sincerity painful to recognize.

"Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates
Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and
forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of
humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the
good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the
natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of
his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that
will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death
impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps
of absolute and inextinguishable being."

In the following Essay, "The Over-Soul," Emerson has attempted the
impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his
rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his
readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of
reaching, he says,--

"Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to
those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare
not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall
short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising
of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use
sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what
hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of
the Highest Law."

"The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-_flow_ of a spiritual
imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous,
God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms
borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute
in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those
applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols,
varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual
intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts
and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to
Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according
to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words,
and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving
in endless procession with