self with functions which,
however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and
not for him. Even the care of his garden, "with its stoopings and
fingerings in a few yards of space," he found "narrowing and
poisoning," and took to long free walks and saunterings instead,
without apology. "Causes" innumerable sought to enlist him as their
"worker"--all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped
him into service. The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it
appealed to him, found him firm: "God must govern his own world, and
knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which
has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to face than
those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of
man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me." This in
reply to the possible questions of his own conscience. To hot-blooded
moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidelity to the
limits of his genius must often have made him seem provokingly remote
and unavailable; but we, who can see things in more liberal
perspective, must unqualifiably approve the results. The faultless
tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly
asserted himself within them, is an example fitted to give heart to
other theorists and artists the world over.

The insight and creed from which Emerson's life followed can be best
summed up in his own verses:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man!"

Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of
the Universal Reason. The great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses
itself in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an angle of its
eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal
to ourselves. "O rich and various Man!" he cries, "thou palace of
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and
the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God;
in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong."

If the individual open thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that
there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought
not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand. "If
John was perfect, why are you and I alive?" Emerson writes; "As long as
any man exists there is some need of him; let him fight for his own."
This faith that in