or repay! The earth still yields. Heaven's breast is not shrunk. It nurses the soul still: else itself were empty and at fault.

Our error or superstition is to mistake a man for a principle, and identify a name with a type. No name can be the whole thing! Character is always current. God does not fall below himself. The human race is not running out. The light of the sun in the sky is as good as ever, and that of righteousness in Asia or America cannot fail. Emerson was a pattern of integrity. As Goethe said of one, this is a nature, of peculiar property and singular impression, not to be confounded with any other,remarkable for quality, not quantity. "God loveth not size." Not the mass of his head, but the lines in his face, expressed him. To be moderate and to omit was his gift. "Always understate," he said

to Mr. Alcott.

"I hung my verses in the wind;

Time and tide their faults may find.

Have you eyes to find the five

Which five hundred did survive?"

He said the chief excellence of style is suppression, an expedient so cheap, it is strange it is so seldom used. Reading a paper, he asked one by his side, in the midst of his recital, with wonderful modesty, if he had not better stop; as Rubinstein whispered to me of his piano recital, when all ears hung on his touch, "It is too long." They who move the world in art or government or war-Homer,

Shakspeare, Michael Angelo, Cæsar, Bonaparte — must have for part of their genius abundance, long flight, a certain precise aim and avoirdupois weight. Emerson, unsurpassed in height, lacked the spread and the motion or impulse of ambition to achieve. He was content to be clean and godly and deliver his soul. He leaves no single extensive performance. He was not caught, impressed, or enlisted by any one idea, object, or aspect of things. He makes no epic. or drama. His songs are swallow-flights on eagle's wings. He coolly surveyed and reported, but did not conceive he had any special mission or part to enact, so he could be, as he was, faithful and true. Like Swedenborg, he united the keenest perception to a mystic sense. We may amend or complete, we cannot annihilate, his report. He did deliver his soul. He was essentially religious. The world to him was a haunted house: he never got over his surprise at being in it as one of the ghosts. Wrangle who will, I will wonder." If he finds himself now in heaven, it is no astonishment to him, as he has had his surprise already on the earth. To exist is all. A genuine man, he was weakened by no contradiction in his own mind. From his influence there is no subtraction of a deviation or fault. He was whole, a sum total of wisdom and will. What he meant and was meant for was

the same.

Others might not agree with him; he agreed with himself. He had below the " manners of the sky."

Only to hint a subject, not to explain a man, am I willing to speak. Into no pound of metaphysic can we drive the soul. Emerson thought Plato with his dialectic had but bit this apple of the world on one side. Rubinstein said all were ruined, were all found out. Our mind is the numeral for this cipher of the sphere; but it cannot fathom itself. We at once get beyond soundings when we launch on the intellectual sea. The North Pole seems to resent our search after its mysteries; but when ships sail across where the meridians meet, there will be a cover of Nature still remaining which no explorer will penetrate or break up. God and Heaven submit not to be analyzed. Our faith in the one, our hope of the other, is an instinct whose root is in both. But as abstractions they furnish. no soil for any growth. We must contemplate them with our affections in the living creation, and in the concrete, before we can realize them in our thought or express them in our life. Sought as the net result of our logic, they vanish into thin air. With his imagination for an eye, Emerson was a perceiver; and he respected perception in himself and others, being as quick and glad to quote their perceptions as to announce his own. He notes, cites, and lauds every scrap of insight, or ripple of tidings over the ocean that heaves from the unknown shore toward which he sails.

10

VI.

EMERSON AS PREACHER.

BY MISS E. P. PEABODY.

WHEN Mr. Sanborn wrote to me that I was appointed to this lecture, he told me that the subject assigned to me was "Mr. Emerson as Preacher," not "Mr. Emerson in the Pulpit," as it stands in the printed programme. But I hold on to what I had immediately agreed to do, for I think Mr. Emerson was always pre-eminently the preacher to his own generation and future ones, but as much—if not more -out of the pulpit as in it; faithful unto the end to his early chosen profession and the vows of his youth. Whether he spoke in the pulpit or lyceum chair, or to friends in his hospitable parlor, or tête-àtête in his study, or in his favorite walks in the woods with chosen companions, or at the festive gatherings of scholars, or in the conventions of philanthropists, or in the popular assemblies of patriots in times. and on occasions that try men's souls, always and everywhere it was his conscious purpose to utter a "Thus saith the Lord." It was, we may say, a fact of his pre-existence. Looking back through eight

generations of Mr. Emerson's paternal ancestry, we find there were preachers in every one of them; the first being one of those Independents whom Archbishop Laud made an attempt to constrain to uniformity by dictating to him how he should regard the Sabbath, and on other ritualistic points, which the spirit of Luther's Reformation had reserved for the private judgment of redeemed souls. It marks the intrinsic conscience of Peter Bulkeley, that he would neither conform with his English pulpit, nor relinquish his profession; for he was a man of fortune, living on his hereditary property, and rich enough to live a layman's life amid the luxury of a scholar's leisure, which he was educated to value. But there was that spirit of consecration to his calling which seems a divine predestination, that compelled him to leave house and lands and turn his steps towards the Western wilderness, and dare all the dangers and hardships of breaking his way in it, to found a colony which was to be an independent church among the Indians. With them he made concord which named the town by a just purchase of land, and a Christian benevolence to them that was indeed not without parallel among the Independents. These Independents are never to be confounded with the later Puritans, who organized the pharisaical community that proudly denied the right of citizenship to Indians and all others not church-members, and also initiated a military policy towards the former that they attempted to justify to themselves from