ips which has
held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a
volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a
confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and
Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that
professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the
fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings
of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions.

Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely
made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not
in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague
aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them,
in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he

"Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer."

Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout
listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn,
who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was
over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life
in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.

"His was the task and his the lordly gift
Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift."

This was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier,
calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more
help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude
could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.

"Nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his
genius," as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a
poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in
circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these
directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and
he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room
naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from
the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very
popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a
very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.

--"I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished
in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos
not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety,