EMERSON 181 
ably near. He drops all other books. He will 
gaze and wonder. From Locke or Johnson or Way- 
land to Emerson is like a change from the school 
history to the Arabian Nights. There may be ex- 
travagances and some jugglery, but for all that the 
lesson is a genuine one, and to us of this generation 
immense. 
Emerson is the knight errant of the moral senti- 
ment. He leads, in our time and country, one illus- 
trious division, at least, in the holy crusade of the 
affections and the intuitions against the usurpations 
of tradition and theological dogma. He marks the 
flower, the culmination, under American conditions 
and in the finer air of the New World, of the reaction 
begun by the German philosophers, and passed along 
by later French and English thinkers, of man against 
circumstance, of spirit against form, of the present 
against the past. What splendid affirmation, what 
inspiring audacity, what glorious egoism, what gen- 
erous brag, what sacred impiety! There is an éclat 
about his words, and a brave challenging of immense 
odds, that is like an army with banners. It stirs 
the blood like a bugle-call: beauty, bravery, and a 
sacred cause,—the three things that win with us 
always. The first essay is a forlorn hope. See 
what the chances are: ‘The world exists for the 
education of each man. . . . He should see that 
he can live all history in his own person. He must 
sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bul- 
lied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater 
than all the geography and all the government of 
