the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of
posterity,--to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a
composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not
described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to
him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France, and
Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and
we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who
communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of
piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes."

Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, "To raise the idea of man;"
he had "the power _to inspire_" in a preeminent degree. If ever a man
communicated those _vibrations_ he speaks of as characteristic of
Milton, it was Emerson. In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is
worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a
school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for
its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The
similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into
their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a
revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost
very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them
in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many
parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any
man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer
of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of
audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as "an expert swordsman"
like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive
controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But
though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have
been conscious, like Milton, of "a certain niceness of nature, an honest
haughtiness," which was as a shield about his inner nature. Charles
Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the
feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in
the line he quotes:--

"The hand of Douglas is his own."

It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was
listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that
of the divine singer.

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