ncial affair, if the Bohemian
press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was
fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over
the world.

* * * * *

Too much has been made of Emerson's mysticism. He was an intellectual
rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let
go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of
common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being
could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob
Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader
may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic
asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the
contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in
the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to
insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable,
the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played
with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified
the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual
divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach
to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out
of itself. If "Rejected Addresses" had not been written half a century
before Emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant
to ridicule and parody it.

"The song of Braham is an Irish howl;
Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything and everything is nought."

Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma
that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.

Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the "Yoga" doctrine
of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The
oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic
dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a
peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to
construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be,
of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and
ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to
build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a
human soul had ever constructed