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always symbolic of the inner. A poet by nature as well as a deep thinker, he is spontaneously alive to the beauty and order of the universe, yet always looks to analogies and correspondences between material and spiritual facts. An eager hunter after facts as the raw material of truths, yet a literal fact is of no importance standing by itself. It must be related to an intellectual or moral meaning. The universe is a symbol of the soul. Such is the theme of his first essay "Nature," the admirable overture to his later music, remarkable for the poetic beauty of its style no less than for its subtle thought, its masterly arrangement, sequence, and development of ideas. Yet he is no mystic in the ordinary sense. He must enter the great temple of the invisible and spiritual through the door of the visible.

Hence, he read every book, ancient and modern, which could help him to a knowledge of nature and man. He was indefatigable in pursuing facts that looked fertile in suggestion he would know all that science, history, and society could teach him. He not only dips into all sorts of books, and observes all that surrounds him, in nature and in human life he must see Europe, Egypt, California. He was greatly drawn to England. He has written an almost exhaustive book on English Traits. He studies the character of the British race from its root to its flower and seed. He sees the English virtues and vices side by side, or strangely mixed up, tracing them all from one ethnic origin. His praise and his blame rise and fall like a necessary systole and diastole pulsing through every chapter. He swings incense under the olfactories of these British with one hand, while in the other he holds a rod to chastise them. His criticism is like fate. The highest dignitaries and institutions of the realm are attacked on one side and defended on another. The lowest exhibitions of mob violence are held to be of the same genesis as the most chivalrous examples of nobility. Every witness is brought into court, the high and the low, the evil and the good, to testify; and the judge sums up the evidence impartially and without heat, for the consideration of a world-wide jury.

Thus, the old saying, "History is Philosophy teaching by example," finds continually new and original illustration in his writings. One of his most instructive books is his "Representative Men," opening with an essay on the uses of great men, and then taking up Plato, or the Phi-losopher; Swedenborg, or the Mystic; Montaigne, or the Sceptic; Shakspeare, or the Poet; Napoleon, or the Man of the World; and Goethe, or the Writer. Each chapter of this book is a masterpiece, for observation, for comprehensive grasp of his subject, for profound and subtle analysis, for expression of the predominant character and genius of each of his representative men, and for a rich, picturesque, and incomparable style.

I mention these two fascinating books in this connection, because they show his powers of observation and biographical knowledge united with those of the thinker, which we proceed to consider more fully.

But

It is through this perception of the intimate correspondence of the outward to the inward, of nature to the soul, of historical characters to the principles they illustrate, that Emerson is to us the profound philosopher or seer. he is the philosopher of no one special school. He belongs to no known sect of thinkers. He has no method but that of nature. He does not argue, but he affirms-out of an intuition which he assumes is or should be shared by all rational minds. He writes as the seer, as one standing on a hill only a little higher up, who beckons his friends to come up and see with him what cannot be seen in the dim and obstructed valleys. And so his writings are of the quality of the great scriptures of all times and peoples. And though he never drops into the fashion of the old Hebrew formula, "Thus saith the Lord," he never lets us doubt that he speaks with authority, because from a conviction he shares with the wisest of all time. He believes that you and I say the same thing he does, in our better and wiser moods.

If we were particularly desirous to classify him, we might

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call him the Affirmative philosopher,- that is, as opposed to the speculative, the tentative, the sceptical. He is far enough away from what is rather too much talked about and prescribed nowadays as the only solid ground and method of thought, I mean the scientific. And the purists of science can find very little in him to interest them. Let Prof. John Tyndall, however, stand as an exception, than whom probably few have a higher admiration of his genius. I sup• pose the metaphysicians also are rather disposed to let his books lie on their shelves. But can they afford to do so, unless so incorrigibly bent on evolving abstractions out of their interior consciousness that nature and history and the lessons of life beat up against their bleak and barren formulas as ineffectually as the sea beats on the rocks? The time, I think, must come, when broader methods, larger affirmation of instinctive and universal truths, comprehensive estimates of all the qualities of men, perceptive, æsthetic, intellectual, moral, social, imaginative, religious, will press in and demand recognition in the professors' closet and the students' class-room, as in the public places of life; and when the books of this teacher will shine with a light which philosophers and scientists of this time fail to notice.

