p," and "Illusions." These will puzzle no one who has
read carefully that first book on "Nature." They all preach the gospel
of intuition, instinctive trust in the Universe, faith in the ecstatic
moment of vision into the things that are unseen by the physical
eye. Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed out, means
really God-reliance; the Over-Soul--always a stumbling-block to
Philistines--means that high spiritual life into which all men may enter
and in which they share the life of Deity. Emerson is stern enough in
expounding the laws of compensation that run through the universe, but
to him the chief law is the law of the ever-ascending, victorious soul.

This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as
well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the
singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no
ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh
and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He
ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and
construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle of
transforming fact and thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that
he would rather have written Emerson's "Bacchus" than any American poem.

That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in its
survey of human forces, no one would claim. Certain limitations in
interest and sympathy are obvious. "That horrid burden and impediment
of the soul which the churches call sin," to use John Morley's words,
occupied his attention but little. Like a mountain climber in a perilous
pass, he preferred to look up rather than down. He does not
stress particularly those old human words, service and sacrifice.
"Anti-scientific, antisocial, anti-Christian" are the terms applied to
him by one of his most penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say
"un-scientific," "unsocial," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which
Plato and Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer
the truth to say, as Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a
technical Christian." He tends to underestimate institutions of every
kind; history, except as a storehouse of anecdote, and culture as
a steady mental discipline. This is the price he pays for his
transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the Now, the moment
of insight. But after all these limitations are properly set do