i^o THOREAU. 



the reformers demanded, with more or less clearness of 

 consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in litera 

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

 Judsea, 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 Presbyterianism 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 Oarlyle spoke out in the 

 Old World and Emerson in the New, no one had dared to 

 proclaim, Le roi est mart: vive le roil 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 commission long enough ; 

 but meanwhile the soul of man, from which all power 

 emanates and to which it reverts, still survives in undimin- 

 ished royalty ; God still survives, little as you gentlemen 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 Independency 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 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- 



