is one man who does not need to be a king; king neither of nations, nor of parishes or cliques, nor even of cent-per-annums; nor, indeed, of anything at all save of himself only. Realities? Yes, your dollars are real, your cotton and molasses are real; so are Presidentships, Senatorships, celebrations, reputations, and the wealth of Rothschild: but to me, on the whole, they are not the reality that will suffice. To me, without some other reality, they are mockery, and amount to zero, nay, to a negative quantity. ETERNITIES surround this God-given life of inine what will all the dollars in creation do for me? Dollars, dignities, senate-addresses, review-articles, gilt coaches or cavalcades, with world-wide huzzaings and parti-coloured beefeaters never so many: O Heaven, what were all these? Behold, ye shall have all thesc, and I will endeavour for a thing other than these. Behold, we will entirely agree to differ in this matter; I to be in your eyes nothing, you to be something, to be much, to be all things:wherefore, adieu in God's name; go ye that way, I go this !--Pity that a man, for such cause, should be so distinguished from all his contemporaries! It is a misfortune partly of these our peculiar times. Times and nations of any strength have always privately held in them

many such men. Times and nations that hold none or few of such, may indeed seem to themselves strong and great, but are only bulky, loud; no heart or solidity in them ;-great, as the blown bladder is, which by and by will collapse and become small enough!

For myself, I have looked over with no common feeling to this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic hearth, on the other side of the Ocean (yet not altogether parted from me either), silently communing with his own soul, and with the God's World it finds itself alive in yonder. Pleasures of Virtue, Progress of the Species, Black Emancipation, New Tariff, Eclecticism, Locofocoism, ghost of Improved-Socinianism: these with many other ghosts and substances are squeaking, jabbering, according to their capabilities, round this man; to one man among the sixteen millions their jabber is all unmusical. The silent voices of the Stars above, and of the green Earth beneath, are profitabler to him, -tell him gradually that these others are but ghosts, which will shortly have to vanish; that the Life-Fountain these proceeded out of does not vanish! The words of such a man, what words he finds good to speak, are worth attending to. By degrees a small circle of living souls eager to hear is

gathered. The silence of this man has to become speech: may this too, in its due season, prosper for him !-Emerson has gone to lecture, various times, to special audiences, in Boston, and occasionally elsewhere. Three of those Lectures, already printed, are known to some here; as is the little pamphlet called Nature, of somewhat earlier date. It may be said, a great meaning lies in these pieces, which as yet finds no adequate expression for itself. A noteworthy though very unattractive work, moreover, is that new periodical they call The Dial, in which he occasionally writes; which appears indeed generally to be imbued with his way of thinking, and to proceed from the circle that learns of him. This present little volume of Essays, printed in Boston a few months ago, is Emerson's first book. An unpretending little book, composed probably, in good part, from mere Lectures which already lay written. It affords us, on several sides, in such manner as it can, a direct glimpse into the man and that spiritual world of his.

"Emerson, I understand, was bred to Theology; of which primary bent his latest way of thought still bears traces. In a very enigmatic way we hear much of the universal soul,' of the &c. &o.: flickering like bright bodiless Northern

y

Pantheist or
Pot-theist ?

Streamers, notions and half-notions of a metaphysic, theosophic, theologic kind, are seldom long wanting in these Essays. I do not advise the British Public to trouble itself much with all that; still less, to take offence at it. Whether this Emerson be 'a Pantheist,' or what kind of Theist or Ist he may be, can perhaps as well remain undecided. If he prove a devout-minded, veritable, original man, this for the present will suffice. Ists and Isms are rather growing a weariness. Such a man does not readily range himself under Isms. A man to whom the open secret of the universe' is no longer a closed one, what can his speech of it be in these days? All human speech, in the best days, all human thought that can or could articulate itself in reference to such things, what is it but the eager stammering and struggling as of a wondering infant-in view of the Unnameable! That this little book has no system,' and points or stretches far beyond all systems, is one of its merits. We will call it the soliloquy of a true soul, alone under the stars, in this day. In England as elsewhere the voice of a true soul, any voice of such, may be welcome to some. For in England as elsewhere old dialects and formulas are mostly lying dead; some dim suspicion, or

clear knowledge, indicates on all hands that they are as good as dead ;-and how can the skilfulest galvanizing make them any more live? For they are dead and their galvanic motions, O Heavens, are not of a pleasant sort!-That one inau more, in the most modern dialect of this year 1841, recognises the oldest everlasting truths here is a thing worth seeing, among the others. One man more who knows, and believes of very certainty, that Man's Soul is still alive, that God's Universe is still godlike, that of all Ages of Miracles ever seen, or dreamt of, by far the most miraculous is this age in this hour; and who with all these devout beliefs has dared, like a valiant man, to bid chimeras, Be chimerical; disappear, and let us have an end of you!'-is not this worth something? In a word, while so many Benthamisms, Socialisms, Fourrierisms, professing to have no soul, go stag gering and lowing like monstrous mooncalves, the product of a heavy-laden moonstruck age; and, in this same baleful twelfth hour of the night,' even galvanic Puseyisms, as we say, are visible, and dancings of the sheeted dead,-shall not any voice of a living man be welcome to us, even because it is alive?

"For the rest, what degree of mere literary talent lies in these utterances, is but a secondary