If it is asked what new truths does Emerson tell us, it may be answered: the province of the thinker is to illustrate and emphasize old rather than reveal new truths; to speak the truth as he sees it out of his freshest and most interior thought; to settle things on their right foundations; to detach the true from the half-true; to build on the sure basis of undisputed ideas and principles, and so to keep on affirming, affirming, out of his deathless conviction and insight, that scepticism will fade out in the fulness of the light he turns upon all subjects of thought.

It is here that Emerson stands pre-eminent. His themes are by no means new. But take his writings from first to last, and there is not a single one of his essays that does not sparkle and glow with fresh statement and original illustration, commanding repeated perusal and consideration. New vistas are continually opened before us. See how old and

hackneyed are his themes,- Nature, Art, History, Spiritual Laws, Compensation, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, Poetry, Experience, Character, Manners, Politics, Farming, Domestic Life, and so on. There are no sensational titles. There is no rhetorical flourish, no struggle for effect. But every sentence reveals the keen observer, the ripe scholar, the original thinker, the master of language and style. Hardly a page but furnishes something strikingly quotable and memorable. His statements of ideas and principles are profounder and his illustrations of them more pertinent and picturesque than any writer of modern times, Carlyle excepted. But he has a calm depth which Carlyle only occasionally reaches. Other thinkers draw their circles of statement; but they are almost all included in his, although concentric. He touches no subject without opening new reaches of thought, or at least suggesting them. "The lesson of life," he tells us, "is practically to generalize: to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars, to penetrate to their catholic sense." "Things seem to say one thing, and say the reverse."

A broad, wholesome vein of common sense is everywhere apparent. His most original statements are supported by the experience of ages. No essayist draws more frequently on past histories and biographies, but every citation is made in the interests of some commanding principle. He is wonderfully clear-eyed and alert in his application of essential meanings to facts. He has also a delicate and quiet humor at times, which adds variety and grace. His originality bears out his own definition of the word,-"being one's self and reporting accurately what we see and are.”

Whatever subject he took up he treated from within outward. The structure and habit of his mind was such that he could not content himself with surfaces, but must penetrate to its central significance. Thus, he always leads his reader within door after door, till he has him seated in his private sanctum of thought, showing a princely hospitality which only the master and lord of himself has a right to

exercise, entertaining us with apt illustration of his theme, and so opening to our eyes the profoundest aspects of all that occupies his mind. In this deep interior sphere of thought, he rarely misses the right solution of things, his essay on the Comic being almost the only instance I remember where he fails to define with complete satisfaction.

But still it is true that some of his essays are much clearer, more continuous, keeping before the reader a more definite line of thought than others. The essay on Experience, for example, is a succession of subtile but rather evasive ideas; and the effect of the whole is vague. But take him at his best, as in that on Character which follows it, and the impression is one of wholeness and continuity that should satisfy the most superficial readers.

In a word, we might briefly define his intellectual superiority to be that he discerns as few philosophers have done the Duality that runs through the universe; touching with one hand the apparent, with the other the unapparent world, and delighting to find in the one a significant symbol of the other. His range is so wide that he swings easily from the most matter-of-fact things and events of the day to the very verge of mysticism, and seems as much at home in one extreme as in the other. Lowell calls him "a Greek head upon Yankee shoulders, a Plotinus-Montaigne," and compares his style to "home-spun cloth of gold."

It is not easy to consider the scholar and thinker apart from the ethical and spiritual guide. His lessons point always to the highest ideal of life. Every thought is the thought of a sage to whom truth is utterly empty and vain, if not moral and spiritual. This runs like a thread of gold through every line he has written. If not expressed, it is implied. His doctrine of self-reliance is one with obedience to the divine law. He is more tonic and inspiring, more full of faith and hope in the great laws of the universe than any other ethical teacher of the day. Indeed, I think many readers value him more for this quality than for anything else. In his "Conduct of Life," he shows a wonderful

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