movement was genuinely Puritan by its inwardness, by its earnest passion for cleansing the inside of the cup, and by its protest against external powers which thwarted or retarded the efforts of the individual soul to move forward and upward by light from within. Looking back in 1844 over the multifarious projects for "the salvation of the world" unfolded by reformers in his part of the country, Emerson remarks: "There was in all the practical activities of New England, for the last quarter of a century, a grad

ual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organization. There is observable throughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts."

Those who place their reliance on spiritual facts have always been thought a little queer and rather dangerous by those who do not. Nor can it be denied that the radical protestantism of the Puritans, which Emerson inherited, has contained from the time of Wycliff an anarchical germ, a latent suspicion of church and state, a tendency towards "coming out," till one shall stand alone in utter freedom and count for one and nothing more. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the individualism which characterized the movement in New England. For Emerson above all, the very rapture of the time rose from its challenge to a perfectly independent, a perfectly fearless, scrutiny and testing of received values in every field — religion, philosophy, morals, politics, literature and art.

Emerson was preserved from the fanaticism of a secession from "the social organization" partly by his culture. A moral reformation which undertakes to investigate the bases of morals will develop and transform itself into an intellectual renascence as soon as those who are conducting it perceive that everything in heaven and earth has a bearing on moral questions. Emerson discovered early that the first step towards thinking greatly and freely on moral matters is to consult the world's accumulated wisdom. Hasty writers speak of his "jaunty" attitude towards the past. If he is jaunty about the past, it is because he is very familiar with it. What impresses the thoughtful student of his journals is his steady effort to hold himself and his contemporaries under the searching cross-lights of human experience. He reads Plato, Cicero, Hafiz, Confucius, Buddha, Mahomet, Dante, Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Napoleon, Coleridge, Carlyle, because that, he finds, is the effective way to set his own intelligence free, and because freedom, he finds, means ability to move at ease and as an equal among such minds as these.

But Emerson was also preserved from excessive individualism by a passion which, properly elevated and directed, may be a young man's guardian angel, the passion of ambition. "All young persons," he observes, "thirst for a real existence for a real object,- for something great and good which they shall do with their heart. Meanwhile they all pack gloves, or keep books, or travel, or draw indentures, or cajole old women.' By habitual imaginative association with great men, he had assimilated their thoughts and virtues, and had accustomed himself to look forward with an almost Miltonic assurance to playing a part above the ordinary in the life of his country. At the age of twentyone he is sketching a series of papers on the improvement of the nation. He thinks the demand for a moral education the best sign of the times, and deems the exploration of the field a task fit for a new Columbus. He queries whether it were not an "heroic adventure" for him to "insist on being a popular speaker." And with perceptible elation at the prospect he concludes: "To address a great nation risen from the dust and sitting in absolute judgment on the merits of men, ready to hear if any one offers good counsel, may rouse the ambition and exercise the judgment of a man.'

II

There is some disposition at present to look upon Emerson's ambition as extravagant and to regard his work as a closed chapter in the intellectual life of America. It is even asserted that he never much affected the thinking of his countrymen. Says a recent writer, "What one notices about him chiefly is his lack of influence upon the main stream of American thought, such as it is. He had admirers and even worshippers, but no apprentices." But this judgment will not stand examination. Emerson had Thoreau for an apprentice; and between them they established relations with the natural world, which successive poet-naturalists have maintained and broadened to the dimensions of a national tradition. He had Whitman for a disciple; and a large part of what passes with us as poetry today is ulti

mately traceable to their inspiration. He left the imprint of his spirit upon Lowell, who said, "There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses." Whatever is finely academic, highbred, and distinguished in our critical literature today has felt the influence of Emerson. "To him," according to Lowell, "more than to all other causes together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives." By his aid innumerable clergymen have found a way to translate the message of ancient scriptures into the language of modern men. Every American who pretends to know anything whatever of the American classics has at one time or another read the "Essays"; and the "idealism" which is thought to be characteristic of the American people is most, readily formulated in a half dozen of his "familiar quotations," which every one knows, whether he has read a line of Emerson or not. Directly and indirectly Emerson probably did as much as any other writer in our history to establish what we mean by "a good American"; and that, in the long run, is the most important sort of influence that can be exerted by any writer in any country.

That his influence abroad has been considerable may be briefly suggested by the reminder that he touched deeply such various men as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Nietzsche, and M. Maeterlinck. When Arnold visited America in 1883, he lectured on Emerson, on whom thirty years earlier he had written a sonnet of ardent admiration and homage. The lecture, the fruit of his ripest critical reflection, was not altogether satisfactory to his American audience. It impressed them as quite inadequately appreciative of their chief literary luminary. For Arnold very firmly declared that Emerson is not to be ranked with the great poets, nor with the great writers of prose, nor with the great makers of philosophical systems. These limitations of Emerson's power are commonly quoted as if detraction were the main burden of Arnold's message. As a matter of fact they are preliminary to his deliberate and remarkable declaration