ndividual thinking man. "If the single man plant
himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world
will come round to him." Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of
the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it had never
been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied precisely the
same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity
School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A tempest in our washbowl,"
he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more than that. The great
sentence of the Divinity School address, "God is, not was; he speaketh,
not spake," was the emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the immediacy
of the soul's access to God. It has been the burden of a thousand
prophets in all religions. The young priests of the Divinity School,
their eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed Emerson's
injunction to turn away from past records and historical authorities and
to drink from the living fountain of the divine within themselves; but
to the professors, "the stern old war-gods," this relative belittlement
of historical Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation passed before
Emerson was again welcomed by his alma mater.

The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord
Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was
a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal,
consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted
sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite
of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in
books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him;
he "fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He
basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the pages of
his private "Journal," which he called his savings-bank, because from
this source he drew most of the material for his books. The "Journal"
has recently been printed, in ten volumes. No American writing rewards
the reader more richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's "Essays,"
the first volume of which appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after
his death in 1882, represent practically three stages of composition:
first the detached thoughts of the "Journal;" second, the rearrangement
of this material for use upon the lecture platform; and finally, the
essays in their present form. The