The
fixed stars of his inner firmament are brought immeasurably near.
He drops all other books. He will gaze and wonder. From Locke or
Johnson or Wayland to Emerson is like a change from the school
history to the Arabian Nights. There may be extravagances and some
jugglery, but for all that the lesson is a genuine one, and to us
of this generation immense.
Emerson is the knight-errant of the moral sentiment. He leads, in
our time and country, one illustrious division, at least, in the
holy crusade of the affections and the intuitions against the
usurpations of tradition and theological dogma. He marks the
flower, the culmination, under American conditions and in the finer
air of the New World, of the reaction begun by the German
philosophers, and passed along by later French and English
thinkers, of man against circumstance, of spirit against form, of
the present against the past. What splendid affirmation, what
inspiring audacity, what glorious egoism, what generous brag, what
sacred impiety! There is an _eclat_ about his words, and a brave
challenging of immense odds, that is like an army with banners. It
stirs the blood like a bugle-call: beauty, bravery, and a sacred
cause,--the three things that win with us always. The first essay
is a forlorn hope. See what the chances are: "The world exists for
the education of each man. . . . He should see that he can live all
history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not
suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he
is greater than all the geography and all the government of the
world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is
commonly read from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not
deny his conviction that he is the court, and, if England or Egypt
have anything to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them
forever be silent.
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