rave blows fresh and sweet in the sunny
air. Step by step Emerson has traveled the great road worn by so many of
old, passing from the 'ideal' to the real, from reverie to a cheerful
awaking,--and the prophecy of genius is at last fulfilled.

For at last he has come out from the misty twilight of Transcendentalism
into the clear daylight of common sense. And surely it is not for us to
decry the bridge, or, if you please, the tunnel through which he has
crossed. He agitates the necessity and practicability of social reform,
but it must be through individual effort. Years ago he decided that
society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their
shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where
it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations
are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who
knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and aims at it
his swiftest arrows. In his essay on Wealth this sharp practical insight
hardens every sentence. The sentimentalist, who believes, with Henri
Blaze, that romance must be the issue of this marriage of Nature with
Religion, betakes himself in consternation to his dainty, poetical
dreams of a Utopia that shall arise, ready made, from the promising
East. The capitalist, who sneers at Philosophy, and would ignorantly
couple Faust with the Mysteries of Udolpho, or Andromeda with Jack the
Giant-killer, rubs his hands gleefully over our author's nice
appreciation of capital and the mysteries of its sudden fluctuations.
'Every step of civil advancement makes a dollar worth more.' 'Political
Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and the
ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible
which has come down to us.' 'The right merchant is one who has the just
average of faculties we call _common sense_; a man of a strong affinity
for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is
thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.... He knows that all
goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent, for every effect a
perfect cause, and that good luck is another name for tenacity of
purpose.' 'The basis of political economy is non-interference.' The
merchant looks narrowly at his theory of compensation, and finds it
tallies well with the result of his own after-dinner meditations,
expressed of mornings to doubting confreres. The philanthropist rejoi