lating of the incident."

The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one
only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson's way of thinking, from
persons to things and to times and places. No date, no position is
insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine:--

"In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns.
With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story
of the Emperor, Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to
the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and
marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that man's day. What
filled it? The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign
despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul answers--Behold his day
here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray
fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains;
in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet,--in the hopes of the
morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the
disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great
idea and the puny execution,--behold Charles the Fifth's day; another,
yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's,
Scipio's, Pericles's day,--day of all that are born of women. The
difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the
self-same life,--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so
admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable,
obliterated past what it cannot tell,--the details of that nature, of
that day, called Byron or Burke;--but ask it of the enveloping
Now. . . . Be lord of a day, and you can put up your history books."

"The deep to-day which all men scorn," receives thus from Emerson
superb revindication. "Other world! there is no other world." All
God's life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or
nowhere, is reality. "The present hour is the decisive hour, and every
day is doomsday."

Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an
optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything.
Emerson's drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite
pole from this weakness. After you have seen men a few times, he could
say, you find most of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and
soon as musty and as dreary. Never was such a fastidious lover of
significance