ns, creeds,
usages, conventionalisms,--each man believing because his neighbors do,
or his father did,--that it was necessary to take a new observation.
What says the heart of man at its highest? For this Emerson is singled
out; for him an ancestry is trained through generations; he is drawn
apart from the church, set aside from government and all institutional
work; practical functions are denied him; he is made an eye,--an organ of
pure vision.

To him God is not afar off but in himself. The heart in its own purity,
tenderness, and strength recognizes the Divine Presence. "The soul gives
itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure,
who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it."
The order of physical nature is the symbol and the instrument of a moral
order. The beauty and sublimity of nature are the manifestation through
sense of the Divine Reality.

So high a revelation can come at first only to souls which in their
greatness are isolated, as the highest mountain peaks stand alone in the
earliest sunbeams. It is for a later time to fit such truth to all the
conditions of human life, to fully assimilate it with older lessons, to
weave it into the warp and woof of society.

It is Emerson, child of the Puritan and disciple of the new knowledge, in
whom joy is most abiding--its roots are in faithful living, brave and
high thinking, the spirit of love, oneness with nature and humanity.

Emerson dwells in an ideal yet real world. He cannot give the password
that will certainly admit; inheritance and temperament must contribute to
that. But he sees that one principle is the rightful sovereign in his
inner world and in the universe,--allegiance to highest known law. It is
a sublimation of the idea familiar to the religious mind, but he gives it
a new and larger interpretation; for, in place of the written Word,
beyond the social and civic obligation, greater than the accepted
moralities, superseding the ecclesiastical virtues, wider than the
overworked altruism of Christianity, is the complete ideal of Man, from
his roughest force to his finest perception.

Talk about duty had become wearisome. "Thou shalt not preach!" says
Emerson. So he discourses as the observer of man and nature, and bids
men to look at realities.

His imitators were beguiled into a theoretical exposition of the
universe. A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their
talk, b