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again, read a little further, until flashes of light shone through the mist. He borrowed the book, took it home, and read still further; then bought a copy, and set about the serious perusal of it. He found it no light labor. He had thought that he was well up in the vocabulary and grammar of the English tongue; but he here found himself much at fault. He says that he was continuously embarrassed by the use of words new to him, or used in new meanings; by the extraordinary construction of the sentences; by the apparent absence of logical continuity, and the unexpected turns of thought, which met him everywhere. He was obliged to blast his way through the Essays by the aid of the dictionary.

We, to whom the language of Emerson is vernacular, can not well understand the kind of difficulty which the German found in comprehending him. Rarely do we find a word whose usual meaning we do not know, or which is used in an unusual sense. The sentences themselves are usually constructed in the simplest and most direct manner, going straight on from beginning to end, with rarely any involution or parenthetical clause. If the ordinary English reader finds any difficulty in getting at the meaning, it arises from the nature of the thought, not from the phrases in which it is expressed. The obscurity rests rather in the reader than in the writer. Grimm, having at last mastered the meaning of

Emerson, wrote an elaborate essay upon him, which was published in 1861, and republished a dozen years later, with additions and confirmations. He had, in the mean time, read and reread the book; and now he says, "Every time I take it up, I seem to take it up for the first time." He continues thus:

GRIMM UPON EMERSON.

"As I read, all seems old and familiar, as if it was my old well-worn thought; all seems new, as if it had never occurred to me before. I found myself depending on the book, and was provoked with myself for it. How could I be so captured and enthralled, so fascinated and bewildered? The writer was but a man like any other; yet, upon taking up the volume again, the spell was renewed. I felt the pure air-the old weather-beaten motives recovered their tone. . . . Emerson regards the world with a fresh vision. The thing done or occurring before him opens the way to serene heights. The living have precedence of the dead; even the living of to-day of the Greeks of yesterday, nobly as the latter molded, chiseled, sang. For me was the breath of life; for me the rapture of spring; for me love and desire; for me the secret of wisdom and power.

"Emerson fills me with courage and confidence. He has read and observed, but he betrays no signs of toil. He presents familiar facts, but he presents them in new lights and combinations. From every object the lines of light run straight out, connecting it with the central point of life. What I had hardly dared to think-it was so bold-he brings forth as quietly as if it was the most

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familiar commonplace. He is a perfect swimmer on the ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure that calm will follow it. He does not hate, contradict, or dispute; for he understands men and loves them. I look on with wonder to see how the hurly-burly of modern life subsides, and the elements gently betake themselves to their allotted places. Had I found but a single passage in his writings that was an exception to this rule, I should begin to suspect my judgment, and should say no further word. But long acquaintance confirms my opinion. As I think of this man, I have understood the devotion of his pupils, who would share any fate with their master, because his genius banished doubt, and imparted life to all things."

Something like this has been the experience of nearly all of that slowly expanding but now wide circle who look up to Emerson as a master and guide. Few of them have come so to regard him from their own immediate intuition or perception. Most of them have read and studied him, because some one in whose judgment they had learned to confide had assured them that he was worth the reading or study. They have gradually grown up to Emerson, but have not outgrown him any more than they have outgrown the bards and prophets of the Old Testament or the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament; Homer, and Eschylus, and Plato; Dante, and Shakespeare, and Milton. It is not well to speak with perfect confidence of the place which any man of our own age will hold in the judgment of

after-ages. Yet we think that it will be long before the works of Emerson will die out from the record of human thought. Books of his, a thousand years hence, will stand on the same shelf with those of Plato, even though the English language, like the Greek, should have become what we foolishly call a dead tongue. We propose, in such brief space as is allotted to us, to present some estimate of the man and of his works.

II.

EARLY DAYS.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 25, 1803. He sprang on both sides from clerical stock. For eight generations there had been no time when one or more of his forefathers, on the paternal or maternal side, was not a minister of the gospel. Joseph Emerson was pastor at Malden a century and a half ago. His son, William, died as chaplain in the army of the Revolution. His son, likewise named William, graduated at Harvard in 1789, and ten years after became pastor of the First (Unitarian) Church in Boston. He was a noted pulpit orator, and several of his sermons were printed. He put

forth a "Selection of Psalms and Hymns," and wrote a "History of the First Church of Boston," which was published soon after his death. He died in 1811, in the forty-second year of his age, leaving a widow, a daughter, and four sons, of whom Ralph was the second.

It is worth while to trace something of the ancestral type, which was strongly impressed upon each of these four brothers. William, the eldest, graduated at Harvard in 1820, and soon after established a flourishing school for girls in Boston. Of him we are told that "although lacking the genius of the others, he was a natural idealist, a man whom it was a privilege to know."

Edward, the third brother, gave early promise of the rarest qualities. In 1832 he sailed for Porto Rico, where he died not long after. While the ship was sailing out of Boston Harbor, he wrote a tender farewell poem, which was published after his death in "The Dial," of which Ralph Waldo Emerson was then editor. Emerson gives this farewell a place in his own latest volume of poems, adding thereto some memorial verses to this "brother of the brief but blazing star; born for the noblest life; the loving champion of the right; who never wronged the poorest that drew breath." This memorial poem is among the best of its kind in our language, and is so characteristic of the author that portions of it may here find fitting place:

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