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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
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