pleasant thoughts,
by corruption and groans. Come out of the azure. Love the
day'--(_Conduct of Life_, 159).

If he could not endure these minor perturbations of the fair and smiling
face of daily life, far less did he willingly think of Death. Of nothing
in all the wide range of universal topics does Emerson say so little as
of that which has lain in sombre mystery at the very core of most
meditations on life, from Job and Solon down to Bacon and Montaigne.
Except in two beautiful poems, already mentioned, Death is almost
banished from his page. It is not the title or the subject of one of his
essays, only secondarily even of that on Immortality. Love, Friendship,
Prudence, Heroism, Experience, Manners, Nature, Greatness, and a score
of other matters--but none to show that he ever sat down to gather into
separate and concentrated shape his reflections on the terrifying
phantom that has haunted the mind of man from the very birth of time.

Pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains and doomed to death;
some of them each day butchered in sight of the others; those who
remained watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and awaiting
their turn in anguish and helplessness. Such, he cried, is the pitiful
and desperate condition of man. But nature has other cruelties more
stinging than death. Mill, himself an optimist, yet declares the course
of natural phenomena to be replete with everything which, when committed
by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, so that 'one who
endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would
be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.' To man
himself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnatural
than most of the virtues.' We need not multiply from poets and divines,
from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy,
the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, with
which life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with one
emotion and some with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual
thinking unintelligible and remote. He admits, indeed, that 'the disease
and deformity around us certify that infraction of natural,
intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed
such compound misery.' The way of Providence, he says in another place,
is a little rude, through earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, and
a thousand other hints of ferocity in the i