tentious instructions and
metaphysical wanderings.

We open Emerson's latest work, the _Conduct of Life_, in a hopeful mood.
Some mysterious sympathy, born from a natural faith in the progress of a
mind that had already proved its power by a daring and successful
onslaught upon old habits and associations, strengthened by a more
practical philosophy that dawns in _English Traits_, and culminating in
the intense passion of yearning in the _Phrenody_, justifies an
expectation that is gloriously realized. To the vigilant thinker a
decade is worth more than aeons to his sleeping brother. The Emerson of
to-day is not the Emerson of twenty or even ten years ago. Here is still
the true, epigrammatic style of his youth. He is as lavish of his
aphorisms, which, like the coins of Donatello, hang over our heads and
are free to every passer-by. Still an antiquarian, like Charles
Kingsley, he peers among Etruscan vases, Greek ruins, Norse runes and
ancient Dantean Infernos and Escurials for the models of a new
literature, a new art, a new life. But an enlarged spirit is visible on
every page.

'The south wind is strengthened
With the wild, sweet vigor of pine.'

We breathe a new air, gaze at new landscapes; a new climate is around
us. Take this book into the sultry midsummer, and its words summon the
ripe autumn with its fruits up from the west; read it by the light of
the blazing Yule log, and it will still recall the wild breezes and warm
suns of October. And it is this growing maturity of thought, this
evident tendency to a grand realization, that prove the honesty and
greatness of the man. He has worked perseveringly at his problems,
disdaining to be aided by criticism or crushed by opposition. His power
has silently gathered its energies in the mines of Thought, dark but
rich, striking shaft after shaft of vast promise. He is a gymnast
struggling now with the realities and possibilities of Life, and no
longer grappling with ignis-fatui in the marshes by the road. Now his
humor gleams genially in keen, swift comparisons: he sports with truths,
like a king tossing up his crown-jewels or Vishnu worlds in the
'Cosmogony of Menu,' and he dares do this because they are no longer his
masters, because he has made them subservient to an end--the great end
of the amelioration of his race.

It is this great element of sport that in its broadest development
elevates man to the far heights of his nature. There all is serene.