196 THOREAU. 



who keeps it forever real and present 1 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 prog- 

 ress 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 sur- 

 vives, 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 Puritan- 

 ism 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 tradi- 

 tions 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 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. 



