ing, more snarl'd with unintelligible
Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountered; an Attempt so
Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy Halcyon Days
with all the Vultures of Hell trodden under our feet." In sound and
structure Mather's style is what the critics call "archaistic." It is
all untouched by the influences of another world, and though "the New
Englanders were," in Mather's view, "a People of God settled in those,
which were once the Devil's Territories," they carried their prose from
the old country, and piously bowed before an old tradition.

Thus has it been with each generation of men. Thoreau fondly believed
that Walden had brought him near to nature, and he wrote with the
accumulated artifice of the centuries. Hawthorne's language was as
old in fashion as the Salem which he depicted, as "the grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor, who came so early with
his Bible and his sword, and trode the common street with such stately
port, and made so large a figure as a man of war and peace." But it was.
upon Emerson that tradition has most strangely exercised its imperious
sway. Now Emerson was an anarch who flouted the conventions of art and
life. It was his hope to see the soul of this world "clean from all
vestige of tradition." He did not understand that what is? proceeded
inevitably from what was He affected to spurn the past as a clog upon
his individuality. Anticipating Walt Whitman, he would have driven
away his nearest friends, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be
dependent no more." So lightly did he pretend to esteem history that he
was sure that an individual experience could explain all the ages, that
each man went through in his own lifetime the Greek period, the medieval
period--every period, in brief--until he attained to the efflorescence
of Concord. "What have I to do with the sacredness of tradition," he
asked proudly, "if I live wholly from within?" So much had he to do with
it that he never wrote a line save in obedience. Savage as he was in the
declaration of his own individuality, he expressed it in the gracious
terms of an inherited art. To this age Emerson's provincialism appears
sad enough. It would not have been remembered had it not been set forth
in a finely studied and mellifluous prose. No sooner did Emerson take
pen in hand than his anarchy was subdued. He instantly became the slave
of all the periods which he despised. H