merson did center in himself and never apologized. His gospel of
self-reliance came natural to him. He was emphatically self, without a
trace of selfishness. He went abroad to study himself more than other
people--to note the effect of Europe on himself. He says, "I believe
it's sound philosophy that wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the
sole object we study and learn. Montaigne said himself was all he
knew. Myself is much more than I know, and yet I know nothing else."
In Paris he wrote to his brother William, "A lecture at the Sorbonne
is far less useful to me than a lecture that I write myself"; and as
for the literary society in Paris, though he thought longingly of it,
yet he said, "Probably in years it would avail me nothing."

The Journals are mainly a record of his thoughts and not of his days,
except so far as the days brought him ideas. Here and there the
personal element creeps in--some journey, some bit of experience, some
visitor, or walks with Channing, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jones Very, and
others; some lecturing experience, his class meetings, his travels
abroad and chance meetings with distinguished men. But all the more
purely personal element makes up but a small portion of the ten thick
volumes of his Journal. Most readers, I fancy, will wish that the
proportion of these things were greater. We all have thoughts and
speculations of our own, but we can never hear too much about a man's
real life.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New
England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He
is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald,
the poet-seer. He is the poet and prophet of the moral ideal. His main
significance is religious, though nothing could be farther from him
than creeds and doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical formalism.
There is an atmosphere of sanctity about him that we do not feel about
any other poet and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit of
Oriental mysticism and bardic fervor grafted upon the shrewd,
parsimonious, New England puritanic stock. The stress and wild,
uncertain melody of his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. No
writing surpasses his in the extent to which it takes hold of the
concrete, the real, the familiar, and none surpasses his in its
elusive, mystical suggestiveness, and its cryptic character. It is
Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and Oriental devoutness,
pantheism, and symbo