you

random any page from any of these, and will find something so broadly, pervasively, lastingly human, that generation after generation will read it on with no sense of the changing epochs which have passed since the man who spoke this word and the men for whom it was spoken have rested in immortal slumber. In the work of Emerson, whatever its final value, there is something of this note. Every other writer at whom we have glanced, and almost every other at whom we shall glance hereafter, demands for understanding that we revive our sympathy with the fading or faded conditions which surrounded his conscious life. At best these other works, vitally contemporaneous in their own days, grow more and more old-fashioned. Emerson, on the other hand, from beginning to end, seems constantly modern, with a contemporaneousness almost as perennial as that of Scripture itself. Though his work may lack something of true greatness, it surely seems alive with such unconditioned freedom of temper as makes great literature so inevitably lasting.

Take, for example, the first page at which a volume of his "Essays" chances to open, that where the verse is printed with which he prefaced his essay on "Spiritual Laws"

"The living Heaven thy prayers respect,

House at once and architect,
Quarrying man's rejected hours,
Builds there with eternal towers;

Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,

And, by famous might that lurks

In reaction and recoil,

Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil;

Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence."

What this means we may admit ourselves unable to understand; but with all due vexation or humility, we can hardly help feeling that here is not a word or even a lurking mood

which might not have emerged from eldest human time, or might not as well emerge from the most remote human future our imagination can conceive. In essence throughout, Emerson's work bids fair to disregard the passing of time; its spirit seems little more conditioned by the circumstances of nineteenth-century Concord or Boston than Homer's was by the old Ægean breezes.

In form, on the other hand, Emerson's work seems almost as certainly local. Broadly speaking, it falls into two classes, - essays and poems. The essays are generally composed of materials which he collected for purposes of lecturing. His astonishing lack of method is familiar; he would constantly make note of any idea which occurred to him; and when he wished to give a lecture, he would huddle together as many of these notes as should fill the assigned time, trusting with all the calm assurance of his unfaltering individualism that the truth inherent in the separate memoranda would give them all together the unity implied in the fact of their common sincerity. But though this bewildering lack of system for a moment disguise the true character of his essays, the fact that these essays were so often delivered as lectures should remind us of what they really are. The Yankee lecturers, of whom Emerson was the most eminent, were only half-secularised preachers, men who stood up and talked to ancestrally attentive audiences. And these eager hearers were disposed at once to respect the authority of their teachers, to be on the look-out for error, and to go home with a sense of edification. Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an obvious development from the endless sermons with which for generations his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers. In much the same way, Emerson's poems, for all their erratic oddity of form, prove on consideration to possess many qualities of temper for which an orthodox mind would have sought expression in hymns. They are designed not so much to set forth human emotion or to give æsthetic delight as to stimulate

moral or spiritual ardour. For all his individualism, Emerson could not help being a good old inbred Yankee preacher.

The orthodox clergy of New England, however, came, as truly as Paul himself, to preach Christ crucified. To say that preaching so various as Emerson's excludes anything, would be presumptuous. But certainly the impression produced by more than one examination of Emerson's writings goes far to warrant the assertion that the one thing which he ignored was the crucifixion. Christ as a philosopher he respected and reverenced; but Christ the Redeemer, who takes upon Himself the sins of the world, interested him no more than the Lord's Supper. So far as Christ was a prophet, a speaker of beautiful and noble truth, a living example of stainless life, Emerson could reverently bow before him; but when it came to considering Christ as more divine than other good men, this same Emerson found the act as far from reasonable as asserting one day's sunshine superior to that of another. The Christian Scriptures he thought on the whole nobler than even the Greek, and still more so than those more remote ones with which he overloaded some later numbers of the " Dial.” All alike, however, great and small, interested him merely as guides, neither more nor less authoritative than such other guides as experience or the inner light. Each and all he valued only so far as they might help mankind toward perception of the truth which he felt it his business to preach. business, he felt it, rather than his duty. That fact of "interest," for lack of which he discarded the most sacred of all Christian traditions, really went to the depths of his nature. What interested him he was prepared to set forth so long as the interest lasted; what did not interest him he was equally prepared serenely to neglect, no matter what anybody else thought about it. He had, however, the native grace never to relax his interest in what he conceived to be the deepest of all truths; namely, that beyond human ken there lie unfathomable, unseen, inexhaustible depths of reality. Into these depths

His

he was constantly seeking to pry as deeply as his human limitations would allow; and what he saw there he was constantly and eagerly interested to reveal. A Yankee preacher of unfettered idealism, one may call him; better still, its seer, its prophet.

Idealism, of course, is ancestrally familiar to any race of Puritan origin. That life is a fleeting manifestation of unfathomable realities which lie beyond it, that all we see and all we do and all we know are merely symbols of things unseen, unactable, unknowable, had been preached to New England from the beginning. But Emerson's idealism soared far above that of the Christian fathers. Their effort was constantly to reduce unseen eternities to a system as rigid as that which addressed their human senses; and this effort has so far succeeded that to-day those who call God by His name thereby almost clothe Him in flesh and blood, in Jovelike beard and flowing robes, turning Him once more, even though immortally, into a fresh symbol of the infinite divine. self which essentially transcends all limitation. To Emerson, on the other hand, the name of God, like the life of Christ, grouped itself with the little facts of every-day existence as simply one more phenomenal symbol of unspeakable, unfathomable, transcendental truth. There is for ever something beyond; you may call it God, you may call it Nature, you may call it Over-Soul; each name becomes a fresh limitation, a mere symbolic bit of this human language of ours. The essential thing is not what you call the everlasting eternities; it is that you shall never cease, simply and reverently, with constantly living interest, to recognise and to adore

them.

Now, in contrast with this infinite eternity of divine truth, no man, not even Christ himself, is free from the almost equally infinite limitations of earthly life. The essence of truth is that it comprehends and comprises all things, phenomena and ideals alike; and we men, great or small, our

selves on any eternal scale little more wonderful than are the leaves of grass which spring and wither in the field, can perceive at any moment only one aspect of this truth. Look at the moon; when it is full you shall see it as a silvery disk in the heavens; again it is shrunk to a sickle; and yet again you shall see no moon at all. By and by you learn a little of the secret law which reveals the same satellite first in one of its protean forms and then in another throughout the changing months of our fleeting human years. Gaze next into the infinities, whereof the system is so unspeakably further from simplicity than the motions of any moon or planets. At one moment you shall see them in one aspect, at the next in another, and so on till life and eternity shall merge. Nay, you shall have less true knowledge of them than if for a little while one should revisit the glimpses of the moon, and, seeing only a curved line dimly gleaming in sunset skies, should return to the shades with news that there is no moon left but a sinking new one.

Would you strive to reconcile one with another the glories. of eternity? strive, with your petty human powers, to prove them consistent things?

Why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself: what then? . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you have said to-day. . . . Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

In Emerson's calm impatience of philosophic system there is a fresh touch of that unhesitating assurance with which he brushed aside the most sacred of Christian institutions, when