WHO does not remember the day in his youth when the page of Emerson was opened to him! It should have been a morning in his sixteenth year, on his first visit to New England, in the crisp autumn with a touch of frost in the air. The ques tions that rise in the mind of the boy have been in ferment: his early sense of life, fate, the eternal issues, are vaguely astir. Coming into the room of a friend at school he finds the book lying on the table, idly opens it, and his eye falls on the line "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string." His own heart strings tighten; he turns back to the first page and finds the stern but tonic lines: 66 'Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat, The frosty, biting air of the book stirs him strongly. He reads on page after page, his pulse quickened to the strenuous Introduction |