a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things
around him; he has become tediously good in some particular, but
negligent or narrow in the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the
disgusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the establishment,
better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than
to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without
supporting it by a total regeneration.'

Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers whose mission lay in
calming men rather than in rousing them, and in the inculcation of
serenity rather than in the spread of excitement. Though he had been
ardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon as the protest
ran off into extravagance, instead of either following or withstanding
it with rueful petulancies, he delicately and successfully turned a
passing agitation into an enduring revival. The last password given by
the dying Antonine to the officer of the watch was _AEquanimitas_. In a
brighter, wider, and more living sense than was possible even to the
noblest in the middle of the second century, this, too, was the
watchword of the Emersonian teaching. Instead of cultivating the
tormenting and enfeebling spirit of scruple, instead of multiplying
precepts, he bade men not to crush their souls out under the burden of
Duty; they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up by
commandments to do and to abstain from doing. Hence, we have in Emerson
the teaching of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma and
the deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter, of which only
Shakespeare among the immortals has a copious and unfailing spring,
there is at least gaiety in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men
to find joy in their existence to the full. Happiness is with him an aim
that we are at liberty to seek directly and without periphrasis.
Provided men do not lose their balance by immersing themselves in their
pleasures, they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing them. But
joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. What Emerson counsels the
poet, he intended in its own way and degree for all men. The poet's
habit of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so low
that the commonest influences should delight him. 'That spirit which
suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry
knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-embedded stone on
which the