He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many common facts, and saw what we see there—and beyond. His first lesson of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal; yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the all-important sense of wonder. “Now that man was ready, the horse was brought,” he writes; and continues:

“The timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not have held the vast North America together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a perfect communication in every manner for all nations,—’twas strange to see how it was secured. The good World-Soul understands us well.”

Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he says—“like the courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming: ‘Let it come in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.’” And this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent flashes of his humor.

IV

While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual books or passages in his own work, he has almost always

expressed somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an exponent:

“We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensation…. Character is more to us…. Religion makes us idealists.”

On another page, he writes:

“Malthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen existed to say, ‘Given the circumstance, the man’s given. I can educate a tiger’: Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest number. But what do you exist to say?”

It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that, for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots and dashes till the day of judgment. Emerson’s contemporaries greatly needed the man and his serene preaching—so undisturbed—while