His lectures could not be briefly summarized. They had no central thought. You could give a sample sentence, but not the one sentence that commanded all the others. Whatever he called it, his theme, as he himself confesses, was always fundamentally the same: "In all my lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. This the people accept readily enough and even with loud commendations as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or Literature, or the Household, but the moment I call it Religion they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which they receive everywhere else to a new class of facts."
Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other points had been considered, was the religious test: Was he truly religious? Was his pole star the moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever with him? But few contemporary authors met his requirements in this respect. After his first visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others, he said they were all second-or third-rate men because of their want of the religious sense. They all looked backward to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a present revelation.
His conception of the divine will as the eternal tendency to the good of the whole, active in every atom, every moment, is one of the thoughts in which religion and science meet and join hands.
III
In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their making—the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebulæ and star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of æsthetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising, I think, than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and show the 'prentice hand more.
The themes around which his mind revolved all his life—nature, God, the soul—and their endless variations and implications, recur again and again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has new thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners, Experience, Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new images. His mind had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were always near at hand with him. He could not get away from them. He renounced the pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less to him, but because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the feeling of the Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth under his feet.
The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a mélange they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings after spiritual truths, and a hundred other things, are always marked by what he says that Macaulay did not possess—elevation of mind—and an abiding love for the real values in life and letters.
Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception of the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."
Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose. Here is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his reader will remember, begins in this wise:
"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hilltop looking down."