eads us, conscious that the
aspects of truth, as he sees them, may change as often as truth remains
constant. Revelation perhaps, is but prophecy intensified--the
intensifying of its mason-work as well as its steeple. Simple prophecy,
while concerned with the past, reveals but the future, while revelation
is concerned with all time. The power in Emerson's prophecy confuses it
with--or at least makes it seem to approach--revelation. It is prophecy
with no time element. Emerson tells, as few bards could, of what will
happen in the past, for his future is eternity and the past is a part
of that. And so like all true prophets, he is always modern, and will
grow modern with the years--for his substance is not relative but a
measure of eternal truths determined rather by a universalist than by a
partialist. He measured, as Michel Angelo said true artists should,
"with the eye and not the hand." But to attribute modernism to his
substance, though not to his expression, is an anachronism--and as
futile as calling today's sunset modern.

As revelation and prophecy, in their common acceptance are resolved by
man, from the absolute and universal, to the relative and personal, and
as Emerson's tendency is fundamentally the opposite, it is easier,
safer and so apparently clearer, to think of him as a poet of natural
and revealed philosophy. And as such, a prophet--but not one to be
confused with those singing soothsayers, whose pockets are filled, as
are the pockets of conservative-reaction and radical demagoguery in
pulpit, street-corner, bank and columns, with dogmatic
fortune-tellings. Emerson, as a prophet in these lower heights, was a
conservative, in that he seldom lost his head, and a radical, in that
he seldom cared whether he lost it or not. He was a born radical as are
all true conservatives. He was too much "absorbed by the absolute," too
much of the universal to be either--though he could be both at once. To
Cotton Mather, he would have been a demagogue, to a real demagogue he
would not be understood, as it was with no self interest that he laid
his hand on reality. The nearer any subject or an attribute of it,
approaches to the perfect truth at its base, the more does
qualification become necessary. Radicalism must always qualify itself.
Emerson clarifies as he qualifies, by plunging into, rather than
"emerging from Carlyle's soul-confusing labyrinths of speculative
radicalism." The radicalism that we hear much about to