EMERSON 181 



ably near. He drops all other books. He will 

 gaze and wonder. Prom 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 aU 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 eclat 

 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 



