Library of the best American literature / Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

by Unknown

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

THE LIBERATOR OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

O classify Emerson is a matter of no small difficulty. He was a philosopher, he was an essayist, he was a poet—all three so eminently that scarcely two of his friends would agree to which class he most belonged. Oliver Wendell Holmes asks:

“Where in the realm of thought whose air is song

Does he the Buddha of the west belong?

He seems a winged Franklin sweetly wise,

Born to unlock the secret of the skies.”

But whatever he did was done with a poetic touch. Philosophy, essay or song, it was all pregnant with the spirit of poetry. Whatever else he was, Emerson was pre-eminently a poet. It was with this golden key that he unlocked the chambers of original thought, that liberated American letters.