a life at first hand there is something sacred is
perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson's writings. The
hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his
temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason
of the passionate character of his feelings on this point. The world
is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of
what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. "Each one of us can
bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be
himself one of the children of the light." "Trust thyself, every heart
vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each man's education
when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when
he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which it was given him to till."

The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty
of the living individual electrified and emancipated his generation,
and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as
the soul of his message. The present man is the aboriginal reality,
the Institution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and
obliterate for present issues. "If anyone would lay an axe to your
tree with a text from 1 John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say
to him," Emerson wrote, "'My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.' Let
him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient,
and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your
Creator." "Cleave ever to God," he insisted, "against the name of
God;"--and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his
total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his
brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an
iconoclast and desecrator.

Emerson's belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the
vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being,
is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of our
youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their
own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his
appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances
the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is sm