m out the interstellar spaces. 'T is vulgar sympathy makes
mortals of us all, and I think Emerson's poetry finally lacks just that
human coloring and tone, that flesh tint of the heart, which vulgar
sympathy with human life as such imparts.

But after we have made all possible deductions from Emerson, there
remains the fact that he is a living force, and, tried by home
standards, a master. Wherein does the secret of his power lie? He is
the prophet and philosopher of young men. The old man and the man of the
world make little of him, but of the youth who is ripe for him he takes
almost an unfair advantage. One secret of his charm I take to be the
instant success with which he transfers our interest in the romantic,
the chivalrous, the heroic, to the sphere of morals and the intellect.
We are let into another realm unlooked for, where daring and imagination
also lead. The secret and suppressed heart finds a champion. To the
young man fed upon the penny precepts and staple Johnsonianism of
English literature, and upon what is generally doled out in the schools
and colleges, it is a surprise; it is a revelation. A new world opens
before him. The nebulae of his spirit are resolved or shown to be
irresolvable. The fixed stars of his inner firmament are brought
immeasurably near. He drops all other books. He will gaze and wonder.
From Locke or Johnson or Wayland to Emerson is like a change from the
school history to the Arabian Nights. There may be extravagances and
some jugglery, but for all that the lesson is a genuine one, and to us
of this generation immense.

Emerson is the knight-errant of the moral sentiment. He leads, in
our time and country, one illustrious division, at least, in the holy
crusade of the affections and the intuitions against the usurpations of
tradition and theological dogma. He marks the flower, the culmination,
under American conditions and in the finer air of the New World, of the
reaction begun by the German philosophers, and passed along by later
French and English thinkers, of man against circumstance, of
spirit against form, of the present against the past. What splendid
affirmation, what inspiring audacity, what glorious egoism, what
generous brag, what sacred impiety! There is an _eclat_ about his words,
and a brave challenging of immense odds, that is like an army with
banners. It stirs the blood like a bugle-call: beauty, bravery, and a
sacred cause,--the three things that win with us alwa