s.... The whole force of all arts goes to facilitate the
decoration of lands and dwellings.... I look on such improvement as
directly tending to endear the land to the inhabitant." The following
sentence might have been written yesterday, so consistent is it with the
thought of to-day: "Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men
with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life and
country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this
continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of
real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the
landscape." In regard to books, pictures, statues, collections in
natural history, and all such refining objects of nature and art, which
heretofore only the opulent could enjoy, Emerson pointed out that in
America the public should provide these means of culture and inspiration
for every citizen. He thus anticipated the present ownership by cities,
or by endowed trustees, of parks, gardens, and museums of art or
science, as well as of baths and orchestras. Of music in particular he
said: "I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms; could
I ... know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and
inundation of musical waves,--that were a bath and a medicine." It has
been a long road from that sentence, written probably in the forties, to
the Symphony Orchestra in this Hall, and to the new singing classes on
the East Side of New York City.

For those of us who have attended to the outburst of novels and
treatises on humble or squalid life, to the copious discussions on
child-study, to the masses of slum literature, and to the numerous
writings on home economics, how true to-day seems the following sentence
written in 1837: "The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child,
the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life are the
topics of the time."

* * * * *

I pass now to the last of the three topics which time permits me to
discuss,--Emerson's religion. In no field of thought was Emerson more
prophetic, more truly a prophet of coming states of human opinion, than
in religion. In the first place, he taught that religion is absolutely
natural,--not supernatural, but natural:--

"Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old."

He believed that revelation is natural and continuous, and that in all
ages prophets are born. Th