had become scarce-have been recently reprinted in answer to a demand certainly very unusual in the case of an extinct periodical. From time to time Emerson collected and published his lectures under various titles. A first series of Essays came out in 1841, and a second in 1844; the Conduct of Life in 1860, Society and Solitude in 1870, Letters and Social Aims, in 1876, and the Fortune of the Republic in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of Poems, and 1865 Mayday and Other Poems. These writings, as a whole, were variations on a single theme, expansions and illustrations of the philosophy set forth in Nature, and his early addresses. They were strikingly original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality and spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first "cut the cable that bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it used to be the fashion to find an English analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described as the Hemans of America, a wellworn critical tradition has coupled Emerson with Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early essays and from Sartor Resartus is beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in temper and style the two writers. were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dis satisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Republic, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence of the doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high and stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely: that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so." It is this conviction that gives to Emerson's writings their serenity and their tonic quality at the same time that it narrows the range of his dealings with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and looks upon this outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away. his eyes from the evil which he disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him and Faust disturbs him with its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only skepticism." The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But Emerson's genius was interpretive rather than constructive. The poet dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous populations," are but sailing foam-bells Along thought's causing stream." Shakespere does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells. Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the great creative poets, in Shakespere and Dante and Goethe, how infinite the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the type is important, the common element. 'In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all." "The same-the same!" he exclaims in his essay on Plato. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the plowman, the plow and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the thought in Brahma: 66 They reckon ill who leave me out; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward "persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson showed, indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his English Traits and Representative Men and in his memoirs of Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance of his favorite manner. Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular "voicings"-as they say in Concord-in rhythmic shape, of single thoughts on "Worship," "Character,” “Heroism,” "Art," "Politics," "Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the clear obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be desired in point of wording and of verse. His Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, in 1836, is the perfect model of an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it. Equally current is the stanza from Voluntaries : "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, "Thou must,' The youth replies, 'I can."" So, too, the famous lines from the Problem: "The hand that rounded Peter's dome, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew." The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the poet - naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837, Thoreau engaged in school teaching and in |