to love this retrospect. I believe in the being God, not in the God that has been. I work; my fathers may have wrought or rested. What have I to do with them, or with the Fellatahs, or the great Khan! I know a worthy man who walks the streets with silent indignation as a last of his race, quite contemptuously eyeing the passing multitude." Emerson goes further than that in welcoming the "new man," the power without known antecedents. In a notable passage of his Journal for 1845, one sees him, as it were, shaking off the dust of the house of his fathers, breaking out of the old New England, in order to enter America, to participate in that national spirit which we know today must learn to enfold and assimilate men of all races:

"I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party. It is the dog in the manger. It is precisely opposite to all the dictates of love and magnanimity; and therefore, of course, opposite to true wisdom. Man is the most composite of all creatures. . . . Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent, — asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans, and of the Polynesians,

will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements."

No man who honestly and earnestly contemplates the making of a nation out of such heterogeneous elements as Emerson here enumerates, no man who truly cherishes the potentialities of human power, wherever they lie, is disposed to assign to political agencies an undue part in shaping the product of the melting-pot. Emerson did not. If we were to sum up his attitude towards the state in a single sentence, it would take some such form as this: The State exists for the benefit of all the individuals in it: and its stability and its welfare depend primarily on the effort

of each individual in it. All concrete advance towards social regeneration, he believed, is accomplished by minorities. by minorities of one! In a country with a strong inclination towards beginning all efforts for moral reformation by the election of a president and a secretary, he proposes this modest method: "Count from yourself in order the persons that have near relation to you up to ten or fifteen, and see if you can consider your whole relation to each without squirming. That will be something." Commenting, in "Life and Letters in New England," on a socialistic scheme for imposing economic salvation on the world from No. 200 Broadway, he surmises that it would be better to say: "Let us be lovers and servants of that which is just, and straightway every man becomes a center of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato and Christ." Let the great state arch above us, but let it beware of pressing too near, lest it crush more natural and vital powers the power of the individual over himself; the power of the family, the neighborhood, the town-meeting, the local enterprise; the "atmospheric" power of culture, the gradual and beneficent pressure of a natural society steadily growing stronger by the diffusion of science and humane learning.

The Emersonian doctrine of democratic individualism has its defects. In these days it appears rather homely and old-fashioned. Yet it has merits towards which one occasionally turns with nostalgic yearnings, merits which may yet restore it to some of its former favor. After many a popular election, is it not still the chief available consolation to go quietly home and close the door and reflect that the wise man "occupies all the space between God and the mob?" And in spite of all the allurement of centralized power, with its promise of prompt and "nation-wide" progress in the sense of the men at Washington, shall we not find in the years to come that the preservation of individuality in the private citizen and of pride and initiative in the "parish," the province, and the separate states, are as vital to the health of the far-flung nation as the use of hands and feet?

VII

It has ordinarily been assumed and asserted that Emerson was very little developed on the aesthetic side. This assumption is intimately associated with two other popular errors, which, in the light of our examination, we may now dismiss. We may first dismiss the popular error which holds that the center of his being was ethical; for we have seen that the center of his being was religious. We may dismiss, also, the popular error of regarding him as a representative of Puritan decadence; for we have seen that he represents rather a renascence and fresh flowering of the ancient passion for perfection. We think rightly of Emerson when we think of him as a humanist bent upon liberating and developing not some but all of the properly human powers. He builds his many-chambered house of life around a private oratory, because, like every successfully exploring humanist, he finds a private oratory at the center of his heart. But this innermost shrine of religious inspiration is emphatically not a Calvinistic chapel, hostile to the arts. It is a retreat friendly to all the Muses that ever haunted "Siloa's brook" or Heliconian springs.

Emerson believed, indeed, like his great predecessor of the seventeenth century, that the pulsing spirit which "voluntary moves harmonious numbers" prefers before all temples "the upright heart and pure." But no one who has approached that inner shrine will ever picture him as summoning the Sacred Nine about him in order to give them a lesson in conduct. No one understands Emerson who fails to perceive that he trusts his inspiration, like a Pythian prophet, like a celebrant of Dionysian mysteries. "If I am the devil's child," he defiantly retorted in his youth to one who had urged him to beware of his instincts, "I will live from the devil." Well assured that he was not the devil's child, he opened communication with his sources of power, resolute to receive and utter whatever they sent, though it might sound like blasphemy, though it might whiff received ethics down the wind. Through a great part of his prose and verse, there is the peculiar beat and throb which marks work conceived in creative heat, under the sway of the

"divine madness." Some of the friends who came closest to him testified to receiving from him not counsel but a sheer access of vital energy exhilarating to the verge of intoxication. It is above all a generative and fecundating impulse that he seeks for himself. It is above all that he desires to impart to others.

We all tend to slip at times into colorless and meaningless routine, into lives of grey commonplace and insignificance. Emerson seems to have apprehended this as a peril to which our democratic society is peculiarly exposed. He cultivates the means of combating it. He cultivates, for example, the color of Oriental poetry. He follows Hafiz, this Unitarian in revolt against the tedium and dead level of the cold New England virtue, and cries: "Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms." He writes an essay on "Inspiration," which is a study under ten beadings of the technique of exaltation, of ecstasy. He chants an ode to Bacchus, calling for

Wine of wine,

Blood of the world,

Form of forms, and mold of statures,

That I intoxicated

And by the draught assimilated,

May float at pleasure through all natures.

Under the heading "Morals" in his discourse on "Poetry and Imagination," he comes to the conclusion, entirely characteristic of him, that "Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks." On this theme Emerson writes occasionally with a recklessness not often associated with the "Victorian" period in America. For power, he intimates in "Mithridates," a poet may perhaps well pay with his soul:

Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,

I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.

O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry!
O all you virtues, methods, mights
Means, appliances, delights,

Reputed wrongs and braggart rights,
Smug routine, and things allowed,
Minorities, things under cloud!
Hither! take me, use me, fill me,

Vein and artery, though ye kill me!

As a priest of the "being God, not the God that has been," Emerson finds that even the greatest of the old poets do not wholly content him. As a believer in the doctrine of continuous revelation, he demands a new revelation. “In a cotillon," he declares in "Poetry and Imagination," "some persons dance and others await their turn when the music and the figure come to them. In the dance of God there is not one of the chorus but can and will begin to spin, monumental as he now looks, whenever the music and figure reach his place and duty. O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad, - this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money."

Emerson knew pretty well what he wanted in the way of a new poet. He was not in the least interested in the production of more "parlor or piano verse." He wanted such utterance as could come only from a great and noble soul immersed in the realities and filled with the spirit of the modern world. His poet must be radical, revolutionary, formative: "Bring us the bards who shall sing all our old ideas out of our heads, and new ones in; men-making poets. poetry which finds its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations of nature, and is the gift to men of new images and symbols, each the ensign and oracle of an age; that shall assimilate men to it, mould itself into religions and mythologies, and impart its quality to centuries." In his essay on "The Poet" he regrets that "we have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture it so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. . . . Dur log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries,