of life as experienced.
Carlyle gives the experience of good and evil,--the tremendous sanctions
of right against wrong, wisdom against folly. He is not triumphant, but
he is not hopeless. "Work, and despair not" is to him "the marching
music of the Teutonic race." Emerson, from the height of personal
victory, sees all as harmonious. One shows the struggle up the mountain
path, the other the view from the summit.

Carlyle's gospel is summed up in "_Work_, and despair not." "Work" was
his own addition to Goethe's line. "Do the duty that lies nearest thee;"
action, as the escape from the puzzles of the intellect and the griefs of
the heart, is his special message.

Emerson is a precursor of the day when "No man shall say to his
neighbors, Know ye the Lord, for all shall know him, from the least unto
the greatest." He is the first of the prophets to rise above anxiety as
to the success of his mission. He lives his life, says his word, sheds
his light--concerned to be faithful, but wholly unanxious as to personal
success.

As the tribes of ancient Israel stood arrayed, the one half on Mount
Ebal, the other on Mount Gerizim,--the one to pronounce the blessing, the
other to utter the curse,--so Emerson is like an embodied promise and
Carlyle a perpetual warning. In Emerson we see the hero triumphant and
serene. Carlyle shows him at close grips with the devil. "Pain, danger,
difficulty, steady slaving toil, shall in no wise be shirked by any
brightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in this
world; nay, precisely the higher he is the deeper will be the
disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks
laid on him; and the heavier, too, and more tragic, his penalties if he
neglect them."

The background for Emerson is the life of early New England. The secret
of New England's greatness was the combination from the first of the
profoundest interest in man's spiritual destiny with the closest grip on
homely facts.

In Calvinism, and in Christianity, the universe was at eternal war within
itself; this was man's projection upon the world of his own moral
conflict. Emerson sees the universe as a harmony. Many influences have
contributed to this idea; it becomes distinct and vivid in a man whose
own life is a moral harmony. Himself truly a cosmos, he recognizes the
answering tokens of the greater cosmos.

The religious sentiment had become so inwoven with institutio