hen I was about nineteen; I had read Pope and Thomson
and Young and parts of Shakespeare before that, but they did not kindle
this love of nature in me. Emerson did. Though he did not directly treat
of outdoor themes, yet his spirit seemed to blend with Nature, and to
reveal the ideal and spiritual values in her works. I think it was this,
or something like it, that stimulated me and made bird and tree and sky
and flower full of a new interest. It is not nature for its own sake
that has mainly drawn me; had it been so, I should have turned out a
strict man of science; but nature for the soul's sake--the inward world
of ideals and emotions. It is this that allies me to the poets; while it
is my interest in the mere fact that allies me to the men of science.

I do not read Emerson much now, except to try to get myself back
into the atmosphere of that foreworld when a paradox, or a startling
affirmation, dissolved or put to flight a vast array of commonplace
facts. What a bold front he did put on in the presence of the tyrannies
of life! He stimulated us by a kind of heavenly bragging and saintly
flouting of humdrum that ceases to impress us as we grow old. Do we
outgrow him?--or do we fall away from him? I cannot bear to hear Emerson
spoken of as a back-number, and I should like to believe that the young
men of to-day find in him what I found in him fifty years ago, when he
seemed to whet my appetite for high ideals by referring to that hunger
that could "eat the solar system like gingercake." But I suspect they do
not. The world is too much with us. We are prone to hitch our wagon to
a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon, but
debases the star. Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take his place
among the small band of the really first-class writers of the world.
Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his sudden inversions,
of his taking sallies in the face of the common reason, and appraise him
for his real mastery over the elements of life and of the mind, as we
do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, and he will be found wanting. And
yet, let me quickly add, there is something more precious and divine
about him than about any or all the others. He prepares the way for
a greater than he, prepares the mind to accept the new man, the new
thought, as none other does.

But how slow I am in getting at my point! Emerson took me captive. For
a time I lived and moved and had my intellectua