wn, the
personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a priceless possession to his
countrymen. The austere serenity of his life, and the perfection with
which he represents the highest type of his province and his era, will
ultimately become blended with the thought of his true Americanism.
A democrat and liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like
Lincoln to become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide
to aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are
negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and the
soul.

Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the
eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's house
on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at
the notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would
be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in
his own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Yet that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more
curious story than the evolution of this local crank into his rightful
place of mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, "A Week
on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers"--which was even more completely
neglected by the public than Emerson's "Nature"--and "Walden," now one
of the classics, but only beginning to be talked about when its shy,
proud author penned his last line and died with the words "moose" and
"Indian" on his lips.

Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life,
means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors
of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor;
critics, like Lowell, place him, not without impatient rigor. To some
readers he is primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White of
Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a
hermit of the woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate
that his powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by a
gift of emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of
literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But
to the student of American thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the
courage and consistency with which he endeavored to realize the gospel
of Transcendentalism in his own inner life.

Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's grandfather
w