Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute; it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death, or nonenity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels; he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.

in

This last statement is reiterated in various forms,

essay after essay, in poem after poem. Perhaps its concisest expression is in a fragment printed in the posthumously enlarged collection of

poems : For God hath writ all dooms magnificent

So guilt not traverses his tender will.

Has not the " philosophy of Emerson" been made sufficiently plain by what we have here read? Its outward glance looks toward God himself, and sees the unseen Spirit mirrored everywhere:

Thou meetest him by centuries,

And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires.
He is the essence that inquires.

He is the axis of the star;

He is the sparkle of the spar;

He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature.*

Or, again—

Higher far,

Upward into the pure realm,

"Wood-Notes."

Over sun and star,

Over the flickering Dæmon film,
Thou must mount for love;

Into vision where all form
In one only form dissolves,

In a region where the wheel
On which all beings ride

Visibly revolves;

Where the starred, eternal worm

Girds the world with bound and term;

Where unlike things are like,

Where good and ill,

And joy and moan,

Melt into one.

There Past, Present, Future, shoot;

Substances at base divided

In their summits are united;
There the holy essence rolls
One through separated souls;
And the sunny Æon sleeps,
Folding Nature in its deeps;
And every fair and every good,
Known in part or known impure
To men below,

In their archetypes endure.

The race of gods,

Of those we erring own,

Are shadows flitting up and down

In the still abodes.

The circles of that sea are laws

Which publish and which hide their cause. * But this ideal, mystic, visionary, American-Oriental,

thus peering into the vague unknown eternities of Deity itself, is the most personal

Individualism.

and practical of writers, and all his message is to

"Initial, Dæmonic, and Celestial Love."

the individual. From these outward shadowy bounds of his philosophy he ever returns to the man to whom he speaks :

It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man stands by himself, the universe stands by him. also.

A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this tenet, that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man's. He is never happy or strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind. And in this self-respect, or hearkening to the privatest oracle, he need never be at a loss. In morals, this is conscience; in intellect, genius; in practice, talent,—not to imitate or surpass a particular man in his way, but to bring out your own new way; to each his own method, style, wit, eloquence.

Americanism.

By this individualism was founded the great nation in which Emerson so thoroughly believed, and upon it must that nation rest in the future. Said Emerson in his last-published book, a lecture on "The Fortunes of the Republic": "Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for, exalted manhood. What this country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that

corn shall serve man, and not man corn." More than this, Emerson would found upon exalted manhood" not only the life of the United States, but the life of that which has been well called "The Republic of God."

What are the faults of Emerson as a thinker and writer ?

faults.

The most conspicuous, doubtless, is a certain vagueness of thought and utterance. I do not refer to those poems or prose passages Emerson's which, though deemed " orphic," or mystic, or unduly concise, are yet intentional in form and clear in meaning to him who will study them. A good example of writing of this class is the much-discussed poem of "Brahma," which, to an intelligent mind willing to stop to consider the purpose of the poem, as well as its form, is as clear as daylight. I mean, rather, those prose passages (and less frequent poetic utterances) in which Emerson maunders along in well-balanced, terse sentences, which are not devoid of sense, separately, but are combined in no consistent or valuable whole. In Emerson's case it not infrequently happens that the whole is less than the sum of all its parts. This fault may be studied in the essay entitled "Immortality." Emerson thoroughly believed in personal immortality, and the essay contains fine and true sayings; but it would be difficult to construct an equal number of pages leaving a more vague and profitless effect upon the reader's mind. This single line by another poet,

"Life is love, and love is eternity,"

is worth more than the whole essay. In this matter of Hebrew explicitness on a definite religious theme Carlyle easily surpassed Emerson. Carlyle raved and spoke wildly at times, when Emerson was bland and cautious; but Carlyle, on an august theme, was never intangible. This criticism applies but to a small portion of Emerson's writings, but it falls upon that portion with crushing force.

Again, Emerson was at times superficial; and, what is worse, spoke authoritatively on subjects concerning which he had no deep knowledge. That which he disliked he too often contemptuously condemned. His method, as has been said, was that of outspeaking, and this method, applied to the whole universe by one with intense prejudices and fixed limits, is a dangerous one. In the case of his imitators it became grotesque, and undoubtedly retarded habits of close and orderly thought in America.

estimate.

But on the general estimate, the work of Emerson is of great importance to America and to the world. His name, by any standard of The general just judgment, must ever stand in honor. The ideal, the beautiful, the true, the right, the godlike, he set in burning words over against the merely material, the utilitarian, the false, the politic, the animal and worldly. He restated for the modern world the eternal principles of transcendentalism, of spiritualism, of the inner light, never lost since the days of Plato. He told the world anew, and in fresh words, of the great First Cause, by whom and in whom are all things. He ever emphasized