dge and faculty, experience
and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative.
But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence
and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy proper
Emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparently
without much examination of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant,
the intuitive, _a priori_ and realist theory respecting the sources of
human knowledge, and the objects that are within the cognisance of the
human faculties. This was his starting-point, and within its own sphere
of thought he cannot be said to have carried it any further. What he did
was to light up these doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetic
imagination. As it has been justly put, though Emersonian
transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy, it is more
justly regarded as a gospel.[1] But before dwelling more on this, let us
look into the record of his life, of which we may say in all truth that
no purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can be found in the annals
of far-shining men.

[Footnote 1: Frothingham's _Transcendentalism in New England: a
History_--a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of criticism.]

I.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. He was of an
ancient and honourable English stock, who had transplanted themselves,
on one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the other from Durham
and York, a hundred and seventy years before. For seven or eight
generations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been
preachers and divines, not without eminence in the Puritan tradition of
New England. His second name came into the family with Rebecca Waldo,
with whom at the end of the seventeenth century one Edward Emerson had
intermarried, and whose family had fled from the Waldensian valleys and
that slaughter of the saints which Milton called on Heaven to avenge.
Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what he was, flowed not only
from Protestantism, but from 'the Protestantism of the Protestant
religion.' When we are told that Puritanism inexorably locked up the
intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened chamber, it is
worthy to be remembered that the genial, open, lucid, and most
comprehensive mind of Emerson was the ripened product of a genealogical
tree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by Puritan sap.

Not many years after his birth, Eme