n of this
kind Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's
holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' What he has
written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and
the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him
without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what it
is that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely
unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with
a windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be his
own expositor.

Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed
to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to
make known and to define. It is too soon to say in what particular
niche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough
that in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the
wise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did
not fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search
for truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or
cumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the
spirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the right
governance of the soul. All this is generally realised and understood,
and men may now be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrine
without the critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day that
Emerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already one
of the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled
respect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere
of religion.

It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of the
labels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince of
Transcendentalists, or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the
sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? How
does he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis,
or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf with the
Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If life
were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with
the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the
everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of
coherent and reasoned opinions about knowle