and. It
was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested
Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it
"the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to
American literature."

Emerson said of himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in
the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have
written." We must set this statement down to one of those fits of
dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods that often came
upon him. What he meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier
age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and
grandfather, but coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and
Wordsworth, and other liberating influences of the nineteenth century,
he was bound to be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of
his immoderate fondness for writing. Writing was the passion of his
life, his supreme joy, and he went through the world with the writer's
eye and ear and hand always on duty. And his contribution to the
literature of man's higher moral and aesthetic nature is one of the
most valuable of the age in which he lived.

IV

Apart from the account of his travels and other personal experiences,
the Journals are mainly made up of discussions of upwards of fifty
subjects of general and fundamental interest, ranging from art to war,
and looked at from many and diverse points of view. Of these subjects
three are dominant, recurring again and again in each volume. These
are nature, literature, and religion. Emerson's main interests
centered in these themes. Using these terms in their broadest sense,
this is true, I think, of all his published books. Emerson was an
idealist, first, last, and all the time, and he was a literary artist,
or aimed to be, first, last, and all the time, and in the same measure
and to the same extent was he a devout religious soul, using the term
religion as he sometimes uses it, as a feeling of the Infinite.

There are one hundred and seventy-six paragraphs, long and short,
given to literature and art, and one hundred and sixty given to
religious subjects, and over thirty given to nature. It is interesting
to note that he devotes more paragraphs to woman than to man; and more
to society than to solitude, though only to express his dislike of the
former and his love for the latter. There are more thoughts about
science than about metaphysics, more about war than about