THOREAU. 147 



consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in literature, 

 life in religion. Of what use to import a gospel from Judaea, if 

 we leave behind the soul that made it possible, the God who 

 keeps it for ever real and present ? Surely Abana and Pharpar 

 are better than Jordan, if a living faith be mixed with those 

 waters and none with these. 



Scotch Presbyter ianism as a motive of spiritual progress was 

 dead ; New England Puritanism was in like manner dead ; in 

 other words, Protestantism had made its fortune and no longer 

 protested; but till Carlyle spoke out in the Old World and 

 Emerson in the New, no one had dared to proclaim, Le roi est 

 mort: vive le roi! The meaning of which proclamation was 

 essentially this : the vital spirit has long since departed out of 

 this form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in com 

 mission long enough ; but meanwhile the soul of man, from 

 which all power emanates and to which it reverts, still survives 

 in undiminished royalty; God still survives, little as you gentle 

 men of the Commission seem to be aware of it nay, may 

 possibly outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may appear. 

 The truth is, that both Scotch Presbyterianism and New 

 England Puritanism made their new avatar in Carlyle and , 

 Emerson, the heralds of their formal decease, and the tendency 

 of the one toward Authority and of the other toward Indepen 

 dency might have been prophesied by whoever had studied 

 history. The necessity was not so much in the men as in the 

 principles they represented and the traditions which overruled 

 them. The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling poet in 

 Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination of the century, the 

 rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare ; but the Puri 

 tanism that cannot die, the Puritanism that made New England 

 what it is, and is destined to make America what it should be, 

 found its voice in Emerson. Though holding himself aloof 

 from all active partnership in movements of reform, he has been 

 the sleeping partner who has supplied a great part of their 

 capital. 



The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well-read 

 critic must feel at once ; and so is that of ^Eschylus, so is that 

 of Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is 

 that of nearly every one except Shakespeare; but there is a 

 gauge of height no less than of breadth, of individuality as well 

 as of comprehensiveness, and, above all, there is the standard of 

 genetic power, the test of the masculine as distinguished from 

 the receptive minds, There are staminate plants in literature, 



