oduce his comments on each:--

1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed
sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the
faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially
the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude
of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel
in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means
chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader.

"Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working
mood."

What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on "Immortality"? It is
to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation
to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed
in this discourse,--what does it mean? We must tack together such
sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:--

"I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction,
namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall
continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we,
if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so."

This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the
possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues:--

"Schiller said, 'What is so universal as death must be benefit.'"

He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu
thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror
of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two
skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of
years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure
to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in
permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created
things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last
plainly:--

"Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the
world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma."

But turn over a few pages and we may read:--

"I confess that everything connected with our personality fails.
Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a
complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We
have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to
w